‘The sea shall have our weapons’: small arms and forced migration across the Baltic Sea during the Second World War

(1)

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yjca20

Journal of Conflict Archaeology

ISSN: 1574-0773 (Print) 1574-0781 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjca20

‘The sea shall have our weapons’: small arms and

forced migration across the Baltic Sea during the

Second World War

Mirja Arnshav

To cite this article: Mirja Arnshav (2020): ‘The sea shall have our weapons’: small arms and forced migration across the Baltic Sea during the Second World War, Journal of Conflict Archaeology, DOI: 10.1080/15740773.2019.1735218

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15740773.2019.1735218

Published online: 01 Mar 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

(2)

‘The sea shall have our weapons’: small arms and forced

migration across the Baltic Sea during the Second World War

Mirja Arnshav

Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

ABSTRACT

During the Second World War, a large number of guns were brought to Sweden by refugees escaping the occupation powers of the eastern Baltic countries. Most people had very limited space for bringing belongings with them, but small arms were apparently highly prioritised when setting out– yet, at the same time, they were usually disposed of in the course of the crossing. Informed by Latours’ thoughts on hybrid actors, this paper explores the relation-ship between humans and arms during the escape across the Baltic Sea in 1943–45. It is shown that although they were seldom fired, the physical presence of these arms directly affected human action, perception and identities, and that it did so in different ways during different phases of the crossing.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 13 September 2019 Accepted 21 February 2020

KEYWORDS

Mobility; forced migration; absences; guns; Estonia; Second World War; border crossing; boat refugees; hybridity; object biographies

Introduction

This paper revolves around the observation that many refugee boats leaving Estonia and Latvia for Sweden during ‘the great escape’ in 1943–1945 carried weapons on board (Holmert1999; Hammerman 2014). It seeks to broaden our understanding of the relation-ship between humans and arms within the escape context by exploring the changing role and multiple functions of arms during this particular crossing. How did guns shape people’s actions and identities while on the move? What conflicts and affordances can be attributed to gun possession? Moreover, taking a broader perspective, how did these weapons affect the legacy of this historic event? In addressing these issues, attention is given to the present lack of material evidence and the historical reasons for this. Following this, the paper also contributes to the archaeological discussion on absences.

Although the relationship between humans and arms is a fairly well-studied area, it has seldom been addressed by materiality studies (but see Saunders2002; Springwood2007, 2014). However, in an attempt to clarify the place of technology in society, French sociologist Bruno Latour has taken as his starting point the often-debated example of guns and humans, referring to the argument on whether it is the gun itself, or the person behind the gun, that does the killing. In criticizing the two competing understandings of the agency– the Myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control and the Myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no man can master– he suggests that both understandings

CONTACTMirja Arnshav mirja.arnshav@ark.su.se Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, Wallenberglaboratoriet, 106 91 Stockholm

https://doi.org/10.1080/15740773.2019.1735218

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

(3)

fall short. As stressed by Latour, the citizen with a gun in hand is no longer the same as he or she was without that weapon, and the weapon in hand is no longer the same object either– for example, when compared with a gun in a drawer. What the two schools fail to acknowledge is that humans and matter exchange properties, and that a third hybrid actor– the ‘citizen-gun’ or the ‘gun-citizen’ – whose goals do not necessarily correspond to either of the previous agent’s programmes of action, emerges from the fusion of the other two. What this implies, according to Latour, is that tools not only mediate our actions, but they form part of what we are (Latour1999).

Following this line of thought, Estonians and Latvians who chose to bring arms along when setting out for Sweden in the course of the Second World War would merge into a kind of agent that– with reference to Latour’s ‘citizen-gun’ – could be called the ‘Baltic refugee-gun.’ Was there really such an agent? And if there was, what new means of action would this make possible, and what new relations and identities would it allow to form? It has been observed that the material manifestations of twentieth-century migration are sometimes challenging to identify. Were we to rely on archaeology alone, most of the remains testifying to migration would deny identiﬁcation (Legendre2018, 71). Regarding the forced migration from Estonia and Latvia (and to a smaller extent Lithuania) to Sweden, the material evidence is likewise scarce. There are a few refugee boats left (Arnshav forthcoming), some graves and monuments commemorating the escape (Edlund2012; Holmert 1999) and a few remnants of internment camps, of which one has been surveyed archaeologically, bringing to light some items associated with the daily life of the detainees (Petré2011).

As already mentioned, the material evidence of arming is no exception; it is largely missing or inaccessible. Today few of the guns that were brought ashore still exist, and those that remain are mostly in private hands. Methodologically, a traditional archae-ological study of the subject is therefore not possible. On the other hand, there are other sources– like photos, ﬁles, and oral accounts – that can be used to achieve a better understanding of the material world of the escape and how arms inﬂuenced the deeds and destinies of the migrants.

