Unto Parvilahti
Boman left home soon after finishing public school and moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1924, where he initially worked in various temporary jobs, but gradually turned to photography.
In October 1940, Boman participated in the founding meeting of the Swedish-language National Socialist organization People's Community Society, and was elected a deputy member of its executive board.
The organization's secretary and key person was his friend, jaeger lieutenant and prominent Finnish National Socialist Gunnar Lindqvist.
[5] In his memoirs, Boman said that he heard about the recruitment of volunteers in March 1941 at a meeting of the Finnish People's Organisation and that he was immediately eager to go.
[7][10] On July 25, 1941, at the initiative of joint officer Ensio Pihkala, Boman was transferred to Berlin to take care of Finnish volunteers' affairs, above all postal connections to Finland.
[10] Through the liaison office recognized by the Germans (Verbindungstelle des Finnischen Freiwilligen-bataillons der Waffen-SS), the Finns were able to influence the volunteers' affairs through the Finnish military representatives in Germany, Colonel Walter Horn and Commander Captain Hakon Grönholm, and through diplomatic channels.
[11] Boman handled, among other things, mail delivery and holiday and entertainment matters for Finnish volunteers under the title of Verbindugsführer der Waffen-SS zur Finnischen Gesandschaft.
[13][14] Even after the repatriation of the Finnish battalion in the summer of 1943, Boman remained in Germany to take care of the affairs of the wounded Finns and did not return to Finland until 1944.
[15] Boman was one of eight Finnish citizens considered dangerously pro-German, who were immediately captured by the secret police after Finland severed its relationship with Germany on September 2, 1944.
[16] Detective Aarne Kauhanen, known as an extreme rightist, was in charge of his interrogations and house searches, who fled Finland a couple of weeks later.
[1] The Soviet authorities' suspicions of espionage were apparently not unfounded, but in the justifications for the sentence Parvilahti's possible crimes were in any case greatly exaggerated and it was alleged that he was guilty of murder.
[22] He spent the first two years of his sentence in the Temnikov forced labor camp, from where he was transferred in 1947 to solitary confinement in the Vladimir prison.
The five-year sentence was completed in April 1950, but Parvilahti was not allowed to return to Finland, but was deported to Siberia, to Dudinka, located in the middle of the tundra on the Taimyr Peninsula.
Thanks to the mass amnesties that followed Stalin's death, the deportation was canceled in the summer of 1954, but leaving the country was not arranged immediately.
"Beria's Gardens" was the first work published in Finland that brought the conditions of the Soviet Union's post-World War II prison camp system to the attention of the general public.
