Deported War Criminal Dies in Soviet Hospital

Karl Linnas, who was convicted in absentia as a war criminal and brought back to the Soviet Union to face the death penalty, died Thursday in a Leningrad hospital, according to Tass, the official Soviet news agency.

Linnas, 67, lived for more than 35 years in the United States, then was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported last April to Tallinn, Estonia, where he was imprisoned pending review of his sentence.

Tass said Linnas died of “acute cardiovascular, renal and hepatic insufficiency” after being transferred to Leningrad for medical treatment that included two operations.

His daughter, Anu Linnas, and his attorney, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, met with him Wednesday. Tass said the visitors expressed satisfaction with his medical care.

Other Disorders Found

Tass said that Linnas had fallen seriously ill before he left the United States, and it accused American doctors of failing to diagnose all his ailments. His documents indicated that he suffered only from peptic ulcers, the Tass account said, but Soviet doctors found several other disorders.

These were listed as “ischemic disease of the heart, atherosclerotic coronary cardiosclerosis, circulatory insufficiency, angina abdominalis, cirrhotic phenomena in the liver, elongation of the abdominal section of the aorta and intestinal hemorrhage.”

Surgery was performed June 24, Tass said, by Dr. Vladimir Kovrigin, chief surgeon of the Leningrad Clinic.

Linnas showed improvement afterward, Tass said, but his condition “began rapidly to deteriorate,” and another operation was performed Monday.

“However, the gastric disease and his health in general were in an extremely neglected state, and Linnas died today (Thursday),” Tass said.

Linnas, who was the commandant of a concentration camp in the Estonian city of Tartu during the German occupation, was accused of taking part in mass executions there. He fled the country and settled in the United States. On Jan. 20, 1962, he was tried in absentia by the Estonian Supreme Court, convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death.

He was sent back to the Soviet Union last April 21 after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay a deportation order.

In the United States on Thursday, East European and Baltic ethnic groups that had lobbied to prevent Linnas’ deportation said his death left unresolved what they called a miscarriage of justice, while a leading Jewish organization said justice now has been done.

“He died while justice was being carried out,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “I have no remorse at his death. I used up all my compassion on his victims.”

In New York, U.S. Atty. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who argued twice before the federal appeals court in Manhattan to have Linnas deported, had no comment on his death. But he said the record against Linnas contained “proof to a certainty that he was a mass murderer and a butcher.”

Need for Legislation

Although federal civil courts found Soviet-supplied evidence against Linnas to be convincing, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeals for review by a vote of 6 to 3, Linnas’ family and attorneys continued to maintain that the Soviet eyewitness testimony that the U.S. Justice Department used to support his deportation was coerced.

Anthony B. Mazeika, head of the California-based Coalition for Constitutional Justice and Security, said that Linnas’ death and the unsettled question of his guilt underscored a need for legislation that would permit criminal trials of accused war criminals in the United States, under stricter standards of evidence than those prevailing in civil deportation proceedings.

In 1981, Linnas was stripped of U.S. citizenship, which had been conferred in 1960, nine years after he emigrated from West Germany to the United States.

Moments before being turned over to Soviet authorities, Linnas protested his innocence, shouting to reporters, “Tell the American people what (the Soviets) are doing is murder and kidnaping!”

Although Linnas had asked Estonian courts for a pardon, the Soviet press described him as rude and unrepentant. He died before the courts had ruled on his request.

Linnas was the second person accused of war crimes by the Soviet Union to be deported by the United States. The first was Feodor Federenko, 78, a former millworker from Waterbury, Conn., who during World War II was a Nazi guard accused of mass killings at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Federenko, deported in 1984, was tried in the Soviet Union a year ago and sentenced to death, but his sentence is still under appeal.