Travel Reference
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states. After all, these were the people Germany was trying to emulate: tall,
blonde, blue-eyed symbols of the Aryan race.
Finland and Estonia's fate were more complicated. During the war, the
Finns valiantly battled Russian invaders, at one point allying with Hitler
against the Russians. By war's end, Finland had fought both the Soviets and
the Nazis. Estonia, meanwhile, was occupied first by the Soviets and later by
the Nazis.
As postwar Europe was divvied up between the communist East and the
democratic West, Estonia wound up in the Soviet sphere of influence. Finland
avoided this fate through a compromise policy called “Finlandization.” The
Finns paid lip service to Soviet authority, censored their own media, acted as
a buffer against military invasion from the West, rejected rebuilding money
from the US (the Marshall Plan), and avoided treaties with the West. In re-
turn, Finland remained a self-ruling capitalist democracy and a firm part of
the Nordic world. They imported raw materials from the Soviets, then shipped
them back as manufactured products, in a mutually beneficial trade agree-
ment.
Meanwhile, Norway and Denmark stood with the West, joining NATO
and participating in the Marshall Plan. Sweden took a more neutral approach,
and Sweden's Dag Hammarskjöld served as the UN's Secretary General from
1953 to 1961. Estonia was submerged into the Soviet Union as one of the 15
“republics” of the USSR, only regaining its independence with the breakup of
the Soviet Union in 1991.
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