Rabbi Urges Accused War Criminal Be Deported

A leading group that seeks to trace surviving Nazi collaborators urged the Reagan Administration Thursday to move swiftly to deport accused war criminal Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union to face a death sentence handed down in absentia 25 years ago.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told a news conference that his organization is “frustrated at the slow pace at which the Administration is moving on the Linnas case.

“There is no reason for Karl Linnas to spend an additional day in freedom in the United States,” Hier said, adding that to allow the 67-year-old retired surveyor from Long Island permission to do so would be an “insult to democracy.”

Supreme Court Decision

After six years of civil court proceedings, the U.S. Supreme Court last month cleared the way for Linnas’ deportation to Estonia--now part of the Soviet Union--on grounds that he had failed to disclose his collaboration with the Nazis when he applied to emigrate to the United States in 1951. The Supreme Court rejected an earlier petition in December by the narrow margin of 6 to 3, one vote short of the number needed to accept a case for review.

According to evidence supplied by the Soviet government, Linnas took part in rounding up and murdering Jews in Estonia during the Nazi occupation and at the age of 21 was appointed chief of a concentration camp. His family and his lawyer, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, argue that Linnas has never had a chance to confront his accusers in a jury trial and contend that there are clear indications that Soviet testimony in the case was coerced.

Linnas, who would be the first American immigrant to be stripped of his citizenship and sent to the Soviet Union to face a predetermined death penalty, was sentenced by a Soviet court in absentia in 1962.

Supporters Cite Evidence

As evidence of what they call the sham character of the trial, his supporters note that the verdict was reported in an official Soviet legal journal three weeks before the trial took place.

Hier, asked whether he would support the family’s request to send Linnas to Israel for a criminal trial, said there was no reason why Israel should serve as a “dumping ground for war criminals.”

Martin Mendelsohn, the Wiesenthal Center’s legal counsel in Washington, said that Israel apparently has been content to let U.S. civil proceedings take their course and to let Linnas be deported to the Soviet Union, which has expressed repeated interest in having him returned.

At the news conference, the center announced that it had handed over to the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations a list of 74 suspected Nazi collaborators believed to be living in the United States.

Criticizes Relief Agencies

The suspects’ names only recently have been obtained from immigration records kept by the International Red Cross and other postwar relief agencies. Hier said that these agencies have continued to withhold their records, citing a need to protect the privacy of refugees, but that the center had obtained access to computer “data bases” that include these records.

He said Neal M. Sher, director of the Justice Department office, had assured him at a meeting Thursday morning that the agency would move immediately to determine which of the 74 still live in the United States and to begin investigating those it can find.

All 74 were said to have emigrated from Latvia and Lithuania, now Baltic republics of the Soviet Union. Hier said that the Wiesenthal center would be presenting additional lists of former refugees from Estonia and the Soviet Ukraine as its surveys of data bases proceeded.