Last
week, suspected Estonian Nazi war criminal Harry Mannil died
unprosecuted in San Jose, Costa Rica at the age of 89.
Mannil, who served for the first year of the Nazi occupation in the Estonian
Political Police in Tallinn - which was responsible
for the arrest and murder of numerous Jews and
communists - was ranked No. 10 on the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's most recent "Most Wanted" list.
His case came
to my attention in the early 1990s as a byproduct
of the investigation of his superior, Evald Mikson,
a notorious murderer and rapist, whom I exposed
living in Iceland and who died suddenly after
the local authorities opened up a murder investigation
against him.
Mannil escaped
after the war to Venezuela, where he became a
multimillionaire. This is the story of our efforts
to bring him to justice.
The Evald
Mikson case was not our only investigation that
related to Nazi war crimes in Estonia, but it
is of special significance for two reasons.
The first
is that it clearly reflected the ambivalent attitude
of the Estonian government to the issue of local
Nazi collaborators. On the one hand, I was granted
access to the KGB files, where I found extremely
incriminating testimony against Mikson. On the
other hand, if I recall correctly, the Estonian
Foreign Ministry issued an official statement
that asserted that Mikson was not guilty of any
crimes, and least of all against the Jewish people,
a total distortion of the historical facts.
A second reason
for the case's significance is that it led me
to two additional suspects who had worked under
Mikson in the Estonian political police - Martin
Jensen, who had immigrated to Toronto, Canada,
and Harry Mannil, who had escaped to Caracas,
Venezuela.
Jensen died
on August 8, 1992, not long after I had notified
the Canadian War Crimes Unit of his presence
in Toronto. Mannil was still alive, and his case
proved to be one of the most difficult I ever
dealt with.
In theory,
everyone is supposed to be equal in the eyes
of the law, but being one of the richest Estonians
in the world and a generous donor to Estonian
cultural institutions apparently can help protect
a suspected Nazi collaborator from prosecution
in Estonia. Thus, all our efforts to facilitate
the prosecution of Mannil for his alleged role
in the arrests and interrogations of Jews who
were murdered by the Nazis and their Estonian
collaborators were unsuccessful.
Part of the
problem stemmed from the fact that we were never
able to prove that Mannil personally committed
murder. While there was testimony recorded by
the Sandler Commission (which investigated the
Baltic refugees who escaped to Sweden) that Mannil
had killed as many as 100 Jews, we were unable
to corroborate this accusation.
Still, over
the years, we were able to record several victories
against him. For example, I made sure that he
was put on the American watch-list of individuals
barred from entering the United States because
of their purported Nazi past. Mannil was actually
kicked out of the country upon arrival at a Florida
airport at least once. (The list is secret and
he had no idea that he was on it.)
Another victory
was the resignation of Henry Kissinger from the
board of the Baltic Institute for Strategic and
International Studies, which Mannil established
in Tallinn. After I brought Mannil's past to
the attention of the former secretary of state,
he resigned from the board on January 24, 1994,
and thanked me for informing him of the matter
and bringing the relevant documentation to his
attention.
A third such
victory, which was unfortunately shortlived,
was Mannil's expulsion on February 4, 2003, from
Costa Rica, where he had business interests and
often visited, because according to the immigration
director Marco Badilla, "His presence could compromise national security, public order, or way of life."
Nine months
and three days later, however, Badilla secretly
rescinded his original order, allowing Mannil
to reenter the country.
In early 2001,
I decided that our best bet to bring Mannil to
trial was to try to convince the Estonians to
do so. That summer, I met with the Estonian prime
minister Mart Laar in Tallinn to discuss the
possibility that the Estonians would open an
official investigation against Mannil and to
persuade him to seek the assistance of the OSI
(the US Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations), which I understood had obtained
new documentation in the case.
