Holocaust Trials in Soviet Estonia - Tartu Trials

Tartu Trials

By the early 1960s, the Soviet government was pursuing Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas and Ervin Viks, who were accused of murdering 12,000 people in the Tartu concentration camp. A more recent estimate concluded that the number was around 3,500 people, mainly Estonian and Estonian Jews as well as some Soviet POWs and Jews from Poland and Czechoslovakia. According to an official Soviet account: "the main culprit, Ervin Viks, fled the ire of the people and now lives in Australia, whereas Linnas found shelter in the USA". The Soviet authorities requested the extradition of both men, but against the background of the Cold War, were flatly refused.

The Australian Attorney General, Sir Garfield Barwick, continued to reject the request for Viks, claiming that it could not be met because: the USSR and Australia did not have an extradition treaty; Viks had passed immigration screening processes and; consequently, any such extradition would undermine Australian sovereignty. Viks died in Australia in 1983.

In January 1962, the men were tried in absentia in Tartu, and were sentenced to death. The transcript and verdict of the trial were published in the magazine Sotsialisticheskaya zakonnost (Soviet Legality) in December before the start of the trial in January the following year(which was delayed due to the sickness of one of the defendants).

During the trials in Tallinn and Tartu quite a few witnesses pointed out Heinrich Bergmann as the key figure behind the extermination of Estonian gypsies.

In 1986 Linnas was finally deported to the USSR, after a federal appeals court had deemed evidence against him "overwhelming and largely uncontroverted." The American judge remarked that his crimes "were such as to offend the decency of any civilized society." Linnas died in a Soviet prison hospital of old age.