The great escapeFigure 1

During 1943–1945, a large number of Baltic people representing all social and age groups managed to escape by boat to Sweden, seeking refuge from conscription, persecution, and repression. The trigger of this migration,‘the great escape’ as it has been labelled, has to do with the tragic fates of the small neutral countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which suﬀered no less than three occupations during the war. The Soviet Union annexed them in the summer of 1940; the following year, they were occupied by Nazi Germany, and then, in 1944, they were reinvaded by Soviet forces (Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle2006; Raun2001).

During theﬁrst two occupations, tens of thousands of people were deported, arrested, or mobilised, and warfare devastated much of the countries. In particular, the Soviet terror during theﬁrst occupation and the mass deportations to Siberia in the summer of 1941, just before the German invasion, left deep scars in society. Hence, when the Red Army began to reoccupy Estonia and Latvia in 1944, refugees preceded its advance. In the autumn, the migration turned large scale. People were evacuated to German territory, but for those living in the coastal area, the main goal was to make it to Sweden– a nearby

(4)

neutral country with historical bonds to the eastern Baltic countries. Boats were seized, or built-in secret, and several smuggling rings were organised– some in cooperation with the Swedish Defence command for intelligence tasks. In total, more than 30,000 people braved the Baltic Sea, often in smallﬁshing boats, to reach Sweden (Eriksson1986; Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle2006; Raun2001).

Atfirst thought, it might not seem very surprising that a number of people, setting out in defiance of the occupying powers, chose to bring arms. However, archaeological studies of mobility and research dedicated to the interrelationship between migrants and objects have shown that the intended function and uses of things often change during the process of border crossing, partly due to unpredicted challenges and oppor-tunities (Gokee and de León 2014; de León 2012; Van Oyen 2017). As stated in the following, the reasons for bringing arms, and their impact during the crossing, turns out to be more complex thanfirst understood.

Not all people who owned a weapon chose to take it with them when leaving for Sweden. As observed in archaeologist Mats Burström’s study on Estonian refugee’s wartime caches, weapons were sometimes buried in the ground, along with other objects, when the owners took off. These hidden objects were of various kinds and deposited for many reasons; some because the occupiers forbade possession, some because they were useful or had an affectual value, and therefore needed to be kept safe until the owner returned from exile (Burström 2017). Probably, weapons could answer to all of these motives. Still, many refugees did not leave their arms behind, in caches or elsewhere. Figure 1.Along the Estonian coast, small boats were often destroyed and shot at in order to prevent people fromfleeing. This boat was repaired in secret and eventually made it to Sweden. As is clear from the hull, the holes have been plugged and plated © Anneli Karlsson, SMTM.

(5)

There were several reasons why people chose to bring arms when setting out for Sweden. Some were armed because they had been hiding in the forests for several months and boarded directly from there. Sometimes people shot at the coast guards trying to prevent them from escaping. Also, as there was soon a shortage of boats and strict surveillance of the ones left, there are examples of armed civilians overpowering the crew of a vessel and forcing it to set course to Sweden (Hammerman2014; Holmert1999; Zirnīte and Lielbārdis2015).

Arms at seaFigure 2

Having made it to the sea, the armed refugees were confronted with new challenges and considerations with regard to gun possession. Most Estonians and Latvians migrating by

Figure 2.The Baltic Sea region in 1942 (places discussed in this paper: 1. Reichskommissariat Ostland, occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; 2. Finland; 3. Åland; 4. Gotland; 5. Sweden). Illustration author.

(6)

boat to Sweden did so within a few weeks, at the end of September and the beginning of October 1944. Unfortunately, this coincided with a period of particularly stormy weather, but since the Red Army was approaching, there was no time to hesitate. In the rough sea, armed people at times faced decisions that would have been almost inconceivable had he or she not carried a gun. Swedish-Estonian politician Illmar Repalu, only a small child at the time of the escape, retells his father’s thoughts when caught in stormy weather in the middle of the sea, on a boat that wasﬂooded and on the verge of foundering:

My dad had brought a gun. Later he told of his desperate thoughts: Shall I kill my family so that they don’t have to suﬀer when we drown? (as quoted in Orrenius2014).

Many Estonian descendants, like Estonian honorary consul in Sweden Riina Noodapera (b. 1952), areﬁrmly convinced that people also shot themselves in order to put an end to seasickness (personal communication, 4 May 2019). Whether such actions actually occurred is hard to prove. There were no unhealed gunshot wounds observed on any of the corpses that washed ashore. On the other hand, most of the people that did not make it simply disappeared at sea, and the corpses that were salvaged were often in quite bad condition (boats with shot holes and human witnesses do, however, prove that a number of refugees were attacked and killed by German or Soviet aircraft or vessels while crossing; Andersson 2003, 70–71; Edlund 2012; Holmert 1999). What is certain, though, is that Reepalu’s father was not the only one considering mercy killings during the escape. A package of razor blades in the collections of the Estonian history museum, brought by a mother and distributed to her kids, tells a similar story (Eesti Ajaloomuuseum 2014, 123), while the Latvian woman Skaidrīte Dimitere, who crossed in the ﬁfth month of pregnancy together with her husband and brother-and mother-in-law, noted:

We had a pistol with us, and we had made a pact that if the boat sinks, we would shoot each other (Zirnīte and Lielbārdis2015, 67).

