In Hitler's Empire, he writes:
Postwar, a collective amnesia seized countries like Italy, Hungary and Romania that had fought alongside Hitler and run parallel occupations of their own. The Croats and Slovaks had acquired their own states, Bulgaria had swallowed up neighbours' lands, and Hungary regained mych of the territory it had lost in 1918. Mussolini had dreamed of a new Roman empire and sent his conscripts to the Cyclades if they were lucky and the Sahara, Slovenia or Somaliland if they were not. Romania had administered the Ukraine, festooned Odessa with corpses and hurled hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the struggle with the Red Army. Baltic, Belorussian and Ukrainian nationalists had all fought on the German side too in the hope that they might benefit.
One country that also ran its own parallel occupation was Finland. Risto Ryti and Mannerheim dreamed of a Finnish empire encompassing the Kola Peninsula and Eastern Karelia, with Finno-Ugrian client states stretching all the way to the Urals. Finnish troops divided up the population of Soviet Karelia into arbitrary racial groups and shut the Slavs up in concentration camps, in preparation for turning them over to the Germans. Finnish East Karelia was to be populated by war veterans turned smallholders in a scheme that almost exactly mirrored Nazi plans for occupied East Europe.
In today's Finland, the Finnish imperial project is conveniently forgotten or glossed over. The "collective amnesia" is so strong that even Mazower's book totally omits any mention of the Finnish occupation. On page 327, he even goes as far as to claim that Finland was "only interested in fighting... for security". This is said without footnotes or references, as if it is an obvious enough fact to not need a source at all.
Certainly there are definitions of security by which Finland invaded the Soviet Union and tried to establish its own eastern empire in the interests of "security", but in that case we will have to argue that Stalin also invaded Finland in 1939 for reasons of "security". Patriotic Finnish historians do in fact maintain that Finland is entirely blameless in everything connected to the Second World War, and even the fact that Finland invaded the Soviet Union is the Soviets' own fault. That this is precisely what Stalin's regime said of the Winter War doesn't trouble them at all, because the Soviet Union was intrinsically evil and Finland is intrinsically good.
Similarly, according to Finnish patriotism, because Finland is intrinsically good and Hitler's Germany was intrinsically evil, nothing the two countries did can be compared to each other. In this way Finnish historians can bemoan the terrible atrocities of Stalin and Hitler, and simultaneously consign Finland's own aggression and dreams of a racial empire to convenient oblivion. Our collective amnesia stretches comfortably into the 21st century.
Mazower's otherwise excellent book provides a telling example of practical amnesia. He has no sources for any of his statements on Finland in the war, but thanks his colleagues in the acknowledgements. One of them is Finnish professor Martti Koskenniemi, who we may guess is at least one of Mazower's sources on matters relating to Finland. So either a distinguished Finnish historian is totally unaware of Finland's imperial project, or has chosen to tell his colleague that Finland "only fought for its security", omitting any mention of an occupation and imperial ambition that is fully documented in Finnish academic literature.
The other alternative is that Mr. Mazower hasn't done any research at all into Finland's policies and war aims in the Second World War, and has simply assumed that they were essentially defensive. Whatever the truth, it's bizarre to read a fairly involved account of Romania's occupation policies on the Eastern Front right next to a denial of the very existence of any Finnish occupation at all.
