ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1918, the German Empire’s military intervention saw German troops bring down the “Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic” in Helsinki, ensuring the triumph of bourgeois middle-class forces in Finland. This act of intervention was considered highly controversial not just in the Nordic countries but also in Berlin. Furthermore, it is likely that if the German Empire had not intervened, the Finnish Civil War would have been resolved in favour of the “Red Guards”. The German Empire had no intention of tolerating any concept of a Socialist Soviet Republic at its borders, preferring to establish a buffer of vassal states in the form of the recently independent Russian Baltic provinces. Constitutionally, these were to be monarchies ruled by kings from the German princely dynasties. Not resistance within Finland, but the military collapse of the German Empire and the November Revolution in Germany, put an end to these plans. In both German and Finnish historiography, this nine-month affair from 1918 has been intertwined with a vast array of historical-political and patriotic myths.
