According to a report of the Soviet Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia (Extraordinary State Commission or ChGK) from the Gdov district, there is at least one example of a presumably concrete involvement of (Ingrian) Finnish soldiers in [an Axis] mass shooting of Roma in the area of Army Group North.

At the end of February 1942, a “retaliation unit” consisting of “Germans, Finns, and Estonians” searched the village Filippovshchina and recognized twenty-six Roma who were deportees from Luga in 1941 and quartered with Russian peasants as work forces. The next day, these Roma, among them ten children under the age of twelve, were driven out of their houses and shot on a bridge at the entrance to the village.

The entire village community had to assemble nearby and watch the mass execution, which was carried out in an especially sadistic manner, since the perpetrators forced the victims to dance on the bridge prior to their death. The soldiers officially declared that “the Gypsies” had been “in contact with partisans,” although they did not interrogate the victims at all. Instead, the Russian villagers were completely shocked by the brutal murder of “defenseless Gypsies and their children” (ChGK Gdov 1945).

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission was not able to find out the exact units involved. It is possible that members of the Finnish Security Group 187 took part in the operation, but since Estonian soldiers were also present, it seems more likely that it was an Estonian unit under [Reich] command with some Ingrian Finns in their ranks.

Further research might bring to light more examples of war crimes and atrocities committed by the [Axis] occupiers with the immediate help of Ingrian Finnish volunteers. A promising source type would be the NKVD files concerning trials against “traitors of the fatherland,” among them filtered Ingrian Finnish repatriates from Finland, but the Russian FSB archives of St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Pskov are still inaccessible to foreign scholars.

Conclusion
One might argue that the Ingrian example with its Soviet Russian context is a separate case and cannot be added to or compared with the role of the war engagement of Finnish Roma men, other Finns, or Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers from Finland itself. At the same time, however, it must be recognized that the Ingrian matter became an immediate part of Finland’s history when the Ingrian Finns were transferred from the occupied territories to Finland in 1943 and 1944.

From that time on, the ranks of the Finnish army had included soldiers of Soviet Finnish origin, who might have taken part in the [Axis’s] mass murder of Roma, Jews, and other Soviet civilians. At the same time, this incorporation of the Ingrian Finns made them brothers-in-arms with the Finnish Roma.

(Emphasis added in most cases.)