Wanted By Nazi-Hunters
Dies in Costa Rica
TALLINN (AFP) - An Estonian alleged by
Nazi-hunters to have murdered Jews during
World War II has died in his adopted
homeland Costa Rica aged 89, according to
officials in the Baltic state.
Harry Mannil died Monday in the Costa Rican
capital San José, Edgar Savisaar, mayor of
Estonia's capital Tallinn and a close
friend, said in a statement.
Savisaar paid tribute to Mannil, the
godfather of his daughter, as an
"outstanding expatriate Estonian
businessman" and did not mention the
accusations against him, dropped by Estonian
prosecutors in 2005.
Mannil nonetheless remained on a wanted list
drawn up by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a
Los Angeles-based Jewish organization that
tracks Nazi war criminals.
Mannil, then aged 21, was recorded as having
served from September 1941 to June 1942 with
the German security forces during the Nazi
occupation of Estonia.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center accused him of
involvement in the murder of 100 civilians,
mostly Jews, although an Estonian probe only
established that he was involved in
interrogations.
The Nazi-hunters rejected as a whitewash a
decision in 2005 by Estonian prosecutors to
halt their five-year investigation on the
ground that they had failed to turn up
evidence to implicate Mannil in war crimes.
Mannil left for Finland in 1943, ahead of a
Soviet takeover of Estonia. He emigrated to
Latin America in 1946, a year after the end
of World War II.
He spent the ensuing decades mostly in
Venezuela, as well as Costa Rica. In 1994,
the Simon Wiesenthal Center got him placed
on a U.S. "watch-list" barring him from the
United States.
Estonia's wartime history is still highly
controversial.
Some Estonians saw the Nazis as the lesser
evils, after German forces drove out Soviet
troops who had occupied the country in 1940
and had deported thousands of Estonians to
their deaths and were do so again after the
war.
But the Nazis brought their own terror.
Estonia's pre-war Jewish population numbered
some 4,400. Most fled before the Nazi
invasion in 1941, but the 1,000 who remained
in the country perished in death camps.
The Nazis also sent up to 10,000 Jews from
other occupied countries to camps in
Estonia, where most died.
The Red Army drove out the Nazis in 1944.
Estonia remained a Soviet republic until the
communist bloc collapsed in 1991.
Mannil, who in exile became a wealthy
businessman and art collector, was appointed
a foreign trade adviser by newly-independent
Estonia's government.
He had first returned to Estonia in 1990 at
the invitation of local Soviet leader Vaino
Valjas, who had met Mannil while serving as
Moscow's ambassador to Venezuela.
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