The story
Periodic clearance of new land for agriculture and the practice of slash-and-burn cultivation began around 750–530 BC. Artifacts found in the area suggest that an increasing number of travellers from Karelia in the east, Häme in the south and the Arctic Ocean coast in the north must have come there from 500 AD onwards. The Sami are indigenous to Sápmi.
Rovaniemi is first mentioned by name in official documents in 1453, existing as a set of small villages whose inhabitants earned their living mainly in agriculture and animal husbandry—with fishing and hunting the most important offshoots.
The exploitation of Lapland's natural resources in the 1800s boosted Rovaniemi's growth. Extensive logging sites and gold fever attracted thousands of people to Lapland. As the mining of natural resources was increased, Rovaniemi became the business centre of the province of Lapland.
The township decree was promulgated on 27 June 1928, as a result of which Rovaniemi seceded from the old rural municipality as its own market town on 1 January 1929.
World War II
Following the Winter War of 1939–1940, Finland increasingly developed military cooperation with Nazi Germany. Under a transit agreement concluded in 1940, German troops and military supplies were permitted to travel through Finland to German-occupied northern Norway. The transit route passed through Rovaniemi, where German logistical, communications and intelligence units began establishing facilities before Finland again entered war with the Soviet Union. A German Luftwaffe command organisation, Fliegerführer Nord, transferred its headquarters to Rovaniemi in December 1940, and by February 1941 the Germans had begun expanding the existing transit organisation into a major military supply centre.
After the outbreak of the Continuation War in June 1941, German forces were given operational responsibility for much of northern Finland. Rovaniemi became the headquarters of the German Mountain Army command in Finland, later the 20th Mountain Army, and developed into the principal German military and logistical centre in Finnish Lapland. The army headquarters, field hospitals, supply organisations and more than 60 German staffs were located in the town and surrounding area. The resulting military presence increased the population present in Rovaniemi from approximately 7,500 to 13,500. Historian Pekka Kujamäki has described wartime Rovaniemi as the "most significant German centre in all of Finland".
Rovaniemi Airport also became an important German military installation. The recently completed Finnish airfield was placed at the disposal of German forces from 1 July 1941, although Luftwaffe personnel and reconnaissance aircraft had already been operating in the area before that date. The Germans greatly expanded the airfield, building hangars, barracks, workshops, ammunition stores, aircraft dispersal areas and anti-aircraft positions. By January 1943 the airfield complex contained at least 31 aircraft hangars, about 120 accommodation and office barracks and 24 large storage buildings.
The German military presence also included prisoner-of-war and forced-labour systems. Alongside paid Finnish civilian workers, German construction, forestry and logistical operations in Lapland used Soviet prisoners of war and labourers brought from German-occupied Europe. A branch of the German Stalag 309 prisoner-of-war system was established at Rovaniemi in September 1941, and other prisoner and labour camps operated in the area. A Finnish liaison report from January 1943 recorded approximately 500 prisoners of war available for work at the Rovaniemi airfield, in addition to Dutch labour-service personnel and paid Finnish workers.
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Relations between the German military and Finnish civilian authorities were generally organised as cooperation between the two countries rather than as an occupation: Finnish civil administration remained in place, while German forces maintained their own military command and legal structures. The large German presence nevertheless had a considerable effect on local life and employment. German units employed thousands of Finnish civilians in northern Finland in construction, transport, forestry, maintenance, hospitals, kitchens and other support work.
Finland agreed to a ceasefire with the Soviet Union in September 1944 and signed the Moscow Armistice on 19 September. Under its terms Finland was required to remove German forces from its territory, leading to the Lapland War. Anticipating fighting, the Finnish authorities ordered the evacuation of Lapland. Evacuation from Rovaniemi began on 16 September and was largely completed by 22 September.
As German forces withdrew north towards Norway, they adopted a scorched earth policy intended to deny roads, bridges, buildings and other infrastructure to the pursuing Finnish forces. The German destruction of Rovaniemi began in October 1944. By the time German forces withdrew, 548 homes, 96 private commercial buildings and nine public buildings had been destroyed, amounting to an estimated 90 per cent of the town's property. Fires and the destruction of the largely wooden town left relatively few pre-war buildings standing.
Reconstruction began soon afterwards. In 1945 Alvar Aalto, working through the reconstruction office of the Finnish Association of Architects, prepared a new town plan for Rovaniemi. His well-known Poronsarvikaava ("reindeer antler plan") arranged the principal roads and green spaces in a pattern resembling the head and antlers of a reindeer.
From Wikipedia’s article on Rovaniemi, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5