The possession of arms among deserters and members of the resistance movement was linked to a slightly diﬀerent agenda. These refugees were generally more prepared to use lethal force against possible attackers, but there was also a suicide aspect to it. If seized, having oneself killed was considered essential in order to save the lives of other people in the resistance movement. According to a protocol of 1 November 1945, the district police superintendent interrogating a contingent of Latvian men and women from the resis-tance who had hijacked aﬁshing boat and forced it to set course for Gotland learned that the arms were not brought just as a means to take control over the boat’s crew:

The refugees had been armed with machine guns as well as ordinary pistols. This was because they were prepared toﬁght until death, rather than being captured alive, were they to be seized by Russian u-boats or patrol ships. After having come close to Gotland they had thrown the weapons, except for three pistols, over board. . . . Zalomanis [as did the several others of them] explained that he would commit suicide, were he to be denied political asylum and extradited to Russia. He knew that in that case death awaited him, preceded by torture in order to make him reveal what he knew about the resistance movement and its members.

On the boats operated by organised smuggling rings, the crew was armed both toﬁght attackers and to control the passengers. Landing secretly on the occupied Baltic coast was an extremely risky business, and it was not unusual for the boats and their crew to be discovered and attacked. At times, gunﬁghts broke out, and several smugglers were

(7)

captured. However, upon return,ﬁrearms were instead pointed towards the passengers and were openly carried as a means of maintaining safety on board. Native Latvian citizen Peteris Jansons (b. 1922), who was manning some of these boats, is one of the few who have provided details on these experiences. Once, he had to point his machine gun at a crowd of desperate people on the shore to prevent them from boarding the already overloaded boat. Another time he used it to force the people on board to throw their coats overboard (the refugees used to bundle up, in order to bring as many clothes as possible, but on an overcrowded boat heading towards the open sea this posed a serious threat since it meant extra weight when the waves soaked the passengers). Finally, he had to use his weapon in order to make people sit down and not rock the boat upon sighting the Swedish coast (personal communication, 7 March 2018). Clearly, only an armed person, a‘Baltic refugee-gun,’ could achieve these kinds of actions and reactions.

Encounters en route

When encountering locals, either en route or after reaching Sweden, but before being transferred to camps, gun possession decidedly had a determining role in the interaction. Along the main refugee sea routes, many examples are proving that arms contributed to smoothing the progress of people on the move by being sold or oﬀered as gifts during the crossing in return for food, shelter, and route guidance. German currency was more or less worthless, and arms were the one thing the Baltic refugees had to oﬀer that was of interest to the locals.

One such area where quite a few Balts seem to have separated from their arms is the autonomous and demilitarised region of Åland, in particular, the outermost island of Kökar, where quite a few Estonians landed. According to people living on the island during these years, more or less every household had one or two arms deriving from the refugees, although this was not something about which one would speak (Lundberg 1976, 91; Edlund 2012, 116). The material evidence supporting these testimonies is like-wise hidden or absent. However, one possible example is found at the local museum, where a Japanese army riﬂe Arisaka, modiﬁed for seal hunting and donated by one of the local households, is showcased.Figure 3

Later on, when makingﬁrst contact with Swedes, the arms oﬀered a welcome opportunity for the often cash-strapped newcomers to earn some Swedish money. An Estonian man, who was picked up by an assisting Swedish naval ship when approaching Sweden, gives an example of how this shady trade carried on until the very last moments before registration:

The sailors were very keen to make us [all people who were picked up from the small refugee boat] understand that they were interested in buying our pistols. In that way, several people sold their weapons and earned some Swedish crowns (Holmert1999, 52).

Similar examples are given by Karl-Erik Ekström (b. 1942), who lived in an area on Gotland where many refugees landed and remembers his father retelling how the guns even aﬀected the body language and pattern of movement of the armed refugees, as they approached and made contact:

After disembarking, they used to expose their weapons and aim the barrels towards their own chests all the time while approaching, like this [mimicking how they approached gently and

(8)

Figure 3. Arisaka rifle on display at the Kökar museum. These rifles were produced between 1898–1945. This one still has the emblem of the Japanese emperor, a chrysanthemum, engraved on it, suggesting that it reached Europe before the end of the war, as Japan later had to agree to scratch off these engravings, as the symbol was thought to encourage rebellions. It is conceivable that it was exchanged in trade during the Russo-Japanese wars in 1904–5, and eventually brought to the fishing and seal hunting community of Kökar (the inhabitants of which are exempt from military service) by an Estonian refugee passing through Åland. © author.

