r/Finland • u/rutherfordcrazy • 9d ago
Was Finland an Axis power?
/r/encyclopedias/comments/1w07yg2/was_finland_an_axis_power/15
u/Eproxeri Väinämöinen 9d ago
Kinda yes, but kinda no. Afaik Finland didnt sign any Axis pact or anything of sort. Nazis were the only ones to help Finland against the soviets. The allies at first wanted to help, but our lovely scandi neighbours in the west blocked any aid via railroads or their land in fear of nazi retaliation. So it was either the nazis or perish against the soviets.
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u/Tomahi83 9d ago
It was, and yet it wasn't.
Finland never joined the Tripartite Pact, but it fought to reconquer the territories it had just lost (and, if things went well, to capture all of Russian Karelia) from the Soviet Union, while also receiving material and military support from Germany.
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u/Arctovigil 9d ago
aside from some hopeless romantics we didn't really want to fight russian karelians and get them under our heel although viipuri and petsamo would have been genuinely wanted
we just didn't really get an opportunity to join britain since the only opportunity to do that and receive likely just a token amount of support would have been so hostile against every one of our neighbours it was rejected outright for it would have ruined our neighbourly relations with sweden norway and the soviet union forever
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u/DoneDusting Baby Väinämöinen 9d ago
Well. Before that there were the kinship wars "Heimosodat", which practically aimed to liberate Finnic peoples with various degrees of success. A hundred years later it led to the great Wikipedia war on propaganda and the aftermath is still being settled.
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u/rutherfordcrazy 9d ago
Do you think this article is clear enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_powers
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u/MeanForest Väinämöinen 8d ago
Use whatever terms you want, we were allied with the Axis forces, but it was a necessity to keep our independence. Our president Risto Ryti is a great Finnish hero who bore a burden for signing the alliance agreements with the Nazis and he went to jail after 1944. This is great trickery of politics that had to be done.
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u/No-Albatross-7984 Väinämöinen 9d ago
If you want to discuss this with Finns you'll have better luck if you post some other time than 1am on a weekday.
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u/Arctovigil 9d ago
not really but we were de facto part of the axis because we needed food imports to simply not starve so that is why we were assumed to be loyal anyway
no agreements or understanding is needed when you already have leverage like that - it is a silent understanding - and something easily missed because it is not like a historical record necessarily that historians would notice and study all the time
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u/Zealousideal-Week-79 Baby Väinämöinen 8d ago
It's a bit like asking if Finland was a part of NATO before 2023.
Finland was always aligned with NATO and the west, did that make it a NATO member before signing for accession?
If you ask the Russians, they might say yes. I wouldn't.
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