Kaarlo Hillilä

Hillilä took part in the battle of Oulu as a student during the Finnish Civil War with his classmate Aaro Pakaslahti in February 1918.

He befriended his roommate, fellow law student, North Ostrobothnian Nation member and future president Urho Kekkonen.

Also like Kekkonen, Hillilä made additional earnings working for Etsivä keskuspoliisi, the predecessor of today's Finnish Security Intelligence Service.

That year, he took office as the head of the market town of Rovaniemi, a position he filled on two separate occasions before his appointment as provincial governor of Lapland.

After Kekkonen became the Minister of the Interior and started plotting the abolition of the Patriotic People's Movement, Hillilä provided him with background research, but the plans were not realised at that point in time.

On a flying visit to Lapland in early 1942, Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler told Hillilä rather openly about ethnic cleansings targeting Jews and Roma people in Germany and its occupied areas.

Hillilä and Pakaslahti acted above all as conversation partners and informants to Kekkonen while he wrote reports on military policy for Suomen Kuvalehti under the pen name "Pekka Peitsi".

At that point an Allied Supervisory Commission led by the Soviet Union came to Finland to carry out police affairs through the Ministry of the Interior.

He returned to his post as provincial governor of Lapland from 1946 to 1947 and then moved to Helsinki to serve as director general of the Social Insurance Institution (SII).