Evald Mikson

Evald Mikson, ( – 27 December 1993) was an Estonian athlete and police officer. He was a goalkeeper for the Estonia national football team, winning seven caps between 1934 and 1938. Mikson played a controversial role as an alleged collaborator during his service in the police force of Estonia during the 1941–1944 Nazi German occupation of Estonia, and he has been accused of committing war crimes against Jews during World War II. Overview In 2001, the Simon Wiesenthal Center published allegations that Mikson committed war crimes against the local Jews during the German occupation of Estonia, when he was working as Deputy Head of Police in Tallinn/Harjumaa. Mikson's descendants have reportedly claimed that he had been at least on one occasion imprisoned by the Germans for hiding details about witnesses from his superiors. However, records obtained by the Simon Wiesenthal Center indicate that he was actually detained for possessing gold stolen from his Jewish victims. Mikson escaped from Estonia to Sweden in 1944. In 1946, he was transported to the Norwegian border, where a boat to Venezuela waited. However, the boat was stranded in Iceland, and he remained there until his death. Mikson himself claimed in 1992 that he was being called a Nazi collaborator and war criminal because of a "former colleague from the Estonian police force who is now a rich man living in Venezuela and who wanted revenge after I wrote an article about him and his crimes against Estonians in World War II".