The Finnish Post Office and Helsinki postal censorship world war in compression from autumn 1914 to winter 1915

Jorma Keturi – SP 3/2018

Thanks to Suomen Postimerkkilehti for permission to translate and upload this article.
Original Finnish article found on page 30-33 here A pdf file shall open in new window.

The Finnish Post Office and Helsinki’s postal censorship under pressure from the World War from autumn 1914 to winter 1915.

The events in the Balkans in the late summer of 1914 heralded war. One of the causes of the start of the world war is the declaration of war by Austria-Hungary on Serbia on 28 July 1914. One day earlier, the Russian Emperor Nicholas II had signed an order to start the war preparation period.

On the day before the last day of July, Russia started a general campaign and two days later war broke out when Germany declared war on Russia in Berlin. Since the end of July, the Grand Duchy of Finland had also been declared under martial law by the announcement of the country’s governor general, and martial law laws came into effect. In practice, this meant that the local civilian administration was subordinated to the highest military command. The highest administrative official of our country was Governor-General Seyn, who was subordinated to the command of the commander of the VI Russian Army.

The 22nd Army Corps also operated under the mentioned commander baron van der Brincken, who was the highest military authority in Finland. The headquarters of the army was then located in Helsinki, but it moved elsewhere by the end of 1914.

On 31 August 1914, the Finnish Senate ordered all county governors and central agencies to take the necessary measures immediately, so that the officials of all the country’s agencies and institutions would be ready, without delay, to fulfil all the orders given to them by the military leadership and the orders of the authorities. The above-mentioned order was forwarded by the Post Office for the information of all post offices.

Before the outbreak of the war, France and Russia had concluded a mutual military alliance agreement. England was involved in the alliance, but without a serious commitment. However, on 5 September 1914, the situation had changed so that all three the state entered into a binding military alliance. When the countries joined Russia in military operations against Austria-Hungary and Germany, the Finnish postal service later had to participate on a large scale in the processing and transportation of Russian transit mail. The Russian post caused significant practical difficulties for the post office due to the large number of parcels. A considerable part of the mail passing through was the mail packages sent from Russia to the Russian prisoners of war taken by Germany. Another important task that consumed resources was related to postal censorship, because the postal administration had to detach a large number of its own staff to the service of censorship to inspect postal shipments. As a result of the state of war, the temporary railway schedule that came into force on 1 August significantly limited the transport of mail by railway. On the tracks that had several shifts a day, only one shift operated. The greatly reduced postal transport by rail increased the amount of road mail, especially in the Southern Finland region. The Post Office tried to increase the number of daily road transports in such a way that mail delivery could be secured.

International mail connections

Mail exchange with foreign countries underwent a complete change due to the war. During peacetime, a significant part of Finland’s foreign mail arrived in Helsinki-St. Petersburg night or day mail wagons. Mail from Scandinavian countries was transported by ship once a day From Stockholm to Turku. Finnish ships had a ship’s post office that took care of sorting the mail during the trip. The transport of postal parcels was arranged on ships with Finland and Germany and Denmark. When the war broke out, the postal exchange between Sweden, Germany and Denmark was stopped immediately. Via Russia, however, it was possible to send mail addressed to Asia via Helsinki, Petrograd and Moscow, and via Moscow-Odessa-Ungen and Romania to Southeast Europe. Mail addressed to other countries was now forwarded via Tornio and Sweden. Due to the state of war, only a few ports in the Gulf of Bothnia were opened to the ships of neutral countries. After a brief interruption mail from Sweden to Finland continued on Swedish ships across the Gulf of Bothnia from Gäfle or Stockholm to Rauma.

The first Swedish mail ship “Öland” arrived in Rauma with a cargo of letter mail on 11 August, from where they were transferred in sealed mail sacks to mail wagons for transport to the homeland and Russia. In Riihimäki, the sealed mail sacks mapped to Russia were transferred Helsinki-Petrograd to the mail car. From time to time, these verses also contained mail addressed to Finland from neutral countries in Europe and Russia’s allies. These shipments can be identified by the round stamps of the Petrograd postal censor affixed to them.

