Jimmy Carter and a Nazi Murderer

One last story about Jimmy Carter and his Jewish problem: this is about his attempt to prevent a Nazi war criminal from being deported. More can be read about it here: “When Humanitarianism Ends: Jimmy Carter’s Disturbing Request on Behalf of a Nazi War Criminal,” by Varda Meyers Epstein (Judean Rose), Elder of Ziyon, January 1, 2025:

Jimmy Carter died, but few Jews mourn him. Carter’s animus toward the Jewish people is by now, legendary. Elder of Ziyon offered an overview Carter’s overt Jew-hatred in Jimmy Carter, antisemite. Saving the worst for last, Elder detailed Jimmy Carter’s plea for leniency for Martin Bartesch, a former SS guard at the Mauthausen work camp during WWII:

The single most damning example of Carter’s antisemitism comes from an incident in 1987.

Neal Sher was the head of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit. They had iron-clad evidence that a Chicago resident, Martin Bartesch, a member of the SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp, was a war criminal and a murderer.

Bartesch’s family started a huge campaign against the OSI, writing letters to members of Congress and other prominent people asking for help. Most politicians contacted the OSI to find out the details, OSI provided them with evidence of his guilt, and they would drop the matter.

But, Sher says, not Jimmy Carter.

During a 2007 Israel National Radio interview, Neal Sher went into some detail about a letter he received from Carter (emphasis added):

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.”

“It always bothered me, but I didn’t go public with it until recently, when he wrote this book [Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid V.E.] 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.”

There’s much more on Jimmy Carter’s sympathetic intervention on behalf of a Nazi war criminal. You can read the rest here.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum? Sorry, but in the case of James Earl Carter, Jr., no can do.