Towards a new war
On the basis of negotiations between Finnish and German military representatives and with the consent of Finnish political powers, two German divisions arrived in Northern Finland in the beginning of June 1941. Foreign Minister Rolf Witting informed the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee afterwards. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Soviet planes bombed several Finnish towns. In the evening parliamentary session, as a consequence of these bombings, Prime Minister Jukka Rangel presented a Cabinet's notice stating that the country was at war.

The Edvin Linkomies Cabinet, appointed in the winter of 1943, adopted the objective of detaching Finland from the war. An armistice was reached in the beginning of September, and the conditions for peace were confirmed in the interim peace treaty of September 1944. The final peace treaty was signed in Paris in 1947.

From war to peace

In addition to implementing the conditions of the interim peace treaty, the parliamentary session of 1944 lowered the voting age and age of qualification to 21 years. After the elections in March 1945, a new parliamentary faction was born: the People's Democratic League of Finland or Skdl. Cabinet politics were based on an alliance between the three large groups, the Social Democrats, the Agrarians and Skdl, that lasted for three years. The issue of punishing war criminals overshadowed Parliamentary work in the autumn of 1945. Enacting retroactive law was deemed politically inevitable, even though such a practice was generally considered to be against the Finnish legal order. The act was passed, however.