In WW2, would you consider Finland to really be an Axis power? Or just trying to survive as a country?

Answer 1

Sprouts_Mom, you are an IDIOT. The questioner had a legitimate question and you had absolutely NO grounds for either insulting her or making preposterous assertions. If you had the slightest notion of common courtesy, you would NEVER have put your foot down your throat all the way to your knees like you just did. SHAME ON YOU.

Questioner, here is the answer to your question. Quite a bit of it is colored by one of my best friends when I was in university, a Finn who served two years in a reconnaisance company and went onto their diplomatic corps.

Finland has always been surrounded by powerful neighbors. A small population and scarcity of the sort of resources and industrial base required to make a large military possible always ensured that Finland would be dominated by Sweden or Russia, whichever was ascendant.

Finland was wrongfully invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 after the USSR demanded one-sided territorial concessions, eventually staging a pretext to conquer Finland. In the end, over a million Soviet troops were committed to the conquest of Finland against barely a quarter of that number, several thousand tanks against a handful of working vehicles. The heroism of the Finns notwithstanding, by 1940 the war was over, and the USSR took control of Finnish territory which it retains to this day as the Russian Federation. The nations of Western Europe stood by and watched this - and did absolutely nothing.

During the years in which brutal anti-Semitism was a fact of life in the old Russia and later under the Soviet Union, Jewish refugees found a home in Finland. Finns never persecuted their Jewish minority as other nations did. In fact, when Finland later allied itself with Germany (a strategic move on part of the Field Marshal Mannerheim, hero of the Winter War who wanted to keep Finland's involvement with German militarism to a minimum) it steadfastly refused to engage in calls to deport its Jewish population. Under Mannerheim's leadership, Finland's sole commitment was a battalion of jaegers which fought under the Waffen SS - a force which did not engage in atrocities, and which incredibly counted Jewish volunteers amongst its ranks!

See references here and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Waffen_SS_volunteers
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/20969/edition_id/431/format/html/displaystory.html

Finland's sole concern was to keep a hostile totalitarian enemy called the Soviet Union at bay. If that meant allying with Nazi Germany in a limited offensive, that was the price Mannerheim was willing to pay in order to prevent the USSR from striking at Finland any longer. The atrocities of the concentration camps were NOT common knowledge back then as they are now (read any account of the liberation of these camps by Americans, where the reaction to such horror is total surprise by the G.I.s) and Finland NEVER engaged in such atrocities against its own Jews or those elsewhere.

Finland was trying to survive as a nation against an enemy that was both communist and intent on conquering it. No Western nation stood up for Finland when it was being invaded the first time around in 1939-40, so Mannerheim did what he did to ensure Finland survived. In 1944, with the defeat of Nazi Germany only a matter of time, Mannerheim even concluded an agreement that had Finns fighting German troops!

It is telling that even after the end of the Second World War, Finland maintained strict neutrality and territorial integrity even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Not a single Finn stood trial at Nuremberg for involvement in genocide. That alone speaks volumes.

As for the notion that we'd be speaking German of Japanese (as stated by the IDIOT above me) that myth completely ignores the prevailing strategic thought in Berlin and Tokyo of their notions of regional hegemony - both "Lebensraum" aka "Greater Germany" and "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" NEVER formulated a concept of world conquest. Both were wrong, but both were not that global in their outlook, and certainly did NOT look at conquest of the United States as either necessary or even desirable!

Finland, like Thailand, was allied to the formal Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but neither is considered during Nuremberg to be an Axis Power. Each had regional concerns and first and foremost, national survival at the top of their agendas. It says enough about the success of such measures that Finland avoided the sort of destruction that brought low the majority of the combatant nations in the Second World War.

Answer 2

Trying to survive. After all, as history has shown, International Socialism (a.k.a. Communism) is a much more efficient murderer of civilians than National Socialism (a.k.a Socialism).

Answer 3

Axis, you Quisling. Thousands of Finns fought for Germany. And since when is the easy way the RIGHT way? If we had behaved like this we'd all be speaking German and Japanese now.

Answer 4

just trying to survive

Answer 5

Yes however they did have much of their land taken by the U.S.S.R.

Answer 6

Yes, but they were non aggressive