Karl Linnas

1919-1987

Karl Linnas was, between 1941 and 1943, the commandant of a concentration camp at Tartu during the German occupation of Estonia. After Soviet forces pushed the Germans out of Estonia, Linnas fought with the German army. After the war he stayed in Displaced Persons camps in Germany until emigrating to the USA in 1951. During the show trial in Soviet Estonia in 1962 he was sentenced to capital punishment. In 1979 U.S. immigration officials charged him with making false statements to gain entry to the United States. In 1981 the Federal District Court in Westbury, New York, stripped then-62-year-old Linnas of his U.S. citizenship for having lied to immigration officials thirty years earlier about his Nazi past. In 1987 Linnas was deported from the United States to the Soviet Union, where he died three months later in a prison hospital in then Leningrad. Linnas became the second naturalized American to be sent to the Soviet Union to face a pending death sentence, after Feodor Fedorenko, whose execution occurred in 1987, the same year of Linnas's deportation.