The investigation
was eventually opened, but the visit, my first
to Estonia in almost a decade, was marred by
several ugly run-ins with the local media. In
the course of an interview with the Estonian
daily Eesti Paevaleht, I was asked whether any
Estonian civilians had murdered Jews during the
Holocaust. I answered in the affirmative, noting
the murders carried out by the Omakaitse during
the initial weeks following the Nazi invasion.
Imagine my
consternation the next morning when someone translated
the headline of the interview. It read, "Nazi-hunter Accuses Estonian Nation of Murders" - precisely the type of assertion that, besides being patently false, was certain
to infuriate Estonian public opinion and increase
its opposition to the prosecution of Harry Mannil
and any other suspected local Nazi war criminals.
Another manifestation
of the deep-seated local resistance to my efforts
to hold Estonian murderers of Jews accountable
was the most offensive caricature of me ever
published anywhere, which appeared in the August
23, 2001, issue of Eesti Ekspress, Estonia's
most popular weekly newsmagazine.
It portrayed
me as the devil, complete with horns, and holding
a pitchfork upon which were impaled several discs
with swastikas on them. In my other hand, I was
holding a cup emblazoned with the inscription "Wiesenthal Keskus" (Center), into which prime minister Laar was seen pouring Harry Mannil's blood.
The caption read, "Kutsumata Kulaline" ("Unwanted Guest").
A year later
I clashed with the Security Police Board, the
agency responsible for the investigation of Estonian
Nazi war criminals. In 1998, Estonia, like its
Baltic neighbors, had established an International
Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against
Humanity, which was mandated to examine all crimes
committed under the Communist (1940-1941; 1944-1991)
and Nazi (1941-1944) occupations of Estonia.
One of the
surprising initial findings of the commission,
which was published in 2001, was that on August
7, 1942, the 36th Estonian Security Police Battalion
participated in the mass murder of the Jews of
Nowogrudok, Belarus.
Several months
later, based on this information, I submitted
to Juri Pihl, the director-general of the board,
a list of 16 members of the unit who had been
awarded the Iron Cross second class by the Nazis
in December 1942 on the assumption that those
decorated might have excelled in the murder of
Jews.
Less than
two weeks later, the board informed the media
that they had no information regarding the participation
of the 36th Battalion in the murder of the Jews
of Nowogrudok, a direct contradiction of the
findings of the Estonian international historical
commission.
I used this
example in an op-ed piece I published in Eesti
Paevaleht on August 7, 2002, the 60th anniversary
of the murders, to demonstrate how Estonia was
not facing its Holocaust past, and urged the
government to designate a day to commemorate
the annihilation of European Jewry.
A date was
decided on that same day, but the date chosen
was January 27, the day of the liberation of
Auschwitz, which, considering the fact that no
Estonian Jews had been deported to that camp,
only strengthened the opinion of many Estonians
that there was no connection between their country
and the Holocaust. An opinion poll held right
after the decision confirmed the problem. Ninety-three
percent of those polled opposed a Holocaust memorial
day in Estonia.
In the conclusions
of the International Commission, there was an
unequivocally negative evaluation of the activities
of Evald Mikson, who was "particularly singled out," along with six other Estonian Nazi collaborators, as being "actively involved in the arrest and killing of Estonian Jews."
He and three
others - Ain-Ervin Mere, Julius Ennok, and Ervin
Viks - were named as the ones who "signed numerous death warrants." Not that these findings in any way convinced his children that their father
had done anything wrong during the war.
As far as
Mannil is concerned, as could be expected, the
investigation was finally closed by the Security
Police Board on December 30, 2005, after several
years of investigation, with no charges brought
against him.
What made
this decision particularly infuriating was that
the Estonian investigation confirmed not only
that Mannil had worked for the dreaded Estonian
political police, but that at least seven persons
(all named) whom he had arrested and interrogated
had been executed by Estonian Nazi collaborators.
This confirmed an important component of our
original accusations, albeit with the exact opposite
conclusion.
In other words,
those findings would have almost certainly been
sufficient to have Mannil prosecuted in any country
that treats Holocaust crimes seriously, but clearly
Estonia is not such a country.
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