[1] Linnas was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by a Soviet court in 1962 on charges that during the German occupation, between 1941 and 1943, he was the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp at Tartu and had personally shot innocent civilians—men, women and children.
[2] Linnas worked as a land surveyor living in Greenlawn, New York, until 1979, when U.S. immigration officials charged him with making false statements to gain entry to the United States.
[3] In 1981, the Federal District Court in Westbury, New York, stripped Linnas of his American citizenship for having lied to immigration officials 30 years earlier about his Nazi past.
A 1986 federal appeals court decision upheld the order for his deportation, ruling that the evidence against the defendant was "overwhelming and largely uncontroverted."
[7] Linnas was reported to have been suffering from "heart disease, circulatory problems, internal hemorrhaging and cirrhosis of the liver" shortly before his death.