It concerned a secret and officially unsanctioned military operation following the end of combat on the Soviet–Finnish theater of WWII known as the Continuation War, where a large amount of Finnish Army weapons and equipment was hidden in caches scattered around the country.
Dozens of Finnish soldiers, fled the country to avoid prosecution, with 21 of them, including Alpo K. Marttinen, later moving to the United States.
[3] The case started to unravel in the spring of 1945, when Lauri Kumpulainen, a Finnish soldier with left-wing sympathies, divulged the existence of the caches to the Allied Control Commission (ACC).
Initially the ACC was eager to follow the case, but after written orders from Nihtilä and Haahti surfaced, they left the investigation to Valpo, the much communist-controlled security police of Finland at the time.
Most of the weapons were silently returned to army depots, and some were destroyed, but even today when old buildings are demolished, caches turn up every year.