Karl Linnas

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Karl Linnas was an Estonian who was sentenced to capital punishment during the Holocaust trials in Soviet Estonia.

In 1981 the Federal District Court in Westbury, NY stripped 67-year-old Linnas of his US citizenship for having lied to immigration officials thirty years earlier about his Nazi past. Linnas's crimes, the judge said, "were such as to offend the decency of any civilized society." From 1941 to 1943 Linnas had commanded a Nazi concentration camp at Tartu, Estonia, where he allegedly directed and personally took part in the murder of thousands of men, women, and children who were herded into anti-tank ditches. A 1986 federal appeals court upheld his deportation order, ruling that the evidence against the defendant was "overwhelming and largely uncontroverted."

On April 20, 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a final appeal. At that point Linnas was flown to the Soviet Union and almost three months later died in a prison hospital while awaiting trial (July 2, 1987).