Weapons Cache Case

The Weapons Cache Case (Finnish: Asekätkentä, Swedish: Vapengömmoaffären) was a Finnish criminal case of the mid-1940s. It concerned a secret and officially unsanctioned military operation following the Continuation War, where a large amount of Finnish Army weapons and equipment was hidden in caches scattered around the country.

Following the Moscow Armistice of September 19, 1944, two high-ranking officers in the Operational department of Finnish Military HQ, Colonel Valo Nihtilä and Lieutenant Colonel Usko Haahti, started planning countermeasures against a possible Soviet occupation of the country. They came up with the idea of decentralized storage of light infantry weapons, so that in case of occupation, an immediate guerrilla war could be launched.

During the demobilization, an organization responsible for hiding the equipment was created and war materiel and other supplies were given to them for safekeeping. A total of 5,000–10,000 people participated in the operation. It was planned that they would cache supplies for 8,000 men, but the participants worked so eagerly that it is supposed they hid enough for 35,000 soldiers.

The case started to unravel in the spring of 1945, when one man, who had stolen foodstuffs from the cache to sell them on the lucrative black market and feared reprisal from his comrades, divulged the existence of the caches to the Allied Control Commission (ACC). Initially the ACC was eager to follow the case, but after written orders from Nihtilä and Haahti surfaced, they left the investigation to Valpo, the much communist-controlled security police of Finland at the time.

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