Who is on whose side?
EXCLUSIVE: JIMMY CARTER INTERCEDED ON BEHALF OF NAZI SS GUARD
By Ezra HaLevi
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.
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.
"In 1987, Carter had been out of office for seven years or so," Sher
recalled. "It was a very active period for my office. We had just
barred Kurt Waldheim – he was then president of Austria and former
head of the United Nations – from entering the U.S. because of his
Nazi past and his involvement in the persecution of civilians during
the war. We had just deported an Estonian Nazi Commandant back to the
Soviet Union after a bruising battle after which we were attacked by
Reagan White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan.
"Also around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of
SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One
such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin
Bartesch."
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.
"We kicked him out and he went back to Austria. In the meantime, his
family – he had adult kids – went on a campaign, also supported by his
church, to try to get special treatment. In so doing they attacked the
activities of our office and me personally. They claimed we used phony
evidence from the Soviet Union – which was nonsense. They claimed he
was a young man of only 17 or 18 when he joined the Nazi forces,
asking for some sympathetic treatment and defense from our office,
which they claimed was just after vengeance."
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.
"I couldn't help thinking of my own father who returned home with
shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight
the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.
"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.'
"I didn't respond to the letter – the case was already over and he was
out of the country – but it always stuck in my craw. A former
president who didn't do what I would expect him to do - with a full
staff at his disposal – to find out the facts before he took up the
side of this person. But I wasn't going to pick a fight with a former
president. We had enough on our plate."
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.
"It always bothered me, but I didn't go public with it until recently,
when he wrote this book and let it spill out where his sentiments
really lie," Sher said. "Here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of
someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special
consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby
really exposes where his heart really lies."
Visit www.IsraelNationalRadio.com to listen to Tovia Singer's
interview with Sher.
My MySpace.com site, click here:
http://www.myspace.com/i77506
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