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Denmark and Saxony joined the war again and Augustus the Strong, through the politics of Boris Kurakin, regained the Polish throne.

Peter continued his campaigns in the Baltics, and eventually he built up a powerful navy.

In the Treaty of Hanover (1710), Hanover, whose elector was to become George I of Great Britain, allied with Russia.

In 1713, Brandenburg-Prussia allied with Russia in the Treaty of Schwedt.

Peter I demanded Charles's eviction, and when the sultan refused, Peter decided to force it by invading the Ottoman Empire.

However the ensuing Pruth River Campaign resulted in a disaster for the Russians as Peter's army was trapped by an Ottoman army at the Pruth river.

However, Peter managed to negotiate a retreat, making a few territorial concessions and promising to withdraw his forces from the Holy Roman Empire as well as allowing Charles's return to Sweden.

These terms were laid out in the Treaty of Adrianople (1713).

Charles showed no interest in returning, established a provisional court in his colony, and sought to persuade the sultan to engage in an Ottoman-Swedish assault on Russia.

The sultan put an end to the generous hospitality granted and had the king arrested in what became known as the "kalabalik" in 1713.

Vyborg) in 1710 and successfully held it against Swedish attempts to retake the town in 1711.

In 1712 the first Russian campaign to capture Finland began under the command of General Admiral Fyodor Apraksin.

Apraksin gathered an army of 15,000 men at Vyborg and started the operation in late August.

Swedish General Georg Henrik Lybecker chose not to face the Russians with his 7,500 men in the prepared positions close to Vyborg and instead withdrew west of Kymijoki river using scorched earth tactics.

After the failure of 1712, Peter the Great ordered that further campaigns in war-ravaged regions of Finland with poor transportation networks were to be performed along the coastline and the seaways near the coast.

Alarmed by the Russian preparations Lybecker requested naval units to be brought in as soon as possible in the spring of 1713.

However, like so often, Swedish naval units arrived only after the initial Russian spring campaign had ended.

Nominally under the command of Apraksin, but accompanied Peter the Great, a fleet of coastal ships together with 12,000 men – infantry and artillery – began the campaign by sailing from Kronstadt on 2 May 1713; a further 4,000 cavalry were later sent overland to join with the army.

The fleet had already arrived at Helsinki on 8 May and were met by 1,800 Swedish infantry under General Carl Gustaf Armfeldt.

Together with rowers from the ships the Russians had 20,000 men at their disposal even without the cavalry.

It was only on 12 May that Swedish squadron under Admiral Erik Johan Lillie made it to Helsinki but there was nothing it could do.

The bulk of the Russian forces moved along the coast towards Borgå and the forces of Lybecker, whom Armfelt had joined.

On 21–22 May 1713 a Russian force of 10,000 men landed at Pernå (Pernaja) and constructed fortifications there.

Large stores of supplies and munitions were transported from Vyborg and Saint Petersburg to the new base of operations.

Russian cavalry managed to link up with the rest of the army there as well.

Lybecker's army of 7000 infantry and 3000 cavalry avoided contact with the Russians and instead kept withdrawing further inland without even contesting the control of Borgå region or the important coastal road between Helsinki (Helsingfors) and Turku (Åbo).

This also severed the contact between Swedish fleet and ground forces and prevented Swedish naval units from supplying it.

Soldiers in the Swedish army who were mostly Finnish resented being repeatedly ordered to withdraw without even seeing the enemy.

Lybecker was soon recalled to Stockholm for a hearing and Armfelt was ordered to the command of the army.

Under his command the Swedish army in Finland stopped to engage the advancing Russians at Pälkäne in October 1713, where a Russian flanking manoeuvre forced him to withdraw to avoid getting encircled.

The armies met again later at Napue in February 1714, where the Russians won a decisive victory.

In 1714 far greater Swedish naval assets were diverted towards Finland, which managed to cut the coastal sea route past Hangö cape already in early May 1714.

This caused severe trouble for Russian supply route to Turku and beyond as supplies had to be carried overland.

The Russian galley fleet arrived to the area on 29 June but stayed idle until 26–27 July when, under the leadership of Peter, Russian galleys managed to run the blockade making use of calm weather, which immobilized the Swedish battlefleet while losing only one galley of roughly 100.

A small, hastily assembled Swedish coastal squadron met the Russian galley fleet west of Hangö cape in the Battle of Gangut and was overpowered by the Russians who had nearly ten-fold superiority.

Russian breach of the blockade at Hangö forced the Swedish fleet to withdraw to prevent the Russian fleet from reaching Sweden itself.

