Erna long-range reconnaissance group

However, Colonel Kurg strongly opposed this;[2] he insisted that they were not Germans but Estonian volunteers, ready to co-operate, but without any commitments to Hitler.

[2] On the night of 10 July the platoon made a seaborne landing on the northern coast of Estonia with 42 men arriving onshore and hiding in the Kautla Marshes 60 km south east of Tallinn.

The group's task was to perform reconnaissance deep behind Red Army lines for the Finnish Army but it turned to saving around 2,000 civilians hiding in the Kautla woods by allowing them to escape while the outnumbered Erna force engaged Soviet NKVD Destruction Battalions in a fierce battle on 31 July to 1 August 1941.

[citation needed] With the end of the war a number of the original members of Erna continued guerrilla activities against Soviet forces, becoming Forest Brothers.

[citation needed] These claims were revived in the 1980s as a way of distracting historians analysing the Kautla massacre, and have been repeated in Russian media in the 2000s.