Carter Interceded on Behalf of Nazi SS Guard Proven to Have Murdered Jews

by Daniel Freedman
Thu, 18 Jan 2007 at 8:48 AM
updated Thu, 18 Jan 2007 at 3:14 PM

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Update VI: It's true. Read a copy of the note Carter sent here.

Update III: Chief Nazi Hunter Blasts Carter for 'Lack of Sensitivity Toward Victims of the Holocaust'

Update V: We spoke to Neal Sher this morning and he confirmed that Carter sent him a personal letter and interceded on behalf of a Nazi, and he pointed us to an op-ed he wrote for the JTA on the subject. He wrote:

As disturbing as I found Carter's plea, and although his attempted intervention has always gnawed at me, I chalked it up at the time to a certain naivete on the part of the former president. But now, in light of Carter's most recent writings and comments, I am left to wonder whether it was I who was naive simply to dismiss his knee-jerk appeal as the instinctive reaction of a well-meaning but misguided humanitarian.

It all makes sense now.

"A former U.S. Justice Department official disclosed to Arutz-7 that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's advocacy extended beyond the PA Arabs, when he interceded on behalf of a Nazi SS man," Arutz Sheva reports.

Neal Sher, a veteran of the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, described a letter he received from Carter in 1987 in an interview with Israel National Radio's Tovia Singer. The letter, written and signed by Carter, asked that Sher show "special consideration" for a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria ...
Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher's office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death's Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.
"We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him -- a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen," Sher said. "We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners." An entry in the book for October 10, 1943 registered the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS guard Martin Bartesch. "It was a most chilling document," Sher recalled ...
The family approached several members of Congress. "The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case," Sher recalled. But there was one politician who accepted the claims without asking for any further information.
"One day, in the fall of '87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading 'Jimmy Carter.' I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn't. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch's daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported. "In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old ... "On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted 'special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.' ...
Now, following Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Sher has decided to go public with the hope that a public made aware of Carter's support and defense of a Nazi SS man will help illustrate why the arbiter of the Camp David Accords came out with a book defending the Palestinians after the landslide election of the Islamist Hamas terror group.

Defending a Nazi SS Guard? If true, it all makes sense now.

Now Carter's complaint about "Jewish organizations" being against him starts to make sense. No guessing where he first got the notion of a Jewish conspiracy from. It's not only Walt and Mearsheimer who would be proud.

The Carter Center didn't return calls for comment.

Update: Carter writes in this morning's Washington Post:

I am concerned that public discussion of my book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" has been diverted from the book's basic proposals: that peace talks be resumed after six years of delay and that the tragic persecution of Palestinians be ended. Although most critics have not seriously disputed or even mentioned the facts and suggestions about these two issues, an apparently concerted campaign has been focused on the book's title, combined with allegations that I am anti-Israel.

Anti-Jewish would probably now be more fitting. No mention of course that it's the Palestinian Arabs who have rejected peace deals and are now at war with each other in Gaza. Which incidentally Israel did pull out of. No mention of those points in Carter's piece, but of course the Jews are to blame: Going after innocent Palestinian groups like Hamas that only want to wipe out the Jewish state, or only going after Nazi SS Guards who were simply following orders to mass-murder Jews. Lucky there is Jimmy Carter to set the record straight and defend those given a bad name by the Jews.

Update II: Brandeis University is now backtracking and allowing a rebuttal to Jimmy Carter.Fox reports (via Jonathan):

Former President Jimmy Carter won't go unchallenged after his appearance next week at Brandeis University, where he is lecturing on his latest book about what he terms the Palestinian apartheid by Israel. Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz will step on stage afterward to rebut the former president's remarks despite having been booted from an earlier booking to debate Carter on his assertions.

Update IV: Scott Johnson at Powerline warns that Neal Sher might not be a credible source, noting that "in 2003 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit disbarred Sher for his admitted 'unauthorized reimbursements' of travel expenses from the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, where he had served as chief of staff." As we note above, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Weisenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, thinks Sher is credible.

We still are awaiting a response from the Carter Center.

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