“Railroad of Death”: History and Archaeology of the German-built Second World War Hyrynsalmi–Kuusamo Railway 1942–1944
journal.fi
During the Second World War the frontal responsibility of northern Finland was held by German troops, who carried out large building projects to enhance the poor infrastructure of this peripheral region. This paper focuses on one of the biggest infrastructure projects performed by the Wehrmacht and Organisation Todt in Finland during the Second World War. The Hyrynsalmi-Kuusamo railway was to be built through a challenging landscape, by people who constantly overestimated their own abilities, and at the great expense and suffering of the workers who were mostly prisoners-of-war and forced labourers. Besides their own contemporary memories and experiences from this event, this construction project and its physical traces live in the local memories and have become part of the transgenerational heritage and remembrance of the war years. Using the wartime construction of the track as a starting point, this study goes on to map the heritage value, archaeological potential, and the state of research related to this German wartime project.

(Mirror.)

The numbers of workers varied over the years, but according to an overview from April 1943 about 5600 people were working on the Hyrynsalmi-Kuusamo railway. Of these, over 2000 were POWs, more than 600 Polish civilian labourers, and 116 Finnish workers. The POWs and Polish labour were kept in camps by the [Axis] and while the former group were entirely made up by forced labour, the latter group consisted of people who had volunteered, were tricked into, or outright forced to work for the [Axis]. The Finns were a separate category entirely, as they had volunteered for the work, and were provided with such good salaries that Finnish authorities had to set up a system to regulate the large amounts of Finns wanting to work for [Axis] agencies. Besides these categories of labour there were a group of over 2000 workers, consisting of Germans as well as men from a number of other European countries, in addition to work leaders and officers. The non-German workers in this latter category and the Polish labourers mentioned above were working for OT, and were a mixture of volunteers and forced labourers. Due to the shortage of labour, also German convicts were sent to work on the railway from 1942 onwards.

[…]

Molka recounts how differently he and the other Polish workers were treated compared to the Soviet POWs, and what a shocking sight it was to observe desperate POWs digging in garbage dumps in search of anything edible. The conditions of the Soviet POWs working at the Hyrynsalmi-Kuusamo railway were by all accounts appalling, something that was recorded by the [Fascists] themselves. For instance, in September 1942 one of the POW camps along the railway line was reported to be in a bad condition, with miserable accommodation and insufficient food. The camp at Isokumpu was described as catastrophic, and the [Fascists] inspecting these camps stated that those in charge of the POWs were lacking any sense of responsibility for keeping these men healthy and fit for the work they had to perform.

[…]

Although it was claimed that the Hyrynsalmi-Kuusamo railway made a difference in the struggle to supply the troops on the Kiestinki-Louhi front, the troops positioned at this front sector in fact required supplies of 1000 tons a day. In addition, the railway was in normal operation, more or less, only for about three months before the breakup of the Finnish-German alliance in September 1944. During their subsequent retreat from Finland, the [Axis] troops destroyed the railroad and its structures, such as bridges, stations, and locomotive garages, most of their archives, and the surrounding civilian infrastructure as part of their scorched earth tactics in mid-September 1944.

(Emphasis added.)