Exclusive: Handwritten Note From Jimmy Carter Interceding for Nazi SS Guard Proven to Have Murdered Jews

by Daniel Freedman
Thu, 18 Jan 2007 at 2:16 PM
updated Thu, 18 Jan 2007 at 4:45 PM

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We now have a copy of the note that Jimmy Carter sent to the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, interceding on behalf of a Nazi SS Guard. We first reported on this story this morning.

Carter's note is attached to a letter from the daughter of the Nazi SS Guard to Mr. and Mrs. Carter, asking for them to help the Nazi SS Guard. Mr. Carter sent the letter to the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, with the following note attached:

To Director, O.S.I.
I hope that, in cases like
this, that special consideration
can be given to affected families for humanitarian reasons.
Jimmy Carter

The writing appears to be in Carter's handwriting with his signature. (Update: littlegreenfootballs.com says the handwriting matches Carter's.) The letter is stamped as "received" by the O.S.I on September 22, 1987. We post the entire letter below.

So who was this Nazi that Carter wanted the O.S.I. to take pity on? As the Arutz Sheva article we quoted this morning reported:

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 same evidence was used by the U.S. military in postwar trials as the basis for execution or long prison sentences for many identified SS guards.

As we wrote this morning:

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.

We also spoke this morning to the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Weisenthal Center and also the director of the center's Jerusalem office, Efraim Zuroff. As we reported this morning:

Speaking from Jerusalem, Mr. Zuroff told us that 'Carter was never particularly sensitive on Jewish issues" and the news "doesn't surprise" him. He described Carter's approach as "a classic case of misplaced sympathy syndrome."
Mr. Zuroff said that Carter "shows an accute lack of understanding for the horrors of the Holocaust" and a "lack of sensitivity toward the fate of the victims of the Holocaust."
He finished off our conversation by asking "why would he use his influence to help a Nazi war criminal?" Why indeed.

Also telling is the silence from Carter Center. We put in a series of calls from approximately 9:00 a.m. this morning to the Carter Center asking for a comment. We were finally called back at 12:15 p.m., only to be told, after we asked our questions, that we needed to submit our question in writing. We did that straight away. We are still yet to hear back from the Carter Center.

But then again, the only thing more damning than their silence is the note Jimmy Carter wrote pleading for a Nazi SS Guard. That probably explains the reluctance to comment.

Carter's constant attacks on the Jewish State now have a new context to be put in. Palestinian terrorist organization sympathizer ... Nazi SS Guard sympathizer ... the pattern is clear.