(9)

humbly, holding the guns visibly and pointed towards themselves] (personal communication, 26 February 2019).

Hence, to escape together with someone carrying a gun could, in many ways, be helpful, but at the same time, it involved certain precautions in order not to threaten the locals.

Crossing the border

It has been stressed by several scholars that absent things are, in many ways, of little concern in today’s materiality studies, although these can be just as important – and experienced – as entities that can be seen, smelt or felt (Bille, Hastrup, and Soerensen 2010). In problematising Latours’ gun example, archaeologist Severin Fowles points out that one cannot add or subtract relations without leaving residues. You are a different person with a gun in your hand, as Latour points out, but you are also a different person having formerly had a gun in your hand. On the battlefield you may be a prisoner-of-war, and in an American context, citizenship is already defined in hybrid terms as the union between a person and a gun (or potential gun), without which you would (at least according to the National Rifle Association) become something less than a citizen (Fowles2010, 29–30).

In the case of the Baltic refugees, according to a considerable body of life stories, arms were frequently tossed overboard when reaching Swedish territorial waters. There were both practical and symbolic motives underpinning this act, both having to do with identity negotiations. To some people – especially so for those who were in uniforms and had fought alongside the Germans– arriving with a weapon in hand was considered a disadvantage in terms of reception and asylum possibilities. Although these weapons were moved from the war zone, they still risked perpetuating a view of the migrants as communists or Nazis, and getting rid of them probably eased relations when landing, making the refugees less threatening and more harmless and incapable in the eyes of the Swedes. As exempliﬁed in Karl Brus’ (b. 1967) story about his father, who escaped together with several other young men in order to avoid forced enlistment, the possession of arms could trigger reactions of anger and worry among the fellow refugees in the boat:

My father brought a riﬂe – he had got it from the Germans and he had received orders to shoot warning shots if the Red Army was sighted. The other ones on board were very mad at him when they found out that he had brought it, but he threw it over board when they reached Sweden (personal communication, 29 June 2018).

Also, there was a juridical aspect to the possession of arms, having to do with asylum issues. On arrival to Sweden, the presence or absence of army weapons contributed to sorting people into particular trajectories and could be decisive for the future of their carriers. Soldiers from the German forces in Courland were sent to special detention camps for German conscripts, no matter their nationality, and were eventually extradited to the Soviet Union. Civilians, on the other hand, were granted asylum and got to stay in Sweden (Ekholm1984; Enquist1968; Eriksson1986). In this sorting process, army weap-ons, along with uniforms, were an important watershed, about which the refugees seem to have been aware. In Gotland, conscripts arriving together with civilians were secretly oﬀered civilian clothes by the district police superintendent, and could, therefore, if they so preferred, register as civilians (Holmert1999). However, after arrival, army weapons were not as easy to get rid of as the uniforms, which could be burnt straight away, and

(10)

there was, in reality, no way to disguise a whole contingent of soldiers had they not got rid of their arms before landing.

The dropping of incriminating items such as army weapons, cameras, and papers into the water was often a quite atmospheric moment. A passage in Alfreds Dzilums’ auto-biographical book Kurzemes sirds vel dzivan provides a moving description of such a situation. It tells about the escape of some partisans from the Latvian resistance move-ment and describes how they almost ceremoniously deposited their weapons into the water, one after another. This was done when sighting Gotland and realising that they were safe– at least for the time being. As one of the men uttered, ‘The sea shall have our weapons and worn out garments’ (Dzilums as quoted in Holmert1999, 262).

As suggested from the example above, and several similar stories, it seems that apart from the possible concrete advantages associated with not being armed at arrival, many people experienced a sort of rite de passage, and conducted their weapons to the seaﬂoor as a response to the fundamental change they were facing– as a gesture of freedom and a marker of the start of a new life. Most civilians that brought arms had hunting riﬂes, weapons for personal defence or sniping, to which the Swedish interrogators did not attach much importance. The need to get rid of them before landing was not necessarily crucial but judging from the rich body of recorded refugee narratives, many people seem to have done so more or less impulsively. One daughter (b. 1949) of a refugee, who escaped together with her twin sister and three other youngsters in their early twenties, recounts:

