A total of 45 persons suspected of belonging to the Red Guards were executed by German troops at a bog at 8 o’clock p.m. at the site of the present Eliel Saarisen tie, halfway from the Pitäjänmäki roundabout to the tunnel leading to the Huopalahti Station, at the site of a pedestrian crossing.
During the Battle of Helsinki, the German Baltic Sea Division advanced on 11 April to Leppävaara, Espoo.
A group of Reds sought shelter in the cellar of Carl Theodor Ward’s garden in South Haaga, at 12 Vanha Viertotie.
According to another version, shots were fired at the car of the German commander Rüdiger von der Goltz, and the executions were a revenge for this.
The rest of the bodies, most likely people not from Helsinki or the Rural Municipality, were loaded on to carts driven by horses and taken a couple of kilometres away to be buried in a pit that had been dug in connection of the building of Krepost Sveaborg.
According to the story the Estonians told at the time, Vilms and his retinue had been in Suursaari, where the Germans allegedly had captured them and brought them to Helsinki on a ship named Regina and then shot them at the Töölö Sugar Factory and then buried them in the North Haaga mass grave.