FOUR HELMETS OF STEEL

FOREWORD

The four helmets in the title represent the four armies where thousands of Estonians were enrolled during the Second World War: Estonian army, German armed forces, Finnish army and Soviet army. It would not be rare for an individual soldier to have served in any combination of three of these armies and a few saw service in all four. There were, however, even more armies with Estonian soldiers during the war and in the years after. This is an attempt to tell a part of their story.

My purpose in writing this material is to shed some light on the fate of one small country in a great war. A small country and its people cannot always choose to their liking when caught in a maelstrom of great events. Sometimes, it is a matter of choosing of two evils the one that is perceived as lesser. Thus, tens of thousands of Estonians served within the German armed forces. This was not because they were drawn to nazi ideology or Germans as a nation; they did it hoping that the more immediate threat to their very existence could be thwarted with German assistance. Also, as a Finn, I wish to remind that our country was allied with Nazi Germany for basically the same reason. These choices are often misunderstood and if these pages help to give some insight to this aspect of the war that raged more than half a century ago, this work has served its purpose.

I have collated the information from the texts mentioned in the bibliography. Since this is not a scientific study, but something I do for leisure, I will not use footnotes to show where an individual piece of information comes from.

These pages will be under construction for some considerable time. I would be grateful for any corrections and other comments to the e-mail address below.

I have made these pages with my favourite HTML editor: Windows Notepad.