Exchange post office for Rauma

The amount of mail that arrived in Rauma from Sweden by ship had grown to such proportions that the postal administration decided to establish a temporary exchange post office in Rauma on 20 August. There were two forwarders, six postmen and two office clerks. The route of mail cars no. 11-12 going to Pori was changed so that they went through Rauma. A postal wagon was put into traffic between Pori and Peipohja. The sealed mail sacks unloaded from the ship could be transfer directly to rail transport. Rauma did not yet have a functional postal censorship in connection with the exchange office, which is why the military censorship commission in Helsinki suspended the operation of the said exchange office already on 27 September passing the mail addressed to Finland to Helsinki for inspection. In reality, Helsinki’s postal censorship had not received any order from the commission regarding this inspection, and so the mails went forward for the time being without censorship. For this, the governor general had reprimanded postmaster Jamalais for disobedience when he had not taken the mail arriving in Rauma on his own initiative into the scope of the inspection. Helsinki postal censorship was still plagued by huge backlogs, which were caused by the censorship authorities’ ill-advised decisions to concentrate the inspection of mail arriving from abroad at the inspection point in Helsinki. Mail service to Rauma continued this time until the beginning of December, when “Everilda” and “Luna” were destroyed to German mining and the same thing happened to the ship “Norra Sverige” on the Mäntyluoto channel. After these serious experiences, shipping to Rauma was suspended and mail arriving from Sweden was moved to the northern Tornio route. From Russia’s ally France, mail was transported to Scandinavia across the channel to England and from there by ship via Bergen via Tornio or Rauma to Finland. The Finnish postal administration directed enemy countries to Germany and mail to Austria-Hungary via the Russian Ungen border post office until 21 September 1914. Before the mentioned termination date, postal connections had become uncertain. Another possibility of sending mail would have been via Denmark, but that had also proved to be a slow route. Neutral Sweden was able to connect with the western powers within the framework of its postal agreements with Bergen and Newcastle in Norway to England and America. Mail from Finland and the Empire and mail addressed to these countries were transported on the aforementioned postal route. Mail addressed to Finland from Italy was routed through Romania and Russia until August 1916.

Postal censorship

After martial law entered into force in Finland, Governor-General Seyn began to implement the censorship decree issued in Russia on 2 August, which one of the most important one of the areas was postal censorship. In the collection of Finnish regulations, the military censorship regulation was not published until 11 September.

The task of postal censorship was to prevent the dissemination of information through the mail during the war that could damage the military position and security of the empire. To achieve this, high military authorities were justified prohibit forwarding of postal items in their areas of responsibility. Although this right was never used in Finland, the implementation of postal censorship caused difficulties for the postal administration as such.

In the early stages of the war, the military authorities left the post alone for the time being. As a temporary solution, only mail addressed to foreign countries and Scandinavian countries was ordered to be directed to the censorship in Petrograd. Changes to the previous one came quickly on 5 August, when the above-mentioned consignments were transited to be sent to Tornio. After three days, the authorities issued a rather strange order according to which all mail from Finland and Russia had to be completely stopped in Tornio. This resulted in huge mail backlogs, for which storage places were sought in the yard of the Tornio post office. After less than a week, the congestion was really started to be cleared, and shipments arriving from Russia were allowed to freely go forward through Sweden in the amount of 14 horse loads. All of the above presented was apt to describe the panic that prevailed among the military authorities. At that time, it was not yet known in which direction the German army would direct its first attack. The fear was that it would have been used towards an operation through Finnish territory Petrograd. Postal censorship started in Tornio on 15 August with a force of about ten censors. The backlog of shipments left for inspection was cleared by 21 August. Recorded broadcasts, which could not have been delayed for more than one day due to censorship, were processed first.

The Postal Administration had ordered a total of 49 postal officials from post offices around the country to relieve congestion. Quite strange was the order of the censorship authorities to direct all foreign mail to Tornio, because there is no didn’t have any kind of capabilities to inspect and deal with such things at first postal amounts.

