Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History ed. by Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (review)

Since the end of the Cold War, scholars of Finland’s past frequently have presented their work as a challenge to some kind of conspiracy of silence, stifling consensus, or outright censorship. This collection of articles avoids such exaggerated claims of daring and justifies its use of the word “silences” to describe Finland’s various relationships to the Holocaust. This review will concentrate on two of the several silences revealed by this book: antisemitism in Finland before World War II and the “separation narrative” (p. 1) concerning Finland’s relationship to the Holocaust.

Scholarship and popular historical memory have persistently maintained that Finland’s refusal to surrender its Jewish citizens to the Final Solution proves the absence of antisemitism in Finland’s past. Simo Muir, in his article on the treatment of antisemitism in Finnish historiography (pp. 46–68), describes the wall of official and scholarly denial that he encountered when he raised antisemitic motivations in his study of a rejected doctoral dissertation written in 1937 by a Jewish student at Helsinki University, Israel- Jakob Schur. Although Muir treats his opponents in that event fairly, one wonders if another contributor could have written about this important and national debate, in which Muir himself was a major protagonist. Such a choice could have mitigated doubts about the objectivity of the volume under review.

The article by Malte Gasche and Simo Muir (pp. 128–50) addresses the discrimination experienced by Finland’s Jewish athletes during the late 1930s. In particular, they focus on the case of Abraham Tokazier, a Finnish Jew who finished first in the 100 meters at the first track- and-field event to be held at Helsinki’s new Olympic Stadium in 1938. Judges officially awarded Tokazier fourth place. The authors suggest officials were motivated by a desire to please German officials at the event. Moreover, Finnish organizers wanted to cater to the significant German interest in Finland’s preparations for hosting the 1940 Olympic Summer Games, which were ultimately canceled. The authors’ explanation seems plausible, considering the historical affinity of Finland’s elites toward Germany, which predated Hitler’s dictatorship.

Ilona Salomaa’s article on the connections between Finnish folklore, patriotism, and racial ideology (pp. 69–94) offers another approach to antisemitism in Finland before World War II. During the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals and political leaders retooled nineteenth- century Finnish nationalism, which had been created on the basis of language and a mythical common past. Finnishness was racialized to exclude specifically those whose ancestors did not live in the mythical world of the Kalevala, Jews among them. Salomaa’s rigorous study might have benefitted from a reading of William A. Wilson’s Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland (Indiana University Press, 1974), a monograph that draws detailed connections between folklore and the growth of exclusivist, aggressive nationalism.

What the authors call the “separation discourse” is the long- standing argument that Finland was a “mere bystander” (p. 219) in respect to the Holocaust. The authors of this book might consider that this separation discourse does not pertain only to the Holocaust. Until recently, scholars of Finland’s history before 1809 emphasized a Finland separate from the Swedish realm to which it belonged. Scholarship on Finland from 1809–1917 traditionally has ignored the fact that Finland was part of the Russian Empire during this period. Historical scholarship in Finland is replete with this discourse of separation.

In respect to the Holocaust, the book uncovers several bases of this separation discourse. The original foundation, touched on in many of the articles, is the idea developed during the war against the Soviet Union (1941–1944) that Finland’s war was fundamentally different from Germany’s. Since the war, many, if not most, historians and officials have upheld the separate war thesis. This original assertion of a separate war was made despite the presence of nearly a quarter- million German troops in Finland and a Finnish Waffen- SS battalion on Germany’s Russian...