They had got completely lost, because one of the boys carried a gun in his pocket, and this caused compass error. On the second day they encountered afishing boat and asked where they were. When thefishermen, who turned out to be Swedish, told them that they were in Sweden, cheers broke out and the boat’s captain, who had brought a gun, immediately threw it overboard. Then the Swedes were disappointed:‘What did you do that for, I could have bought it off you’ one of them cried (personal communication, 24 May 2018).Figure 4 A curious issue, which has to do with the later fate of these guns, is that it seems that a few involuntary gun heirs have reacted like the refugees when facing problematic aspects of arms possession. In a conversation with an Estonian descendent in Gotland, the woman (b. 1952) told how she had just disposed of a gun that a Baltic refugee for unclear reasons had handed over to her father– also a Baltic refugee – who had kept it for the rest of his life. Now deceased, the gun, illegally imported and possessed, emerged as something slightly mena-cing, and its presence was unsettling to his relatives. ‘What were we to do with it?’ the women asked, and went on telling how they hadfinally come to the solution to toss it into the sea,‘from where it once came,’ as she explained (personal communication, 4 May 2019).

Conﬁscated arms

It is thus apparent that most Balts seem to have made an effort to get rid of their arms before registration. Hence many weapons were never listed or confiscated by Swedish authorities. Still, one thing that made a great impression on Swedish conscripts and locals involved in the refugee reception, and that still stands out as one of the strongest Swedish memories of these events, was the influx of arms brought along by the refugees. Former conscript Olle Carlsson, who assisted in the reception of refugees, remembers:

(11)

Theﬁrst thing one did after boarding the vessel was to disarm them. They were armed, each and every one of them. I remember– in the evenings, when I was to report, there would be a huge pile of weapons (Carlsson1993).

Similar testimonies are known from other witnesses, for example as observed by former oﬃcer Carl-Gustaf Andrén (b. 1922):

They brought guns, old, very old. And liquor. They brought those two things. Some guns from the nineteenth century and some modern. It was a huge mix (personal communication, 26 February 2018).

As is clear from the letters from the Government Oﬃces and the Country Administrative Boards, it was decided that without import permits, the refugees could not expect to get their conﬁscated arms back. However, if they so wished, they were allowed to sell hunting weapons and handguns of a civilian origin to Swedish citizens or sometimes to the Swedish Police forces. Regarding the material, it was all handed over to the National Defence for keeping and care.

One place where a relatively large number of arms were confiscated was the Swedish island of Gotland, in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Situated less than 100 miles from the east Baltic coast, it was well within reach of the western parts of Estonian as well as Latvia and– after the final Russian takeover of Estonia – the Courland pocket, from which the last refugees escaping the Red Army took off (Holmert 1999). In total, the island received Figure 4.Five young Estonians made it to Sweden in this refugee boat on the island Järflotta, south of Stockholm. Due to a compass error caused by a gun the migrants landed in a different county than the one they had aimed for. Nevertheless, two settled near the place of arrival, got married and stayed for the rest of their lives. © Anneli Karlsson, SMTM.

(12)

Figure 5.The section with‘refugee boat equipment’ at Strandridaregården, Gotland. Based on the picture, the material displayed included: a Finnish submachine gun (M31 Soumi), which was used in significant numbers in combat, not least by mobile troops on skis during the Winter War of 1939–40, fighting the Red Army; a Soviet Mosin–Nagant rifle (91/30), which was the standard issue weapons of Soviet troops during the war; a German bolt action Mauser rifle (Kar 98b) and a knife bayonet (M1884:98), both widely used during World War II; an automatic Mauser pistol of the C96 series, which was produced into the 1930 s; a Soviet Nagant revolver model 1895, which was manufactured as late as the Second World War; a sniper rifle, a detonator crimping pliers and a number of magazine pouches. © Gotlands museer.

(13)

about 10,000 persons or one-third of the arrivals to Sweden, and, as a consequence, a substantial portion of the refugee’s arms.

From the County Boards’ records of confiscated arms at Gotland, it is possible to gain some knowledge of the kinds of arms, and the quantities of them, that were brought to Sweden and collected at arrival. On the whole, the influx did not exceed 200 pieces, while the number of refugee boats that made it to the island was fewer than 300 (of which some boats made several trips back and forth). Considering that Gotland was the part of Sweden that was situated closest to the war front, and where about a third of the refugees landed, it would be reasonable to estimate that the total number of arms confiscated along the entire Swedish east coast probably did not exceed 500 pieces, at the most. The Swedish narratives about refugee boats laden with arms seem to be somewhat exagger-ated, reflecting perhaps wide-eyed innocence of Swedish conscripts when getting a glimpse of the ongoing war mediated by the arriving refugees.

Although far from every boat had arms on board when reaching the shore, there were occasions when a considerable number of arms were confiscated within a short period. For instance, according to the records, on 9–10 May 1945, just after the final surrender of Germany, two shotguns, one automatic rifle, one hunting rifle, eight submachine guns, and no less than 47 pistols were collected from as many Latvians, arriving in two boats to the coast. These Latvians were not civilian refugees, but some of the legionnaires who had fought the Red Army alongside the Germans (Deland2010).