Military Censorship Commission to Helsinki

The governing body of postal censorship, the “Special Military Censorship Commission”, was established in Helsinki on 1 September 1914, when the commander of the 22nd army corps had approved the plan presented by Governor General Seyn. It was chaired by the head of the Raahe military region, Lieutenant Colonel Belostotskij, whose immediate superior was the commander of Viapori, General Bauer. Belostotsky had been born In Finland and felt the conditions of the country inside and out. The other members of the commission were assigned to their duties from the post office, the printed products board, the governor general’s office, and a person appointed by the commander of the Viapori fortress. The commission started its work three days later. The first task it had received was the order to start checking the mail that had arrived at the Helsinki post office, which was so far allowed to travel freely. Governor-General Seyn had energetically taken up the inspection issue, even though he had no role in censorship matters based on his official position. Decisions about the inspection belonged to the military authorities. Seyn was energetically planning and implementing the Russification of the Finnish postal service before the war. When it didn’t happen to the extent he had planned, now he had the opportunity to intervene in the course of things, even though they were not even his own. On 3 September the Helsinki post office was ordered to hand over the incoming letter mail to the postal censor. The office handed over 5,000 registered letters and 20 sacks of ordinary letters for inspection. These numbers included foreign and Russian mail that arrived in Helsinki. With the given order, there was congestion The postal censorship in Helsinki was very bad, with mail being delayed for up to two weeks. The public reacted to this with sarcastic newspaper articles and started correspondence with the management of the post office with. The authorities agreed to relieve the resulting backlog by allowing all shipments forward freely, but this did not eliminate the actual problem. In early September, the Finnish senate demanded the governor-general to solve the congestion problems twice in a sharp tone. The situation became even worse when Jamalainen received a censure from the chairman of the commission order to start checking all domestic mail in Helsinki, in addition to mail arriving from abroad, on 28 September. This was already too much for postmaster Jamalainen. In awe, he began to pressure the authorities responsible for censorship and Governor General Seyn to give up checking domestic mail in Helsinki. As a justification, he presented that if 100,000 domestic mail items arriving at the Helsinki post office per day were to be checked, then 500 sensors would be needed. According to him, there was no possibility of hiring this number of people. In the end, the censorship authorities realized that there was no foreign and domestic arrivals mail could be checked centrally in Helsinki.

Sources: Correspondence between the Governor General and Jamalainen from 1914-1915.

My own research. PLH Postal Department documents 1914-1915.

Summary of the beginning of postal censorship in Helsinki in 1914

• Shipments arriving at Helsinki Post from abroad and Russia inspection began on 4 September 1914.
• By order of the chairman of the Censorship Commission, starting on 26 September, all domestic mail was ordered to be checked by the Helsinki postal censorship. The Postmaster General presented his weighty and reasoned opinion in writing to revoke this order.

• The post’s situation was eased by the announcement of the Censorship Commission On 28 September, when Finland’s biggest cities were it was decided to set up postal censorship checkpoints for domestic mail for inspection.

• The inspection of shipments addressed to Uusimaa (Nyland) county began on 12 October 1914.

More postal censorship checkpoints were established

On 28 September 1914, the chairman of the special war censorship commission informed postmaster Jamalainen in writing that it had been decided to establish a checkpoints in the following cities: Helsinki (Uusimaa county), Turku (county of Turku and Pori and Åland), Vyborg (county of Vyborg), Nikolaikaupunki (Vaasa county), Oulu (Oulu county), Kuopio (Kuopio and Mikkeli counties) and Tampere (Hämeenlääni). The inspection was carried out at this stage at the county inspection point determined by the place of address. The censors in the aforementioned cities were appointed by the commandant of the Sveaborg fortress, Lieutenant General Bauer. Tornio (outgoing international mail) and Helsinki (arrived from Russia registered letters) the inspection was already underway. And the citizen turned to the Finnish Senate, bringing up his concerns about how the new inspection offices that will be opened in the near future regarding sensors to be occupied. The censorship committee had planned to hire staff from postal offices around the country. In practice, this did happen, but on a much smaller scale than planned. The local courier companies in Rauma wanted their correspondence to be checked locally instead of in Tampere. The chairman of the Military Censorship Commission approved the application and the operation started at the end of October. The military authorities had drawn their attention to the fact that through Pori’s Mäntyluoto, mail shipments arrived in the country with ships, which had to be checked and for Pori County, a local censorship station was established in mid-November 1914.

Summary of the opening of checkpoints according to source data:

15.08.1914 Tornio (outgoing international mail)

03.09.1914 Helsinki (business letters from Russia and abroad)

12.10.1914 Helsinki (mail addressed to Uusimaa county)

03.10.1914 Vyborg (post addressed to Vyborg county)

05.10.1914 Turku (printed products arrived from abroad)

15.10.1914 Turku (mail addressed to the counties of Turku and Pori.

Pori county until 14 November 1914)

10.10.1914 Kuopio (post addressed to Kuopio county)

13.10.1914 Nikolaistad (Vaasa) mail addressed to Vaasa county)

13.10.1914 Oulu (post addressed to Oulu county)

15.10.1914 Tampere (mail addressed to Häme county)

25.10.1914 Rauma (mail addressed to the city of Rauma)

15.11.1914 Pori (post addressed to Pori County)