"Sana claims that the handing over was a systematic practice of both the Finnish police and the military. Part of the deportations was a population exchange: the Finns were interested to receive Finnish-related POWs and citizens so as to settle them in Eastern Karelia, and in return, the Germans received POWs captured by Finland. After the war, Valpo, the Finnish national police force, destroyed large parts of its archives. Nevertheless, Sana, in other archives in Finland and Germany, managed to find documents that directly involved Valpo head Arno Anthoni and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.
"When the transfer of Soviet POWs to the Gestapo became known, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, wrote a letter to the president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, requesting information on the deportation of Jews from Finland to Germany during the war:
I am writing to you in the wake of recent revelations by Finnish researcher Elina Sana, that Finland turned over approximately three thousand foreigners to Nazi Germany during World War II, among them a considerable number of political officers of the Red Army and Soviet Jewish prisoners of war. They were thereby, in effect, sentenced to almost certain death.... I am certain that you would agree that such revelations require a forthright response by the Finnish authorities and appropriate measures to acknowledge the wrongdoing and if possible, hold those responsible accountable for their misdeeds.
"Surprisingly, within twenty-four hours President Halonen replied: ‘I accept your letter and I have appointed a professor at Helsinki University to prepare for me a portfolio on the subject and we will indeed do research on the subject.' The professor in question is the legal historian, Prof. Emeritus Heikki Ylikangas."3
