Finding Åke Hjalmar Löwstedt
In May 2025 we made a new attempt of finding the mortal remains of Swedish volunteer Åke Löwstedt who was killed during a night patrol in August 1941.
We found the first clear evidence of the firefight between Soviet soldiers and the Swedish partrol. Finds of a several Finnish 9 mm machinegun cartridges in the Soviet trench Löwstedt was moving towards might indicate that he made it to the edge of the trench before he was killed.
No sign of his remains though.
Unpublished private photos from wartime Hanko found!
Last summer an elderly gentleman who participated in the Battlefield Archaeology excavation of the ”Hamsterbo” shelter asked me if I would be interested in looking at some wartime pictures that had been taken bu his father in Hanko.
The pictures proved to be a real treasure trove. They included never before published pictures of the arrival of German soldiers in Hanko in January 1942 and pictures of Soviet prisoners of war in the war ridden town of Hanko.
Four extremely rare pictures of Finnish officers in the company of Soviet prisoners in the grim process of burying remains of Soviet soldiers killed in the battles of 1941 are of particular interest to our research project ”Finding the Fallen of the Hanko Front”. They add a sense of tragic reality to the efforts by the Finnish side to find their own missing soldiers one year after the fierce and bloody battles in the archipelago in the summer of 1941. This daunting task was almost impossible and the search for the missing and killed from both sides is still going over 80 years later in 2022.
I have now scanned the pictures and will start researching them next week. These pictures together with accompanying archive finds will be published in 2025.
Photo: Soviet prisoners of war are beeing hurdled of a truck by Finnish guards in January 1942.
Today we accuired a real treasure trove of unpublished pictures relating to our ”Finding the Fallen of the Hanko Front” project.