The Soviet Patrol That Turned to Cannibalism in WWII
Updated: Jul 28
In the autumn of 1942, four men were sent behind enemy lines near the shore of Lake Onega, in the Olonets region of Soviet Karelia, on a reconnaissance mission that was never supposed to last long. It lasted long enough that by the time Finnish troops caught up with them, two of the four were dead, eaten by the men they'd served beside, and the whole strange episode had turned into one of the more disturbing, and least discussed, survival stories of the Second World War.
Four Men, One Freezing Lake
The patrol was an unusual mix. Jaakko Anttila was a Finn who'd defected to the Soviet side. Aleksandr Gerasimov and Gennadi Timofeyev were Soviet soldiers. And Milton Sevander was something rarer still: an American-born Finn whose family had emigrated to Soviet Karelia during the Great Depression, part of a wave of roughly 6,000 to 7,000 Finnish Americans and Finnish Canadians who moved there in the early 1930s chasing what recruiters called a socialist paradise. It's a chapter of history known today as Karelian fever, and it ended badly for a lot of the people who fell for it. Hundreds of the immigrants were swept up and executed in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, years before this patrol ever set out. Sevander had grown up in that community and, by the time the war reached Karelia, was serving in the Red Army alongside it.
The four men were dropped behind Finnish lines for reconnaissance, expecting resupply drops to keep them fed. The drops never came. As Lake Onega began to freeze over, their planned route back froze along with it, cutting off any realistic path to safety. What started as a routine mission turned into a slow, isolated collapse, the kind of situation that has produced almost every documented case of survival cannibalism in modern history, from the Donner Party's snowbound wagon train to shipwrecked sailors adrift for weeks at sea.
What Happened on the Ice
The breaking point came when Gennadi Timofeyev broke his ankle, likely on the uneven, half-frozen ground. Unable to walk and unable to be carried far in their condition, he became, in the patrol's own later account, a liability the group couldn't sustain. Anttila, the most senior man present, killed him with an axe. The remaining three ate him.
It didn't end there. About a week later, with supplies gone again, Anttila shot Aleksandr Gerasimov in the back of the head while Gerasimov was shaving. His body was also butchered and eaten. It was the gunshot, not the killing itself, that gave the group away. A Finnish patrol operating nearby heard it and moved in, capturing Anttila and Sevander on 11 November 1942.
A Trial, an Execution, and an Unusually Lucky Break
Anttila and Sevander were both court-martialed on charges of espionage and high treason, the underlying reconnaissance mission itself being the primary crime under Finnish military law, with the cannibalism treated as grim supporting evidence. A Finnish medical officer who examined what remained of Timofeyev and Gerasimov documented the extent to which their bodies had been butchered and consumed, filing a report that's since become one of the more clinical, unsettling documents to survive from the Continuation War.
Anttila, identified as the instigator of both killings, was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad on 12 December 1942. Sevander caught a break that likely saved his life: because he held American citizenship by birth, Finnish authorities showed him leniency, and instead of execution he was sentenced to a prisoner of war camp.
This wasn't an isolated horror story either. Finland's Continuation War against the Soviet Union produced a small number of comparably grim, well-documented cases of Soviet reconnaissance patrols resorting to cannibalism after being cut off from supplies, images so disturbing that Finland kept a batch of roughly 300 wartime photographs classified for over 50 years, only releasing them in 2006 partly out of concern for how graphic they were and how Moscow might react. Whatever happened to Anttila's patrol on the ice near Lake Onega, it was part of a small, grim pattern that the war produced more than once.
The Twist Nobody Sees Coming
Here's where the story takes a turn that almost never makes it into the retelling. Milton Sevander survived his time in the prisoner of war camp and, once released, stayed in the region rather than returning to the United States. In the years after the war, he married a woman named Mayme Corgan, the daughter of Oscar Corgan, one of the organizers who'd helped recruit Finnish Americans to move to Karelia in the first place, and who'd been arrested and executed in Stalin's purges in 1938 without his family ever learning exactly what happened to him.
Mayme Sevander went on to become one of the most important chroniclers of the entire Karelian fever tragedy. Barred from her journalism career in the Soviet Union because of her family's history, she eventually relocated to Duluth, Minnesota, taught at the College of St. Scholastica, and spent decades researching what had happened to the thousands of North American Finns who vanished into Stalin's purges. She wrote several books on the subject, including They Took My Father and Red Exodus, and compiled a list of well over a thousand names of the dead and disappeared, a record still used by researchers and descendants trying to trace what happened to their own relatives. Milton, the man who'd survived his patrol by eating two of his own comrades and then serving out a Finnish prison sentence for it, spent the rest of his life married to the woman who devoted her career to documenting exactly the kind of catastrophe that had swallowed his adopted homeland. He died in 1973, a fairly ordinary death for a man whose youth had been anything but.
It's an odd, almost unbelievable epilogue to a story that starts with an axe and a broken ankle on a frozen lake, and it's the kind of connection that puts this patrol in stranger company than most people realize: the same grim calculus that drove the Donner Party to cannibalism a century earlier in the Sierra Nevada played out again on a frozen Karelian lake, only this time one of the survivors spent the rest of his life next to someone documenting exactly how many other people that same historical moment had swallowed whole.
