Karl Linnas: a Deportation Dilemma

Despite having been stripped of his citizenship and having been ordered deported from the United States, Karl Linnas still sits on U.S. soil. Because of several appeals to stay the sentence of deportation, and a certain amount of influence in Washington by those who resist his deportation to the Soviet Union, Linnas has not yet been flung from U.S. shores.

Linnas, 66, was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet court in 1961. He was charged in 1982 by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) with lying about his wartime activities when he entered the U.S. in 1951, immigrating from Germany under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. According to the charges filed by the OSI, Linnas joined a Nazi execution squad in 1941 in a Tartu, Estonia, concentration camp when Germany occupied Estonia, in order to execute “undesirables,” mostly Jews. He is accused of commanding firing squads that killed men, women and children who were forced to kneel before mass graves, as well as personally shooting several camp inmates.

On December 1, 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Linnas’s appeal against deportation to the USSR, a decision hailed by at least nine Jewish organizations. Today, these organizations, and very many others, are decidedly upset over the failure of the U.S. Justice system to provide for Linnas’s speedy deportation.

The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York has sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to its 59 constituent organizations asking that they protest the continued presence in the U.S. of Linnas. The letter, urging Attorney General Edwin Meese to sign off on Linnas’s deportation order, will be submitted to two Senators and two Congressmen.

Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said of the failure to, until now, deport Linnas that “the whole thing is an abomination. We’re waiting for the Attorney General to enforce the law, as we are in the case of (Austrian President Kurt) Waldheim, placing him on the watch list (of war criminals not welcome in the U.S.) We don’t need to protect Nazis in this country. The Attorney General should send a clear message, ‘Nazis are not welcome here.’ The entire Jewish community is being challenged by these cases. Will they stand up in this moral struggle or will they allow those individuals who protect these heinous persons to prevail? We’re not asking for a favor–we’re asking that the law be carried out.”

Linnas’s counsel, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, has been successful in delaying the deportation of the wartime Nazi partly because of an amazing technicality: Linnas requested to be sent to “free Estonia,” a country that no longer exists. He even asked the Estonian Consulate in New York to grant him refuge, a complete impossibility because, as a Consulate spokesperson said, “We are not here as a country; we are just an office.”

The Estonian Consulate, whose presence dates back to before World War II, exists by the grace of the United States government, which does not recognize Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries. Nevertheless, Estonia, like Latvia and Lithuania, was incorporated into the USSR after World War II.