As is clear from the County Administrative Board’s files on confiscated arms, there was a broad range of guns, representing both different kinds of army weapons as well as weapons for civilian use. They were manufactured by Belgian, Italian, Czech, Russian, Finnish, and American brands (and several unidentified pistols) and were of several different kinds: revolvers, pistols, machine guns, automatic rifles, rifles (some with bay-onets), carbines, shotguns, and hunting rifles. Although the majority of them seem to have been relatively new, fabricated in the 1930s or early 1940s, some were made as early as the late 1800s and were almost 50 years old at the time.

In the years following the war, visitors to the local museum Strandridaregården in Ljugarn, on the east coast of Gotland, could get acquainted with a collection of the refugees’ arms at a section of the exhibition dedicated to ‘Years of Warfare’ (Sw. Ofredsår). Judging from documentary photos in the display (figure 5), several army weapons of Finnish, German, and Russian origin were put on display. On the whole, the display seems to have provided a fair reflection of the army weapons, both standard and captured, that were commonly used in the conflicts between Finland, Germany, and the USSR that drew in the Estonians and Latvians.

Of equal interest, though, is the label, which once presented this section of the exhibition to the visitors and the caption of the documentation of the display. In these, the showcased arms are referred to as‘refugee boat equipment,’ thus framing refugees, boats, and arms as almost inseparable from one another. This, of course, is a rough generalisation and should be understood as an expression of Othering, revealing the contemporary Swedish outlook of the situation rather than the actual situation.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to think about the entanglements between people and things within this particular context. On the boat, everybody was, to some extent, exposed to the power of the weapon (if there was one). Moreover, new and somewhat unconventional assemblages were indeed formed due to extraordinary circumstances. In

(14)

this case, guns were brought on board vessels that were not commonly associated with armed conflicts, like small fishing boats and other traditional vessels, where they mingled with sewing machines,fishing nets, and kitchen utensils, forming a sort of microcosmos demarcated by the hull.

Migrant material culture

As pointed out in the introduction, it can be challenging to identify archaeological proof of mobility and forced migration, even when working with the recent past. In seeking an understanding of the‘Baltic-refugee-gun,’ it is found that the evidence of its existence is, in many ways, elusive, not least with respect to material evidence. While a relatively limited number of arms were confiscated and listed, oral accounts suggest that arms were indeed something that were frequently brought on board boats setting out from the eastern Baltic coast. Many of them were disposed of at sea, off the Swedish coast, whereas arms taken ashore were redistributed and are mostly gone, except for a few copies in local communities. Parallels may be drawn between the discarded arms on the seafloor – which probably form the bulk of the material evidence of this escape today – and other cases of contemporary migrant material culture. Like clothing, water bottles, equipment, and cars that are found in the Sonoran desert and Finnish Sapmi respectively, they are things that are repeatedly abandoned close to the border in order to blend in and facilitate the crossing (Gokee and de León2014; de León2012; Seitsonen, Herva, and Kunnari2016). The Baltic refugees did not have to blend in to be able to succeed in crossing the border, as they were considered asylum seekers, but identity negotiations were still essential, and at this point, a gun was not an asset but a burden.

An interesting parallel where refugees and arms are concerned is the almost contemporary case of the Spanish Republicans in the civil war. Although this was a giant escape movement involving hundreds of thousands of people, few material traces are left today. However, among those few, arms stand out as crucial archaeological evidence. When approaching the border, the republican soldiers either tossed their guns into the ravines lining the roads or were disarmed by French soldiers after crossing. The confiscated arms were eventually sent back to Franco’s Spain, while the weapons that were disposed on the Spanish side of the border were never systematically sought. Hence, weapon parts are still plentiful on the Spanish side of the border– buried in the ground or kept by the local population and at local museums – but are almost non-existent on the French side, because of the thoroughness with which the French police and the military searched for them (Legendre2018). Although the Baltic arms have never been identified or surveyed, there seems to be a number of them scattered close to the border (on the seafloor, with the coast, experienced as the border, within sight), which probably makes them the most compelling material footprint of this migration.

While similarities exist, motives behind transporting the arms on the escape to France versus that to Sweden seem to have differed. The republicans were known to hold onto their arms in order to delay the advance of their enemies (Legendre2018). It may be that this assertion is somewhat oversimplified and that there were additional reasons for carrying firearms, not least among the 170,000 civilians, but since this has not been explored in more depth, we simply do not know. The Baltic refugees, for their part, did bring weapons for more complex reasons, including personal safety and defence issues, trade opportunities, considerations of suicide or because they formed part of the household equipment which

(15)

was needed when settling down and making a living in Sweden. The reasons for bringing guns varied, not least between Legionnaires and members of the resistance movement on the one hand and non-ﬁghting civilians on the other. The ﬁrst groups seem to have been more inclined to combat, whereas the motives for the others also had to do with a sense of personal safety, monetary value, or perhaps sentimental reasons.

