I drove to pick up my daughter from school and spent a short while at the old cemetery on top of the esker before that.
This a memorial for the German soldiers of the Baltic Division that landed in on the south coast of Finland in Hanko and Loviisa in the late stages of the civil war on April 3 1918. After capturing Helsinki on the 13th and 14th, the Baltic Division conquered Hämeenlinna and continued towards Lahti. The decisive Battle of Tampere had been fought between March 8 and April 6 and the result had been a decisive loss for the Reds against the Whites which the government forces were called.
The placard next to the monument says the Germans lost 53 men. The Germans approached Lahti from the south and captured a train that had 50 armed Reds on it by surprise immediately upon entering the city. The Reds had been routed in Tampere and they were mainly trying to escape to the east towards Russia although they did put up resistance in Lahti. I wasn't aware that the Germans suffered so many casualties when they were taking the city, which was a lot smaller a century ago than it is now. The amateurs that the Reds were no match for the properly trained Germans who were led by professional soldiers.
The civil war was a tragedy resulting from crop failures in the summer of 1917, the Russian gendarmerie (police) being disbanded in the spring of 1917 and an effective lack of law and order. In the autumn of 1917, the labor unions created guards to act as picketers which evolved into the Red Guard and the White guard was organized as a response. The Finnish senate that had declared independence from the Russian Empire on December 6 1917 had no police or military forces to maintain order. The old class society was crumbling all over Europe. That was the general background of the civil war. Radicals took control of the Social Democratic Party. The civil war broke out in January 1918 and raged for three months.
The town hall
A PE class, I guess
A surprising location
It is very rare for the anyone's face to be sculpted in their headstone here. It is nearly universal in some cultures.
That hill is about six kilometers from here.
That's probably a disease.
The railway station
The new bus station is on the left. The wooden building furthest of the three used to be the residence of the station manager. There is a cafeteria in it now.