Peanut President Defends Nazi Death Camp Guard

I realize my younger readers may not be familiar with the weeks long firestorm of criticism which greeted President Reagan's visit to a German cemetery where a handful of Nazi SS guards were also buried. Stars and Stripes has the basic facts of that visit with this news report from that time period. The cemetery visit was requested by German Chancellor Kohl to show how we had healed the wounds of war. Something the left is constantly urging we do (but only on THEIR terms).

Predictably, the left and the Jewish lobby (pretty much the same thing unless we are talking about defending Israel) went haywire. They trotted out all the same garbage about Reagan being a Nazi in disguise with the same glee that they currently use when falsely tagging President Bush with the Hitler label.

Even years later, in "scholarly" papers, it was suggested that "Reagan's speeches and public statements before, during, and after his 1985 visit to West Germany demonstrate his misappropriation of the memories of the Holocaust in order to further his political agenda. The events surrounding Bitburg justified survivors' fears that the memory of the Holocaust would be desecrated and distorted after their deaths."

Today we learn that another U.S. President defended a LIVING Nazi SS guard with blood on his hands. Will we experience a worldwide media firestorm of criticism with this revelation?

Jimmy Carter Interceded on Behalf of Nazi SS Guard
by Ezra HaLevi
Arutz Sheva
Jan 17, 2007

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

Neil 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.
...
“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 Bartash 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.”

Click here to listen to Tovia Singer’s interview with Shur on Israel National Radio.

I wonder if those who so loudly protested President Regan's visit to Bitburg will have the same sense of outrage? Will we even hear a peep about this story in the lamestream "news" media?

For those on the left who might find this outrage a rare opportunity to invoke the "silence is the best policy" rule I remind you of the words of Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who said: "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..."

UPDATE:

Chief Nazi Hunter Blasts Carter for 'Lack of Sensitivity Toward Victims of the Holocaust'
NY Sun
January 18, 2007

The chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Weisenthal Center and also the director of the center's Jerusalem office, Efraim Zuroff, told us that there is "no question" that the story about Jimmy Carter interceding on behalf of a Nazi guard is true and described Carter's actions on behalf of the Nazi as "pathetic." Neal Sher, he said, ran the Justice Department's investigation into Nazis hiding in America and was extremely reliable.

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.