Whites take Vyborg

On the morning of 29 April 1918 units of the White Eastern Army of Major-General Ernst Löfström took control of Vyborg, Finland’s fourth-largest city and, since 9 April, the seat of the revolutionary government that had fled from Helsinki. That same morning, between the village of Naulasaari and Tienhaara station, west of the city, a column of Reds surrendered after trying during the night to break out towards Hamina. The British chronology of the war gives 30 April and attributes the victory to “German troops and the Finnish White Guard”, but the city was taken by the Finnish White army. The German Baltic Division was then fighting far to the west, near Lahti and Hämeenlinna. At Vyborg, however, two German officers in the service of the Whites held commands: Colonel Eduard Ausfeld, whose group cut the railway to Petrograd, and Colonel Ulrich von Coler, whose units were the first to reach the city.

After the capture of Tampere General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was able to direct his main forces onto the Karelian Isthmus. The offensive began on 19 April. On 23 April Ausfeld’s group cut the railway line near Raivola and then took Terijoki and Kuokkala on the Gulf of Finland. The Reds were cut off from Russia. The Whites had about 18,000 men and more than 80 guns. More than 12,000 Reds with their families were crowded into the city, most of them refugees from western Finland, and, according to various estimates, between 5,000 and more than 7,000 were fit to fight. On 25 April the chairman of the revolutionary government, Kullervo Manner, and most of its members sailed for Petrograd. Of the leaders only Edvard Gylling remained. The Reds repulsed the first assaults, on 25 and 26 April, because the Whites had sent inexperienced conscripts into the fight. The decisive attack, preceded by many hours of shelling, began on 27 April. On the night of 27–28 April drunken Red Guards burst into the provincial prison and shot more than thirty Whites held there, among them two members of parliament.

After taking the city the Whites began mass executions. They shot captured Red Guards, often on the spot, and their anger was fuelled by the discovery of the bodies of those killed in the prison. Particularly grim was the purge directed at Russians and at people taken for Russians. According to Finnish research, at least 327 people regarded as Russians were shot by the fortress ramparts and elsewhere, probably between 360 and 420 in all. Many of them were Russian officers and officials sympathetic to the Whites, and among the dead were also Poles, Estonians, Tatars and Jews, as well as schoolchildren. The total number of people executed in Vyborg is disputed: Finnish studies give from about 450 to 1,200. Between 4,000 and 6,000 Reds were taken prisoner near Naulasaari and thousands more in the city itself. In the Vyborg prison camp, which at its peak held more than 11,000 prisoners, more than 800 people had died of hunger, disease and in executions by the autumn.

The fall of Vyborg sealed the end of the civil war. On 2 May near Lahti, where the Germans had closed the road east to them, about 30,000 Red soldiers and refugees surrendered, according to German estimates, and on 5 May the last units laid down their arms on the Kymi River. The end of the war is usually dated to 15 May 1918, and a day later Mannerheim held a victory parade in Helsinki.