Justice Department officials said today the refusal of the Supreme Court yesterday to review a lower federal court ruling stripping a Long Island resident, Karl Linnas, of his citizenship for hiding his wartime Nazi past, would make possible prompt start of proceedings to deport him.
Linnas, 62, a resident of Greenlawn, had his citizenship revoked July 30, 1981 by Federal Judge Jacob Mishler in Westbury, L.I., after a non-jury trial. Mishler ruled that Linnas, a draftsman who entered the United States in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen in 1960, had withheld information about his role as a concentration camp guard in Tartu, Estonia, and that he had participated in a number of killings of inmates.
Linnas had been tried in absentia in Estonia and sentenced to death for the crimes he had committed in the Tartu camp. According to testimony in the hearing by Mishler, Linnas told immigration officials, when he entered the United States, that he had been a university student in Tartu from 1940 to 1943.
Mishler held, in his decision, that the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation “established clearly, unequivocally and convincingly” that Linnas had been a member of an Estonian unit which aided the German occupying forces and that, on several occasions, he had supervised the execution of inmates, who included Jews.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
