Germans take Helsinki

At two in the afternoon of 13 April 1918 a white sheet was hung from the tower of the church in the working-class district of Kallio. By half past six in the evening the last Red Guards in Helsinki had laid down their arms. The Finnish capital, in Red hands since the end of January, was taken by the German Baltic Division of Generalmajor Rüdiger von der Goltz, which ten days earlier had landed at Hanko. The British chronology of the war records the capture of Helsinki under 13 April, with the note “12–14 April”: fighting in the city went on on 12 and 13 April, and on 14 April the Germans held a victory parade. On the same 13 April, according to the British chronology, the Finnish government announced that all the German troops that had landed in Finland had come at its request.

March on the capital

The Reds had nothing to defend Helsinki with. After the fall of Tampere and the German landing, the revolutionary government, Kullervo Manner’s People’s Delegation, and the Red Guard staff fled on 9 April to Vyborg. The defence of the capital was left to the militia commander Edvard Nyqvist and a few thousand poorly armed reservists. According to Finnish researchers at most 2,000 Red Guards took part in the fighting. Nyqvist and the moderate Social Democrats wanted to surrender, and the Swedish military attaché, Captain Sigurd af Ekström, mediated in talks with the Germans. Manner, however, forbade capitulation, and on 11 April the Red Guards gathered in the Senate building, carried away by a speech from the people’s commissar Antti Kiviranta, who had arrived from Vyborg, decided to fight. Kiviranta assured them that only 400 Whites were coming from Hanko. The fortress of Suomenlinna no longer threatened the Germans, because White sympathisers had secretly removed the breech-blocks from its guns. The Russian fleet, in accordance with the agreement concluded at Hanko, began to leave the port, and British sailors scuttled their submarines so that they would not fall into German hands.

Fighting in the city

On 11 April the Germans occupied the fortifications in Espoo abandoned by the Reds. On the morning of 12 April, after their last call for surrender had been rejected, they advanced into the city along the main road from the west, today’s Mannerheim Road, and from the north through Pasila. Part of the force cut the main railway line to the north at Tikkurila. The Reds defended themselves on the Tilkka rocks, in barracks and in apartment blocks, but gave way street by street. Residents, including White sympathisers who brought the Germans flowers, coffee and sandwiches, watched the fighting at close quarters, and shops and cafés stayed open. In the evening about four hundred German sailors landed on the Katajanokka peninsula. On the morning of 13 April ships began to shell the last pockets of resistance, and at seven the Red staff in the Smolna building surrendered. The working-class districts north of the Long Bridge, shelled by German artillery, capitulated in the afternoon. The underground White Guard of Helsinki, about two thousand men, played a minor part in the fighting.

54 Germans were killed, as were about four hundred Reds, including twenty to fifty prisoners who were shot, and about twenty civilians. Between four and more than six thousand Reds surrendered, according to different accounts, although only some of them were armed Red Guards. The prisoners were held in a camp on Suomenlinna. Finnish historians stress that there were no mass executions in Helsinki like those in Tampere, and that the Germans even tried to curb the Whites’ zeal for shooting captives.

The parade

On 14 April von der Goltz drove at the head of a parade through the city centre to Senate Square. With him rode Governor Bruno Jalander and Mayor Johannes von Haartman, and the general was welcomed by Senator Onni Talas. Despite the capitulation, individual snipers were still firing from windows, and the boat of Admiral Hugo Meurer had to turn back under fire, so the squadron commander did not reach the ceremony. The Whites received all this with mixed feelings. General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim had opposed the German attack on the capital because he wanted to take it himself, and he held his own victory parade in Helsinki only on 16 May.

The government’s statement of 13 April repeated the line that the White Senate of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud had been presenting since February: the Germans were not invaders but allies called in by the lawful authority. From a military point of view the capture of Helsinki changed little, because the war had been decided at Tampere. Politically, however, it meant a great deal: von der Goltz, who took up residence in the former quarters of the Russian governor-general, became the most important person in the capital, and for half a year Finland found itself in Germany’s orbit.