Conclusions

In the light of Latour’s argument on the implications of carrying a gun, it seems the ‘Baltic refugee-arm,’ in terms of an autonomic actor, was deﬁnitely present during parts of the crossing. His discussion of human-things hybridity and of things being us is in this Baltic case perhaps most clearly manifested in the example of the young man who caused a compass error and made the boat go oﬀ course because of the gun in his pocket. This illustrates that travelling with armed people could have unintended consequences and outcomes, none of which the actors could foresee.

There are also several examples indicating that gun possession shaped the actions and motives of the owner. As suggested in the opening, the interpretation of migrant material culture can be challenging, as the extraordinary situation often makes the general order of things collapse, so that new assemblages form and things get used in slightly new ways. One such phenomenon that has emerged from the study is the tendency to aim guns, including army weapons, not towards external foes but at one’s self or fellow refugees. It is, of course, hard to determine the extent to which people brought guns with the original intention of using them for committing suicide or killing relatives and kin. However, it seems very likely that these kinds of thoughts were sometimes linked to unexpected situations during the crossing, like when caught in rough weather or taking in water. In similar ways, most people probably had not planned to give their guns away or sell them while on the move, or to toss them into the sea, as eventually turned out to be a good idea to many of the gun owners. These situations can hardly be attributed to the demands of the original function of the arms -, nor understood to be a consequence of the fundamental motives of the humans. On the contrary, they can only happen if you have a gun andﬁnd yourself in an escape boat.

Studies looking into the mobility of objects have convincingly shown that things take on new meanings as they travel. Additionally, it has been stressed that in many cultures, there is a particular appreciation for such things (Hahn and Weiss2013). In stark contrast to this, the case of the Baltic refugee’s arms – just as other material culture associated with illegal border crossing – highlights the importance of getting rid of things that have travelled; to erase material evidence in order not to be associated with it. However, as archaeologists are well aware, the complete erasure of material culture is extremely difficult to achieve, as almost everything leaves some trace (González-Ruibal 2019). There are most likely more non-confiscated and non-destroyed Baltic arms to be discov-ered and identified in the future, but one first step may be to acknowledge their absence and tofind alternative ways to approach it.

A ﬁnal observation is that, although mostly absent today, these arms, once brought to the sea by ﬂeeing Estonians and Latvians, have proven ontologically sticky. Although most people arrived unarmed, the mainstream narrative is that refugees were armed. A relatively small number of arms have certainly contributed

(16)

to shaping the Swedish perspective on ‘The great escape over the Baltic Sea’; they have formed memories and made way for a rather crude notion of a connection between Baltic refugees and arms.

However, more importantly, perhaps, this paper has shown that guns were probably most often aimed at the refugees themselves. This, I believe, is an insight that adds both to the previous understanding of the escape situation, and our general thoughts of the use of arms. Trying to approach the‘Baltic refugee-gun,’ and to understand the ways and motives of this agent is, I believe, of relevance both for the archaeological discussion on conﬂicts, material culture, and mobility, and, more importantly, for the ways we comprehend the harsh reality of forced migration.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks for comments on an early draft of this text go to Alison Klevnäs, Liv Nilsson Stutz, Roberta Biasillo, Mats Burström, Anna McWilliams, Niklas Eriksson and my colleagues attending the PhD course Materiality and the Human. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Maritime Museum, Anna Arnberg and Anneli Karlsson, who are co-contributors to the project The Materiality of the Great Escape over the Baltic Sea, and the Swedish National Heritage Board for supporting the project. Finally, I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers, as well as the editor of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

The work described here is part of research founded by the National Swedish Heritage Board (RAÄ-2018-3326)

Notes on contributor

Ph.Lic. Mirja Arnshavis a PhD student at Stockholm University and research-coordinatior at the National Maritime Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research interests include contemporary archaeology, maritime archaeology, conﬂict archaeology and heritage studies. Her present research concerns Estonian and Latvian refugee boats from the Second World War in Sweden.

ORCID

Mirja Arnshav http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2037-3341

References

Andersson, J.2003. Rödhamns värld: historien om livet vid Ålands stora farled. Mariehamn: Ålands landskapsstyrelse, museibyrån.

Arnshav. forthcoming. De små båtarna och den storaﬂykten. Lund: Nordic academic press. Bille, M., F. Hastrup, and T. Soerensen, eds.2010. An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of

(17)

Burström, M.2017. Ballast: Laden with History. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Carlsson, O.1993.“Olle Carlssson berättar om skärgårn, bussarna, Ramsmora, Tegelön och 1940-taletsﬂyktingmottagning.” Koldalsbladet 42: 13–22. Boo: Boo Hembygdsförening.

de León, J.2012.“‘Better to Be Hot than Caught’: Excavating the Conﬂicting Roles of Migrant Material Culture.” American Anthropologist 114 (3): 477–495. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01447.x. Deland, M.2010. Purgatorium. Sverige och andra världskrigets förbrytare. Stockholm: Atlas.

