Appeal Fails; Nazi Suspect Deported : Accused War Criminal Linnas Forced to Face Death Penalty in Soviet Union

Only hours after the Supreme Court rejected the last of his many appeals, the U.S. government deported accused Nazi war criminal Karl Linnas on Monday, the first American to be forcibly returned to face a death sentence in the Soviet Union.

Shouting “God bless America!” the 67-year-old Linnas, under tight security, was shoved into a police car and placed aboard Czechoslovak Airline Flight 601 bound for Prague. Soviet authorities were expected to take custody of Linnas when the plane landed this morning.

“What they’re doing right now is just a murder and kidnaping,” Linnas shouted while being rushed by five officers to the police station at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Ends Eight-Year Battle

The expulsion of Linnas ends an eight-year court battle in which the legacy of Nazi horrors was posed against American distrust of the Soviet judicial system. In 1962, he was convicted in a Soviet court in absentia of commanding a concentration camp in Estonia in 1941 and 1942 where more than 2,000 Jews, many of them small children, were put to death.

For the last two weeks, his deportation had been delayed pending a final appeal to the Supreme Court. Attorneys for Linnas, calling his conviction 25 years ago the result of a “show trial,” said that evidence from Soviet prosecutors was trumped up and should not be relied upon in American courts.

But on a 6-3 vote Monday, the high court justices refused to reopen his case and vacated the stay of deportation. A stocky man with a long white beard, Linnas appeared enraged as reporters shouted questions at him while he was taken from a New York City jail cell, where he had been held for the last year, to be put aboard the Czech airliner.

Anu Linnas, one of his daughters, said in a statement at the Supreme Court Monday that her father, a retired land surveyor from Long Island, N.Y., was being “wrongly deported to die.”

“If my father isn’t shot immediately, the Soviets will stage one of the flashiest show trials the world has ever seen,” she said. “Hitler’s and Stalin’s ghosts are probably having a nice toast right now,” she said.

Test for Justice Department

For U.S. officials, the case has been a key test of the Justice Department’s stepped-up campaign to ferret out former Nazis who slipped into this country after World War II and have lived here quietly since.

Linnas clearly lied about his past when he applied for immigration to America in 1951 and was granted citizenship, U.S. officials say, and these false statements provide ample grounds for deporting him.

In May, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said that the evidence was “overwhelming and largely uncontroverted” that Linnas was “chief of the Nazi concentration camp in Tartu, Estonia, during the time that he later claimed (on his immigration application) to have been a university student.”

Witnesses called by Soviet officials to testify told U.S. prosecutors that they had seen Linnas shoot innocent Jews and push them into an open pit outside the concentration camp. Estonia is now part of the Soviet Union.

The appeals court said that Linnas’ actions as a concentration camp chief “were such to offend the decency of any civilized society.” Under his direction, according to court records, “innocent Jewish women and children were tied by their hands and brought in their underwear to the edge of the ditch where they were forced to kneel. The guard then opened fire.”

The government also introduced documents signed by “Karl Linnas, chief of Tartu concentration camp.” After Soviet armies pushed the Germans out of Estonia, Linnas fought with the German army and was wounded in 1944, government prosecutors said.

Calls Action Welcome

Eli Rosenbaum, counsel for the World Jewish Congress, said that the Supreme Court action was “very welcome indeed.”

Neal Sher, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Prosecution, also praised the high court for clearing the way for the deportation of Linnas, saying that it “sends the right message that the United States is not going to be a haven for Nazi war criminals.”

Justice Department officials, in a statement released after the Czech plane took off, said that they had undertaken a “wide search” to find another nation willing to take Linnas, but that “there was no other country willing to accept (him) as a deportee.”

Last week, Justice Department officials had word that Panama would accept him, but this arrangement was dropped after bitter protests by the World Jewish Congress, which disclosed the plan.

His attorneys also scrambled in recent days to find another country that would accept Linnas but were unsuccessful in attempts to further delay the deportation.

Even as the Czechoslovakian plane was taking off, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist rejected a bid from Linnas’ daughter for a temporary stay blocking the deportation.

Attorneys for Linnas and his family steadfastly maintained that Linnas played no part in Nazi atrocities and instead was merely an Estonian nationalist who fought the Soviet annexation of the Baltic nation.

His attorneys said that the Soviet Union convicted Linnas and sentenced him to death at a trial in which witnesses against him were coached. They said he had no right to seek defense witnesses.

The verdict in the Soviet trial was reported, apparently inadvertently, in the Dec. 7, 1961, issue of the official Soviet journal Socialist Legality--several weeks before the proceeding took place, in January, 1962.

In his long fight to avoid deportation, Linnas gained the support of former White House Communications Director Patrick J. Buchanan, who contended in several recent articles that Soviet officials had manufactured evidence against Linnas and other escapees from Soviet territory.

Only Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Harry A. Blackmun and Sandra Day O’Connor voted to hear Linnas’ final appeal (Linnas vs. Immigration and Naturalization Service, A-732).

In 1984, Fydor Fedorenko, accused of being a guard at the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland, was returned to the Soviet Union, but Fedorenko had not fought deportation in U.S. courts. Fedorenko was sentenced to death in 1984, but the sentence has not been carried out.

Linnas is the 14th person to be deported from the United States after a special Justice Department probe.

The others included Andrija Artukovic, a Seal Beach resident who was sent back for trial in Yugoslavia; and John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker who is on trial in Israel accused of being the notorious Treblinka camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

David G. Savage reported from Washington and John J. Goldman from New York. Staff writer Robert Gillette in Washington contributed to this story.