Arne Somersalo

Who was Arne Somersalo?

Arne Sakari Somersalo was a Finnish officer and anti-communist activist.

Somersalo was educated at the University of Helsinki before studying natural sciences at the University of Jena. Based in Germany during the First World War he enrolled in the German Army as an officer in 1916, serving until the armistice. He would later claim that the war had been the death of old Europe and argued that one of its main positives was that it had "rescued our nation from the deadly, slimy embrace of a lothsome cuttlefish" in reference to Russia. He transferred straight to the Finnish Army and from 1920 to 1926 was the commander of the Finnish Air Force.

He became involved in politics in 1926 when he started editing the right wing journal Valkoinen Vartio and then founded the fiercely anti-communist Finnish Defence League. He joined the Lapua Movement in 1930 then the Patriotic People's Movement in 1932, serving as a delegate to the Parliament of Finland for the latter from 1933 to 1935 for Turku. He was also the editor in chief of the IKL party newspaper Ajan Suunta from 1931 to 1935. Ideologically he was a supporter of corporatism and was close to fascism.