Edlund, K-J.2012. Deﬂydde kriget. Baltiska och andra ﬂyktingar runt Åland krigsåren 1939–1945. Stockholm: Leandoer och Ekholm förlag.

Eesti Ajaloomuuseum. 2014. Castles and Paws. The German Occupation of Estonia 1941-1944. Estonian History Museum Exhibition Catalogue. Tallinn: Eesti Ajaloomuseuum.

Ekholm, C.1984.“Balt- och tyskutlämningen 1945-1946: omständigheter kring interneringen i läger i Sverige och utlämningen till Sovjetunionen av f d tyska krigsdeltagare.” University PhD. diss., Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.

Enquist, P. O.1968. Legionärerna. Stockholm: Norstedt.

Eriksson, L.-G., ed.1986. De första båtﬂyktingarna. Stockholm: Statens invandrarverk.

Fowles, S. 2010. “People without Things.” In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, edited by M. Bille, F. Hastrup, and T. Sørensen, 23–44. New York: Springer. Gokee, C., and J. de León.2014.“Sites of Contention: Archaeological Classiﬁcation and Political Discourse in the US–Mexico Borderlands.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1 (1): 133–163. doi:10.1558/jca.v1i1.133.

González-Ruibal, A.2019. An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. London and New York: Routledge. Hahn, H. P., and H. Weiss, eds.2013. Mobility, Meaning and the Transformations of Things: Shifting

Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Hammerman, M., ed. 2014. Estlandssvenskarnas ﬂykt över Östersjön: ﬂyktberättelser och namnförteckning över anlända 1940-1945. Stockholm: Svenska odlingens vänners förlag. Hiio, T., M. Maripuu, and I. Paavle, ed. 2006. Estonia 1940-1945. Tallinn: Estonian International

commission for the investigation of crimes against humanities.

Holmert, B.-G., ed.1999. Gotland under beredskapsåren. 1. Flyktingströmmarna från Baltikum i andra världskrigets slutskede. Visby: Bengt-Göran Holmert.

Latour, B.1999. Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Legendre, J.-P.2018.“Vestiges of the Spanish Republican Exodus to France. An Archaeological Study of the Retirada.” In An Archaeology of Forced Migration. Crisis-induced Mobility and the Collapse of the 13th c. BCE Eastern Mediterranean, edited by J. Driessen, 55–74. Louvain: UCLouvain. Lundberg, U.-L.1976. Kökar. Helsingfors: Söderström.

Orrenius, N. November 162014.“De ﬂydde över havet – nu är rädslan tillbaka.” Dagens nyheter. Petré, B. 2011. “Arkeologiska undersökningar på fornlämning RAÄ 28, Söderby, Lovö socken,

Uppland. Gravfält från vendeltid och vikingatid samt några gravar och boplatslämningar från bronsålder.” Lovö Archaeological Reports and Studies 10. Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University. https://www.archaeology.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.77160. 1537859405!/menu/standard/ﬁle/raa28soderby.pdf

Raun, T.2001. Estonia and the Estonians. Stanford. Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University. Saunders, N.2002.“The Iconic Culture of Shells in the Great War and Beyond.” In Matériel Culture. The Archaeology of Twentieth Century Conﬂict, edited by J. Schoﬁeld, W. Gray Johnson, and C. M. Beck, 22–40. London and New York: Routledge.

Seitsonen, O. I., V.-P. Herva, and M. Kunnari.2016.“Abandoned Refugee Vehicles ‘In the Middle of Nowhere’: Reﬂections on the Global Refugee Crisis from the Northern Margins of Europe..” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 3 (2): 121–294. doi:10.1558/jca.32409.

Springwood, C. F., ed.2007. Open Fire. Understanding Global Gun Cultures. Oxford and New York: Berg. Springwood, C. F.2014.“Gun Concealment, Display, and Other Magical Habits of the Body.” Critique

of Anthropology 34 (4): 450–471. doi:10.1177/0308275X14543394.

Van Oyen, A.2017.“Material Culture and Mobility: A Brief History of Archaeological Thought.” In Mobility and Pottery Production. Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by C. Heitz and R. Stapfer, 53–68. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

(18)

Zirnīte, M., and A. Lielbārdis.2015. Baltic Refugees in Gotland in Photographs by David Holmert. Riga: Latvijas Universitātes Filozoﬁjas un socioloǵijas institūts, Latvijas Universitātes Literatūras, folk-loras un mākslas institūts, Latvijas Mutvārdu vēstures pētnieku asociācija Dzīvesstāts.