Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

U.S. marshals arrested and cuffed Demjanjuk when he didn’t show up for the hearing.

While John Demjanjuk was waiting for the appeals court decision on his denaturalization, OSI was chasing thirty more cases through the courts and investigating another five hundred. Almost all were alleged Nazi collaborators. One of them was Karl Linnas. Like John Demjanjuk, Linnas was important to the survival of OSI. Moscow was beginning to cooperate with OSI researchers and prosecutors and OSI needed to keep Moscow satisfied, if not happy.

Like other former Nazi collaborators living in the United States, INS investigators had found Karl Linnas enjoying a quiet life as a retired land surveyor in Greenlawn, New York, on Long Island. He was on the original Karbach list. A grizzled man with a huge white Santa Claus beard, he was spending his retirement writing music for children’s bands.

Linnas’s past was not so philanthropic.

Before the German occupation of the Baltic countries, Linnas was a member of Estonia’s anticommunist Home Guard, the Omakaitse. The Nazis recruited him to be commandant of a concentration-work camp in Tartu, Estonia’s second largest city. Under his three-year watch, camp guards—mostly Estonian volunteers—murdered between 3,500 (U.S. estimate) and 12,000 (Soviet estimate) Estonian Jews and Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and Jews transported to Estonia from Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

The Tartu guards were systematic. They loaded prisoners into a small red bus and drove them to an antitank trench outside the city. On their way to execution, the guards beat the men and raped the women and girls. According to eyewitnesses and a U.S. Department of State cable from Moscow, Linnas was a brutal camp commandant who personally supervised mass executions.

“Linnas frequently travelled to execution site, where he directed shooting of people and personally gave coups de grace with pistol to those who remained alive,” the U.S. embassy in Moscow cabled Washington. “He maintained brutal regime in camp, beat those under arrest, and mocked them.”

When the Red Army reoccupied Estonia in 1944, Linnas joined the 38th Estonian Police Battalion and fought with Germany against the Soviet Union in a Baltic Legion. Like Demjanjuk, he received a severe shrapnel wound. He was taken to a German hospital for treatment. After his release, he remained in Germany until the end of the war.

Linnas swore on his visa application to the United States that he had been a student and draftsman in Estonia until May 1943, when he was conscripted into the Estonian army. It sounded plausible, except that there was no Estonian army. Linnas immigrated to the United States in 1951, the year before Demjanjuk did.

To date, there is no evidence that any U.S. intelligence officer, army official, or State Department employee helped Linnas enter America or that he had ever worked for the CIA. However, several “restricted” pages have been removed from his declassified CIA file, which may indicate a Linnas-CIA relationship. The government refused my Freedom of Information request to declassify those pages.

In 1962, the Soviet Union tried Linnas, Juhan Jüriste, and Ervin Viks as “murderers” and “German Fascist handymen” and sentenced all three in absentia to death, based on eyewitness testimony from both former Estonian guards and victims alike. Jüriste pleaded guilty. Viks was living in Sydney, Australia, which declined to deport him to Estonia to stand trial. And twenty years after Estonia had formally requested Linnas’s deportation, a U.S. federal court in New York stripped him of his U.S. citizenship based on witnesses and documents supplied by the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Johannes Soodla, another Estonian who allegedly had served as a guard at the infamous Tartu concentration camp, was living quietly in California. A decorated hero in the Estonian War of Independence, Soodla had been a ranking officer in the Estonian Home Guard before serving as a brigadier general in an Estonian battalion of the Waffen SS. For his dedicated service, the Germans awarded him the Iron Cross second class. After the war, Soodla worked for the CIA in Trieste, Italy.

In 1961, Moscow asked the United States to deport Soodla to stand trial for war crimes. The Soviets even gave the State Department Soodla’s home address in Glendale, California. State declined to hand him over, however, and the INS failed to investigate Soodla for probable visa fraud. When OSI was finally up and running, Soodla—born in 1897—was already dead.

Finally, in 1984, an immigration court ordered Linnas deported to Estonia for retrial. The deportation order, once again, pitted Jews against émigrés. The fight was more than another Washington teapot tempest. The Linnas deportation issue divided Congress and the White House, the Department of State and the Department of Justice. Former White House communications director Pat Buchanan, for example, was a staunch supporter of Linnas and an avowed enemy of OSI. He received fifteen thousand cards, letters, and phone calls against deporting Linnas to Estonia.

At stake were three political issues. If deported to Estonia, Karl Linnas would set a new precedent. The United States did not recognize the communist satellite states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as legitimate governments. Therefore, Baltic Americans argued, to deport Linnas to Estonia would be the equivalent of legitimizing Moscow’s illegal incorporation of the Baltic countries.

Furthermore, Baltic Americans pointed out that Linnas had been tried and convicted in a Soviet kangaroo court. To deport him back to Estonia would be to sanction Soviet-style evidence such as forged documents and eyewitness testimony extracted through blackmail and torture.

OSI argued that the Soviet Union was eagerly awaiting Linnas’s return to Estonia. Not to deport him would jeopardize the cooperation of Moscow, which had already supplied evidence to OSI for the Fedorenko, Demjanjuk, and other trials. Without Moscow’s continued help, OSI would be unable to make its cases and would slowly starve to death, a point that did not go unnoticed by OSI’s enemies.

OSI further argued with a clear conscience that the evidence it had received from the Soviets and that it used to denaturalize Linnas was reliable. Historians had examined the documents and attorneys had grilled witnesses. OSI was convinced not only that Linnas had lied on his visa application, but also that he was guilty of major war crimes. Furthermore, the Soviet Union promised to retry Linnas if he were deported either to Estonia or the USSR. OSI believed the Soviet promise.

The White House opposed deporting Linnas to Estonia. How would it look to the world if President Ronald Reagan, the archenemy of Moscow, caved in to Jewish pressure and delivered Linnas to the Soviets on a platter? The State Department and George Shultz supported their boss. The Justice Department didn’t. Attorney General Edwin Meese backed OSI and supported the immigration court’s deportation decision.

Instead of succumbing to gridlock, Washington quickly hammered out a face-saving compromise. If no other country in the world was willing to take Karl Linnas, he would be deported to Estonia. The international search for a taker began. The State Department asked West Germany if it wanted to extradite Linnas. Germany said no, he wasn’t a German. Next, State asked Israel if it wanted to extradite him. Israel said no. All the evidence against Linnas was in the Soviet Union, which Israel trusted about as much as it trusted the Palestinians. Finally, State sent out an SOS to seventeen countries, from the Philippines to Venezuela.

No one wanted Karl Linnas.

When the Supreme Court decided not to review the Linnas case in December 1986, four years after he had been stripped of his U.S. citizenship, the State Department began making plans for Linnas’s deportation to Estonia. It wasn’t simple. The transatlantic flight from New York to a far corner of Eastern Europe required refueling. But where? Afraid that Linnas supporters might attempt to kidnap him while the plane sat on a runway, the State Department chose Czechoslovakia for the refueling layover. The communist country promised tight airport security.