MOSCOW, June 27. /TASS/. Finnish troops created more than 100 places of forced detention of Soviet citizens on the occupied territory during the Great Patriotic War, including 14 concentration camps, Russian Security Council First Deputy Secretary Rashid Nurgaliyev said.
"More than 100 different places of forced detention were created on the territory occupied by the Finnish troops. For the Russian population of Karelia, as well as for the inhabitants of the Vologda and Leningrad Regions, 14 concentration camps were created: six concentration camps in Petrozavodsk, as well as in the villages of Vidlitsa, Svyatnavolok, Paalu, Kolvasozero, Koropa, Luzhma, Kindasovo and the settlement of Ilyinsky," Nurgaliyev said in an article published on the Security Council's website.
He pointed out that the truth about the atrocities of the Finnish invaders is documented and stored in archives and museums, as well as published in special historical collections. Dozens of thousands of documents on the occupation policy of the Finnish regime have been declassified and transferred by the Karelian branch of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to the republican archive.
"The largest concentration camp center was Petrozavodsk. There the Finnish Nazis did not build gas chambers or carry out mass executions, but they killed people by deliberately creating unbearable living conditions. Hunger, hard, exhausting work and mass diseases killed the prisoners," Nurgaliyev emphasized.
He added that some of the most gruesome evidence of the Finns' cruelty were the prisoner-of-war camps. The captured soldiers were stripped of their shoes and overcoats and put to the hardest work. They were harnessed to sledges carrying water and logs, and whipped to make the exhausted men move faster.