Long-term Mortality of War Cohorts: The Case of Finland

Abstract

The system of full mobilisation and the modest effects of the World War II events on the civil population make Finland a highly useful case for exploring whether war veterans have elevated long-term mortality risks. Using data from the Human Mortality Database and a register-based micro sample with main causes of death, we study men in the cohorts who participated in the wars against the Soviet Union in 1939-1944. For these war cohorts, we find no indications of reduced survival after the early 1950s, as compared with male cohorts without combat experience. The absence of a long-term effect might be an artefact of mortality selection. In the first few years after war-end, death rates remained relatively high because of infectious diseases that killed off the weakest of the survivors. The results are in line with a series of other studies and illustrate that in the potential presence of cohort inversion there are no visible long-term effects of war experience on later-life survival.

Forced migration in childhood and subsequent fertility: The Karelian displaced population in Finland

“…The regional categorisation is the same as that used by Saarela and Finnäs () and Saarela and Elo (), who studied mortality and health of the forced migrants. The last male cohort mobilised for army service during the war period consists of people born in 1926 (Saarela & Finnäs, ). Thus, none of our study subjects had participated in combat during the war.…”

Secondary traumatization, relationship problems, and adult children’s well-being: Long-term effects of World War II in the Netherlands

“…The NKPS examined how representative the data were and found that men, younger persons and children living at home are somewhat underrepresented whereas married and cohabiting couples with children are somewhat overrepresented (Dykstra et al, 2005). Register data have also been used in the past to estimate effects of war trauma (Saarela & Finnas, 2012;Saarela & Elo, 2016) and while such data obviously have much lower nonresponse, they do not have direct measures of war trauma. On the other side of the spectrum are small-scale psychological and clinical studies which have even more in-depth measurement, but this comes at the cost of having small and nonrandom samples.…”

“…Direct effects occur via psychological processes such 1 In the literature on primary traumatization, there are some negative findings as well. For example, large-scale demographic studies of Finnish cohorts who were drafted to participate in World War II reveal no significant long-term effects on mortality (Saarela & Finnas, 2012) and similarly large studies on forced migration in Finland during World War II reveal no negative effects either (Haukka, Suvisaari, Sarvimaki, & Martikainen, 2017;Saarela & Elo, 2016;Santavirta, 2014).…”

Longevity of World War II Estonian volunteers in the Finnish Army: A follow-up study of the impact of the post-war life course and repressions

“…This branch of follow-up studies has considerably expanded over the last two decades, during which the cohorts affected by the war have passed away. The groups of survivors studied include war veterans (Bedard and Deschênes 2006;Bramsen et al 2007;Saarela and Finnäs 2012), prisoners of war (POWs) (Page and Brass 2001;Costa 2012;Solomon et al 2014), and affected civilian populations (Collins et al 2004;Sagi-Schwartz et al 2013;Fund et al 2019).…”