The Russian army occupied Finland mostly in 1713–1714, capturing Åland from where the population had already fled to Sweden on 13 August 1714.

Since the Russian galley fleet was not able to raid the Swedish coast, with the exception of Umeå, which was plundered on 18 September, the fleet instead supported the advance of the Russian army, which led to hastily withdrawal by the Swedish army from Raahe (Brahestad) to Tornio (Torneå).

Yet the town could not be taken due to the arrival of a Swedish relief army, led by general Magnus Stenbock, which secured the Pomeranian pocket before turning west to defeat an allied army in the Battle of Gadebusch.

Pursued by coalition forces, Stenbock and his army was trapped and surrendered during the Siege of Tönning.

In 1714, Charles XII returned from the Ottoman Empire, arriving in Stralsund in November.

In nearby Greifswald, already lost to Sweden, Russian tsar Peter the Great and British king George I, in his position as Elector of Hanover, had just signed an alliance on 17 (OS)/28 (NS) October.

Previously a formally neutral party in the Pomeranian campaigns, Brandenburg-Prussia openly joined the coalition by declaring war on Sweden in the summer of 1715.

Charles was then at war with much of Northern Europe, and Stralsund was doomed.

Charles remained there until December 1715, escaping only days before Stralsund fell.

When Wismar surrendered in 1716, all of Sweden's Baltic and German possessions were lost.

Furthermore, he attempted to bar Great Britain access to the Baltic Sea.

In search for allies, Charles XII also negotiated with the British Jacobite party.

This resulted in Great Britain declaring war on Sweden in 1717.

The Norwegian campaigns were halted and the army withdrawn when Charles XII was shot dead while besieging Norwegian Fredriksten on 30 November 1718 (OS).

Despite a continued Swedish naval presence and strong patrols to protect the coast, small Russian raids took place in 1716 at Öregrund, while in July 1717 a Russian squadron landed troops at Gotland who raided for supplies.

To place pressure on Sweden, Russia sent a large fleet to the Swedish east coast in July 1719.

There, under protection of the Russian battlefleet, the Russian galley fleet was split into three groups.

One group headed for the coast of Uppland, the second to the vicinity of Stockholm, and the last to coast of Södermanland.

Together they carried a landing force of nearly 30,000 men.

Raiding continued for a month and devastated amongst others the towns of Norrtälje, Södertälje, Nyköping and Norrköping, and almost all the buildings in the archipelago of Stockholm were burned.

A smaller Russian force advanced on the Swedish capital but was stopped at the battle of Stäket on 13 August.

Swedish and British fleets, now allied with Sweden, sailed from the west coast of Sweden but failed to catch the raiders.

After the treaty of Frederiksborg in early 1720, Sweden was no longer at war with Denmark, which allowed more forces to be placed against the Russians.

This did not prevent Russian galleys from raiding the town of Umeå once again.

Later in July 1720 a squadron from the Swedish battlefleet engaged the Russian galley fleet in the battle of Grengam.

While the result of the battle is contested, it ended Russian galley raids in 1720.

George I and Frederik IV both coveted hegemony in northern Germany, while Augustus the Strong was concerned about the ambitions of Frederick William I on the southeastern Baltic coast.

Peter the Great, whose forces were spread all around the Baltic Sea, envisioned hegemony in East Central Europe and sought to establish naval bases as far west as Mecklenburg.

In January 1719, George I, Augustus and emperor Charles VI concluded a treaty in Vienna aimed at reducing Russia's frontiers to the pre-war limits.

Hanover-Great Britain and Brandenburg-Prussia thereupon negotiated separate peace treaties with Sweden, the treaties of Stockholm in 1719 and early 1720, which partitioned Sweden's northern German dominions among the parties.

The negotiations were mediated by French diplomats, who sought to prevent a complete collapse of Sweden's position on the southern Baltic coast and assured that Sweden was to retain Wismar and northern Swedish Pomerania.

Hanover gained Swedish Bremen-Verden, while Brandenburg-Prussia incorporated southern Swedish Pomerania.

Britain would briefly switch sides and supported Sweden before leaving the war.

In addition to the rivalries in the anti-Swedish coalition, there was an inner-Swedish rivalry between Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and Frederick I of Hesse-Cassel for the Swedish throne.

The Gottorp party succumbed and Ulrike Eleonora, wife of Frederick I, transferred power to her husband in May 1720.

When peace was concluded with Denmark, the anti-Swedish coalition had already fallen apart, and Denmark was not in a military position to negotiate a return of its former eastern provinces across the sound.

