Gunnar Hohenthal

Gunnar Hohenthal competed in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics as a member of the Russian team in the modern pentathlon. At that time, only officers were allowed to participate and Finland did not have its own Army until independence in 1918. Hohenthal placed 20th overall with fairly equal rankings in all disciplines. He was also an avid skier and runner.

Born Veli Gunnar Hohenthal as the son of a clergyman, he changed his name to Veli Gunnar Bogislaus von Hohenthal in 1920. He attended the Swedish Lyceum in Vaasa until 1900 before embarking on a military career, studying at the Nikolai Cavalry School in St. Petersburg from 1902 to 1905 and the Officers’ Cavalry School from 1912 to 1914. During this time, he served, for instance, as adjutant to the Empress Dagmar, who was Tsarina of Russia until 1894 as Maria Feodorowna. In 1905, Hohenthal was ordered to Poland, then part of Russia, due to the public uproar caused by the assassination of the then Finnish Chancellor of Justice by his brother Lennart as an act of resistance against the Russian oppression. Gunnar served three years in Poland for service in the Military Order’s Dragoon Regiment in Garbalin near Warszawa.

After the Russian Revolution, Gunnar Hohenthal, who had last served as a colonel in the reserve cavalry regiment of the Life Guards, returned to Finland and was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Finnish Army in 1918. There, he served as commander of the Häme cavalry regiment. Hohenthal retired from the Army in 1923 and then worked as an inspector for the Pohjola insurance company. His resignation was part of the forced replacement of the so-called “Russian officers” who had served and received their training in the Russian Imperial Army. In 1938, he founded the company Oy Veli Hohenthal & Co. and ran it until 1944. In 1944 Hohenthal fled to Sweden, where his mother was from, in October 1944, rowing from the Åland Islands to the Simpnäsklubb lighthouse in the Stockholm archipelago. He lived in Sweden for the rest of his life and was granted Swedish citizenship in 1952.

Veli Hohenthal was married to the Ukrainian Natalia Pardelos-Stollnikoff. The marriage remained childless.