Page 412 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

412 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

In the towns the situation was worse than out in the countryside. Many Finns remember
that their parents made trips to the countryside to buy food from farmers they were related to or
whom they had already known before the war. They understood that this was illegal, because
the farmers were obliged to sell everything to the authorities who would then sell it in strictly
calculated food rations. Most of the buyers were harmless, but there were of course also “busi-
nessmen”, who created a flourishing trade going around the rationing. However, very few seem
to have had doubts or bad conscience of using the black-market, so great was the need for extra
food. Society tried to tie up the black-market by propaganda and by using policemen and other
authorities to survey and catch these “control criminals” and forfeit their goods.
The wars lowered typical peacetime criminality but brought along opportunity crimes.
Especially the private use of state and army owned items was a generally accepted habit.
There was also lots of evacuee owned property strolling around. Neither was other private
property safe, especially during the extensive bombings, the light-fingered looted damaged
houses and shops.
Ordinary citizens, who showed plain disobedience in rationing, were ready to bring their
straw to the stack for the war efforts. The experiences from the Finnish wars shows that war
diminishes typical peace time crimes, but brings in a new form, opportunity crimes: theft,
pilferages, and rationing abuses, refusals from work obligations and refusals from arms.
When the rules and regulations as well the control measures were relaxed after the wars, the
opportunity criminality disappeared.
The Winter War changed the Finnish social security system. The authorities had to find
solutions to settle the evacuees, and to take care of war widows and war orphans. This led to
several revisions of the Law of Accident at War, enacted in 1938, and this made it tangled and
incoherent. the law stated that a pension had to be paid to a war widow, and to a war orphan
younger than 17, financial support without separate request.
Finland’s Welfare (Suomen huolto), which was established in 1939, acted as an intermedi-
ary with help from abroad to Finland during the Winter War. During the Continuation War
the association tried to patch up the shortcomings of the official maintenance net, and give
one-time assistance to those in need. There grew also up lots of associations on the side of
the social benefit system, when almost all of the groups who had suffered from the war es-
tablished one of their own.
In practice, the situation was complicated: the numerous helpers created confusion and
there were families for whom nobody seemed to be responsible. Those entitled to support did
not, in some cases, have a clear picture from where to get help neither did know their rights.

scars Of a war
The widows of the soldiers fallen during the Continuation War were mostly young. Be-
cause of the special significance given to heroic death, their widowhood was different. Their
husbands were war heroes and the war widows were subordinated by praising. The widows
of the nation got the role of an eternally mourning woman. In everyday life the widows were
generally single parents, who often lived at subsistence level with their flock of children. A
war widow was not allowed to step down from her pedestal: she could not go out to dance,
to restaurants, keep company with a man, at least not with a German soldier. Other women