Frederick I was, however, willing to cede Swedish support for his rival in Holstein-Gottorp, which came under Danish control with its northern part annexed, and furthermore cede the Swedish privilege of exemption from the Sound Dues.

A respective treaty was concluded in Frederiksborg in June 1720.

When Sweden finally was at peace with Hanover, Great Britain, Brandenburg-Prussia and Denmark–Norway, it hoped that the anti-Russian sentiments of the Vienna parties and France would culminate in an alliance that would restore its Russian-occupied eastern provinces.

Yet, primarily due to internal conflicts in Great Britain and France, that did not happen.

Therefore, the war was finally concluded by the Treaty of Nystad between Russia and Sweden in Uusikaupunki (Nystad) on 30 August 1721 (OS).

Finland was returned to Sweden, while the majority of Russia's conquests (Swedish Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, Kexholm and the bulk of Karelia) were ceded to the tsardom.

Sweden's dissatisfaction with the result led to fruitless attempts at recovering the lost territories in the course of the following century, such as the Russo-Swedish War (1741–1743), and the Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790).

Saxe-Poland-Lithuania and Sweden did not conclude a formal peace treaty; instead, they renewed the Peace of Oliva that had ended the Second Northern War in 1660.

Sweden had lost almost all of its "overseas" holdings gained in the 17th century and ceased to be a major power.

Russia gained its Baltic territories and became one of the greatest powers in Europe.

The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815 (1983) pp 77–93.

Moulton, James R. Peter the Great and the Russian Military Campaigns During the Final Years of the Great Northern War, 1719–1721 (University Press of America, 2005).

Denazification () was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War.

It was carried out by removing those who had been Nazi Party or SS members from positions of power and influence and by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with Nazism.

The program of denazification was launched after the end of the war and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945.

The term denazification was first coined as a legal term in 1943 in the Pentagon, intended to be applied in a narrow sense with reference to the post-war German legal system.

In late 1945 and early 1946, the emergence of the Cold War and the economic importance of Germany caused the United States in particular to lose interest in the program, somewhat mirroring the Reverse Course in American-occupied Japan.

The British handed over denazification panels to the Germans in January 1946, while the Americans did likewise in March 1946.

Denazification was carried out in an increasingly lenient and lukewarm way until being officially abolished in 1951.

Additionally, the program was hugely unpopular in West Germany, where many Nazis maintained positions of power, and was opposed by the new West German government of Konrad Adenauer.

On the other hand, denazification in East Germany was considered a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society and was far stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart.

However, not all former Nazis faced harsh judgment; doing special tasks for the government could protect a few from prosecution.

Though all the occupying forces had agreed on the initiative, the methods used for denazification and the intensity with which they were applied differed between the occupation zones.

The term denazification also refers to the removal of the physical symbols of the Nazi regime.

For example, in 1957 the West German government re-issued World War II Iron Cross medals, among other decorations, without the swastika in the center.

About 8.5 million Germans, or 10% of the population, had been members of the Nazi Party.

Nazi-related organizations also had huge memberships, such as the German Labor Front (25 million), the National Socialist People's Welfare organization (17 million), the League of German Women, Hitler Youth, the Doctors' League, and others.

It was through the Party and these organizations that the Nazi state was run, involving as many as 45 million Germans in total.

In addition, Nazism found significant support among industrialists, who produced weapons or used slave labor, and large landowners, especially the Junkers in Prussia.

Denazification after the surrender of Germany was thus an enormous undertaking, fraught with many difficulties.

The first difficulty was the enormous number of Germans who might have to be first investigated, then penalized if found to have supported the Nazi state to an unacceptable degree.

In the early months of denazification there was a great desire to be utterly thorough, to investigate every suspect and hold every supporter of Nazism accountable; however, it was decided that the numbers simply made this goal impractical.

However, the legal foundations of the trials were questioned, and many Germans were not convinced that the trials were anything more than "victors' justice".

Many refugees from Nazism were Germans and Austrians, and some had fought for Britain in the Second World War.

Some were transferred into the Intelligence Corps and sent back to Germany and Austria in British uniform.

However, German-speakers were small in number in the British zone, which was hampered by the language deficit.

Due to its large German-American population, the US authorities were able to bring a larger number of German-speakers to the task of working in the Allied Military Government, although many were poorly trained.

They were assigned to all aspects of military administration, the interrogation of POWs, collecting evidence for the War Crimes Investigation Unit and the search for war criminals.

The United States military pursued denazification in a zealous and bureaucratic fashion, especially during the first months of the occupation.

It had been agreed among the Allies that denazification would begin by requiring Germans to fill in a questionnaire () about their activities and memberships during Nazi rule.

