Linnas Letters to U.S. in 1947 Uncovered : Accused War Criminal Shown as Having No Sympathy for Nazis

WASHINGTON — Six weeks after the United States deported Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union to face execution as an accused Nazi war criminal, letters that Linnas and his wife wrote in 1947 to an American friend from a refugee camp in Germany have come to light, portraying him as an ardent anti-Communist with no sympathy for the Nazis.

The letters, part of a pen-pal correspondence that began in 1939, tend to support the family’s contention that Linnas considered himself a patriot dedicated to preserving the independence of his native Estonia, a small Baltic nation occupied first by the Soviets in 1940, then by the Germans in 1941 and finally annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of the war.

One of the letters, dated Sept. 3, 1947, and written by Linnas and his wife, Linda, from a refugee camp in southern Germany, rails at “these damned Communists.”

Composed in halting but clear English, it goes on to tell the American woman friend in Baltimore, “You and all the people of America must know what had Nazis and communists done to the little nation” of Estonia.

Another letter, written by Linnas on Oct. 10, 1947, refers to “this hideous Germany.” Still another, a month later, reports that many of their friends who remained behind in Estonia had been deported by the Soviets to an unknown fate in Siberia.

Sentenced to Death

Linnas, now 67, was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by a Soviet court in 1962 on charges that he was commandant between 1941 and 1943 of a Nazi concentration camp in Tartu, Estonia, during the German occupation, and had personally shot innocent civilians, including Jewish men, women and children. Linnas’ lawyers and family contended that the Soviets fabricated the charges in retaliation for his anti-Communist activities during the war.

There is no indication that the emergence of the letters will affect Soviet prosecution of the case.

“It is long past the point anything like this would be of any use,” said Patrick Korten, a Justice Department spokesman. “His postwar views would not alter what we believe him to have done during the war.”

Written at a time when Linnas, his wife and two small daughters were seeking to emigrate to the United States, the letters center on the deprivations and anxieties of life in the refugee camps of war-shattered Europe. They provide few details about how Linnas spent the war.

In the Sept. 3, 1947, letter, however, Linda Linnas wrote, in an apparent reference to her husband’s anti-Soviet activities, that he was “commanded from his firm on a long journey” a few days after their wedding on July 7, 1944, returned briefly that August and was wounded in a “Russian artillery attack” on Aug. 30 as Soviet troops advanced into Estonia.

The letter does not identify the “firm,” but it is consistent with a German document captured by the Allies and submitted by the Justice Department in court proceedings against Linnas in 1981. The document is a military pay voucher that identifies Linnas as a lieutenant in the German-controlled 38th Police Front Battalion. It states that he was recuperating from wounds suffered that Aug. 30 but does not link him to a concentration camp.

The correspondence began in May, 1939, broke off in 1940 as the war reached Estonia and resumed only in 1947 after an Estonian refugee organization in New York helped re-establish contact with the Baltimore woman. The letters before the war, all written by Linda, do not reflect Karl Linnas’ prewar views.

The American woman who carried on the correspondence--now an executive with a charitable foundation in Baltimore--said in a telephone interview Wednesday that she had lost touch with the Linnas family after they emigrated to the United States in 1951 and settled on Long Island but that she had saved at least a dozen of the letters through the years.

The woman, who asked not to be identified by name for fear of harassment, said that she only recently learned that Linnas had been accused of war crimes and had spent almost seven years in the federal courts battling deportation. She was able to contact Linnas’ daughter Anu, who lives in the Washington area, and who provided copies of five of the letters to The Times.

The Baltimore woman said she found it impossible to believe that Linnas had engaged in wartime atrocities. “He was a very gentle man, a loving father. . . . I think all these charges are trumped up,” said the woman, who began the pen-pal correspondence with Linnas’ future wife as a 15-year-old Baltimore preparatory school student. Linda Linnas died in 1970.

As evidence of the falsity of the charges, the Linnas family has noted that a Soviet legal journal inadvertently reported the verdict of the Soviet war crimes panel three weeks before the 1962 trial took place.

U.S. civil courts, however, found Soviet evidence against Linnas convincing and ruled that he had illegally obtained U.S. citizenship by failing to acknowledge collaboration with the Nazis. In April, Linnas became the first naturalized American to be sent to the Soviet Union to face a pending death sentence.

In another development, Anu Linnas said she had received three letters from her father, now being held in a Soviet prison in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, which appear to indicate that he is being treated well. Dated from April 24 to 27, a few days after his arrival, they refer to the availability of pipe tobacco, “extra milk” and other provisions for a “sick person’s diet.”

Activists in the Estonian emigre community, however, said the Soviets may have prevailed on Linnas to write the letters as part of an effort to blunt conservative criticism in the United States of the Justice Department’s cooperation with the Soviets.