(Mirror.)
The numbers of workers varied over the years, but according to an overview from April 1943 about 5,600 people were working on the Hyrynsalmi–Kuusamo railway. Of these, over 2,000 were POWs, more than 600 Polish civilian labourers, and 116 Finnish workers. The POWs and Polish labour were kept in camps by the [Axis] and while the former group were entirely made up by forced labour, the latter group consisted of people who had volunteered, were tricked into, or outright forced to work for the [Axis].
The Finns were a separate category entirely, as they had volunteered for the work, and were provided with such good salaries that Finnish authorities had to set up a system to regulate the large amounts of Finns wanting to work for [Axis] agencies. Besides these categories of labour there were a group of over 2,000 workers, consisting of Germans as well as men from a number of other European countries, in addition to work leaders and officers.
The non‐German workers in this latter category and the Polish labourers mentioned above were working for OT, and were a mixture of volunteers and forced labourers. Due to the shortage of labour, also German convicts were sent to work on the railway from 1942 onwards.
[…]
Molka recounts how differently he and the other Polish workers were treated compared to the Soviet POWs, and what a shocking sight it was to observe desperate POWs digging in garbage dumps in search of anything edible. The conditions of the Soviet POWs working at the Hyrynsalmi–Kuusamo railway were by all accounts appalling, something that was recorded by the [Fascists] themselves.
For instance, in September 1942 one of the POW camps along the railway line was reported to be in a bad condition, with miserable accommodation and insufficient food. The camp at Isokumpu was described as catastrophic, and the [Fascists] inspecting these camps stated that those in charge of the POWs were lacking any sense of responsibility for keeping these men healthy and fit for the work they had to perform.
[…]
Although it was claimed that the Hyrynsalmi–Kuusamo railway made a difference in the struggle to supply the troops on the Kiestinki–Louhi front, the troops positioned at this front sector in fact required supplies of 1,000 tons a day. In addition, the railway was in normal operation, more or less, only for about three months before the breakup of the Finnish–German alliance in September 1944.
During their subsequent retreat from Finland, the [Axis] destroyed the railroad and its structures, such as bridges, stations, and locomotive garages, most of their archives, and the surrounding civilian infrastructure as part of their scorched earth tactics in mid‐September 1944.
(Emphasis added.)