Five categories were established: Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Followers, and Exonerated Persons.

The Americans, unlike the British, French, and Soviets, interpreted this to apply to every German over the age of eighteen in their zone.

Eisenhower initially estimated that the denazification process would take 50 years.

When the nearly complete list of Nazi Party memberships was turned over to the Allies (by a German anti-Nazi who had rescued it from destruction in April 1945 as American troops advanced on Munich), it became possible to verify claims about participation or non-participation in the Party.

The 1.5 million Germans who had joined before Hitler came to power were deemed to be hard-core Nazis.

Progress was slowed by the overwhelming numbers of Germans to be processed, but also by difficulties such as incompatible power systems and power outages, as with the Hollerith IBM data machine that held the American vetting list in Paris.

As many as 40,000 forms could arrive in a single day to await processing.

By December 1945, even though a full 500,000 forms had been processed, there remained a backlog of 4,000,000 forms from POWs and a potential case load of 7,000,000.

The Fragebögen were, of course, filled out in German.

The number of Americans working on denazification was inadequate to handle the workload, partly as a result of the demand in the US by families to have soldiers returned home.

Replacements were mostly unskilled and poorly trained.

In addition, there was too much work to be done to complete the process of denazification by 1947, the year American troops were expected to be completely withdrawn from Europe.

Pressure also came from the need to find Germans to run their own country.

In January 1946 a directive came from the Control Council entitled "Removal from Office and from Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes".

One of the punishments for Nazi involvement was to be barred from public office and/or restricted to manual labor or "simple work".

At the end of 1945, 3.5 million former Nazis awaited classification, many of them barred from work in the meantime.

By the end of the winter of 1945–46, 42% of public officials had been dismissed.

Malnutrition was widespread, and the economy needed leaders and workers to help clear away debris, rebuild infrastructure, and get foreign exchange to buy food and other essential resources.

Offenders: Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons ().

Subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment up to ten years performing reparation or reconstruction work plus a list of other restrictions.

Subject to immediate arrest, death, imprisonment with or without hard labor, plus a list of lesser sanctions.

Again because the caseload was impossibly large, the German tribunals began to look for ways to speed up the process.

The tribunals accepted statements from other people regarding the accused's involvement in Nazism.

These statements earned the nickname of Persilscheine, after advertisements for the laundry and whitening detergent Persil.

There was corruption in the system, with Nazis buying and selling denazification certificates on the black market.

Nazis who were found guilty were often punished with fines assessed in Reichsmarks, which had become nearly worthless.

In Bavaria the Denazification Minister, Anton Pfeiffer, bridled under the "victor's justice", and presided over a system that reinstated 75% of officials the Americans had dismissed and reclassified 60% of senior Nazis.

The denazification process lost a great deal of credibility, and there was often local hostility against Germans who helped administer the tribunals.

By early 1947, the Allies held 90,000 Nazis in detention; another 1,900,000 were forbidden to work as anything but manual laborers.

From 1945 to 1950, the Allied powers detained over 400,000 Germans in internment camps in the name of denazification.

By 1948, the Cold War was clearly in progress and the US began to worry more about a threat from the Eastern Bloc rather than the latent Nazism within occupied Germany.

The remaining cases were tried through summary proceedings that left insufficient time to thoroughly investigate the accused, so that many of the judgments of this period have questionable judicial value.

For example, by 1952 members of the SS like Otto Skorzeny could be declared formally denazified () in absentia by a German government arbitration board and without any proof that this was true.

The delicate task of distinguishing those truly complicit in or responsible for Nazi activities from mere "followers" made the work of the courts yet more difficult.

Denazification was from then on supervised by special German ministers, like the Social Democrat Gottlob Kamm in Baden-Württemberg, with the support of the US occupation forces.

Contemporary American critics of denazification denounced it as a "counterproductive witch hunt" and a failure; in 1951 the provisional West German government granted amnesties to lesser offenders and ended the program.

The Information Control Division of the US Army had by July 1946 taken control of 37 German newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, and 7,384 book dealers and printers.

Its main mission was democratization but part of the agenda was also the prohibition of any criticism of the Allied occupation forces.

In addition, on May 13, 1946, the Allied Control Council issued a directive for the confiscation of all media that could contribute to Nazism or militarism.

As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned.

All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense.

All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed.

The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order was in principle no different from the Nazi book burnings.

The censorship in the US zone was regulated by the occupation directive JCS 1067 (valid until July 1947) and in the May 1946 order valid for all zones (rescinded in 1950), Allied Control Authority Order No.

The directives were very broadly interpreted, leading to the destruction of thousands of paintings and thousands more were shipped to deposits in the US.

Those confiscated paintings still surviving in US custody include for example a painting "depicting a couple of middle aged women talking in a sunlit street in a small town".

Artists were also restricted in which new art they were allowed to create; "OMGUS was setting explicit political limits on art and representation".

The publication Der Ruf (The Call) was a popular literary magazine first published in 1945 by Alfred Andersch and edited by Hans Werner Richter.

Der Ruf, also called Independent Pages of the New Generation, claimed to have the aim of educating the German people about democracy.

In 1947 its publication was blocked by the American forces for being overly critical of occupational government.

Richter attempted to print many of the controversial pieces in a volume entitled Der Skorpion (The Scorpion).

The occupational government blocked publication of Der Skorpion before it began, saying that the volume was too "nihilistic".

Publication of Der Ruf resumed in 1948 under a new publisher, but Der Skorpion was blocked and not widely distributed.

Unable to publish his works, Richter founded Group 47.

The Allied costs for occupation were charged to the German people.

A newspaper which revealed the charges (including, among other things, thirty thousand bras) was banned by the occupation authorities for revealing this information.

Members of the Nazi Party and its organizations were arrested and interned.

The NKVD was directly in charge of this process, and oversaw the camps.

In 1948, the camps were placed under the same administration as the gulag in the Soviet government.

According to official records, 122,600 people were interned.

This process happened at the same time as the expropriation of large landowners and Junkers, who were also often former Nazi supporters.

Because part of the intended goal of denazification in the Soviet zone was also the removal of anti-socialist sentiment, the committees in charge of the process were politically skewed.

A typical panel would have one member from the Christian Democratic Union, one from the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, three from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and three from political mass organizations (who were typically also supportive of the Socialist Unity Party).

Former Nazi officials quickly realized that they would face fewer obstacles and investigations in the zones controlled by the Western Allies.

Many of them saw a chance to defect to the West on the pretext of anti-communism.

Conditions in the internment camps were terrible, and between 42,000 and 80,000 prisoners died.

From the 1950s, reasoning for these accusations focused on the fact that many former functionaries of Nazi regime were employed in positions in the West German government.

However, East German propaganda also attempted to denounce as Nazis even politicians such as Kurt Schumacher, who had been imprisoned by the Nazi regime himself.

Such allegations appeared frequently in the official Socialist Unity Party of Germany newspaper, the Neues Deutschland.

The East German uprising of 1953 in Berlin was officially blamed on Nazi agents provocateurs from West Berlin, who the Neues Deutschland alleged were then working in collaboration with the Western government with the ultimate aim of restoring Nazi rule throughout Germany.

Doing special tasks for the Soviet government could protect Nazi members from prosecution, enabling them to continue working.

Having special connections with the occupiers in order to have someone vouch for them could also shield a person from the denazification laws.

For the British government, the rebuilding of German economic power was more important than the imprisonment of Nazi criminals.

Economically hard pressed at home after the war, they did not want the burden of feeding and otherwise administering Germany.

In October 1945, in order to constitute a working legal system, and given that 90% of German lawyers had been members of the Nazi Party, the British decided that 50% of the German Legal Civil Service could be staffed by "nominal" Nazis.

Similar pressures caused them to relax the restriction even further in April 1946.

In industry, especially in the economically crucial Ruhr area, the British began by being lenient about who owned or operated businesses, turning stricter by autumn of 1945.

To reduce the power of industrialists, the British expanded the role of trade unions, giving them some decision-making powers.

They were, however, especially zealous during the early months of occupation in bringing to justice anyone, soldiers or civilians, who had committed war crimes against POWs or captured Allied aircrew.

In June 1945 an interrogation center at Bad Nenndorf was opened, where detainees were allegedly tortured via buckets of cold water, beatings, being burnt with lit cigarettes, etc.

A public scandal ensued, with the center eventually being closed down.

The British to some extent avoided being overwhelmed by the potential numbers of denazification investigations by requiring that no one need fill in the Fragebogen unless they were applying for an official or responsible position.

This difference between American and British policy was decried by the Americans and caused some Nazis to seek shelter in the British zone.

In January 1946, the British handed over their denazification panels to the Germans.

They did not view it as critical to distinguish Nazis from non-Nazis, since in their eyes Germans were all to blame.

At the same time, some French occupational commanders had served in the collaborationist Vichy regime during the war where they had formed friendly relationships with Germans.

As a result, in the French zone mere membership in the Nazi party was much less important than in the other zones.

Because teachers had been strongly Nazified, the French began by removing three-quarters of all teachers from their jobs.