Dan Friedman relays a 2006 article by former Justice Department official Neil Sher, who had played a key role in tracking down Nazis for the DOJ's Office of Special Investigations. Sher was renowned Nazi-hunter who worked in the Reagan administration under Attorney General Ed Meese.
...OSI announced the loss of citizenship and removal from the United States of a former Chicago resident. Martin Bartesch admitted to our 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.
In Bartesch’s case, OSI researchers uncovered iron-clad documentary evidence of his direct, hands-on role in the Nazi genocide. Among the SS documents captured by American forces when they liberated Mauthausen was what we described as the Unnatural Death Book, a register of prisoners killed, along with the identity of the SS guard responsible for the murder.
So powerful was this evidence that, in postwar trials conducted by the U.S. military, the book served as the basis for execution or long prison sentences for many identified SS guards.
An entry on Oct. 20, 1943, registers the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS man Martin Bartesch. It was a most chilling document.
Bartesch’s family and “supporters,” seeking special relief, launched a campaign to discredit OSI while trying to garner political support. Indeed, OSI received numerous inquiries from members of Congress who had been approached.
After we explained the facts of the case, however, the matter inevitably was dropped; no one urged that Bartesch or his family be accorded any special treatment.
Well, there was one exception — Jimmy Carter.
In September 1987, after all of the gruesome details of the case had been made public and widely reported in the media, I... I was ... taken aback by the personal, handwritten note Jimmy Carter sent to me seeking “special consideration” for this Nazi SS murderer. There on the upper-right corner of Bartesch’s daughter’s letter was a note to me in the former president’s handwriting, and with his signature, urging that “in cases such as this, special consideration can be given to the families for humanitarian reasons.”
...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.
...The exposure of Carter’s views on Israel and the Jewish lobby has shed a clearer light on his attempt to influence me in the Bartesch case. We know from his own confession that he has had lust in his heart. Unfortunately, he has given us ample reason to wonder what else is lurking there.
Jimmy Carter is a very sick individual. It takes a real low-life to side with SS executioners, but it's no way a surprise given Carter's bizarre history.
8 comments:
In war horrible things occur. Were the SS more terrible than the US commander who machined the survivors of sunken Japanese ships any better. At least two British sub commanders did the same yet were promoted. I refrain from the activities of our Russian allies, which Churchill and Roosevelt were aware of yet did nothing. Pity the Polish officer corps that was sacrificed on the altar of political necessity. Yet we are lectured about the evils of the SS.
Why not just remember that in war no one emerges with clean hands.
Go to bed Jimmy, it's WAY past your bedtime.
How twisted does one have to be to draw a comparison between isolated war crimes of individual commanders against fellow combatants and the systematic extermination of entire civilian populations of "undesirables?"
And the fact that Russia was our ally against The Axis during WWII doesn't change the fact that they were our enemy then and for the next half century. And beyond.
War is Hell, yes, but what the SS did was not in the context of war. It was the plan for the peace to follow the war.
He was a real winner, wasn't he.
The only good thing Carter gave us -- by virtue of his failures -- was Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps Ebola Boy will give us President Ted Cruz.
"Were the SS more terrible than the US commander..."?
Um, yeah. They were. Policies of systematic, industrial world-wide genocide beat the War Is Hell excuse 4 times out of 5 in blind taste tests.
The troop transport was sunk right off the island they were headed to. So they were rowing in their lifeboats to that island where they would have then be able to reinforce the island's defenses. I have no problem with them attacking those men. The killing of the Japanese who were swimming up to the sub to surrender being shot is a different matter. That I consider to be a war crime. My father fought in the Pacific and I know through some of his tellings how brutal the Japanese were and can understand the actions of the submariners but it doesn't justify it.
Anonymous is concerned that those surrendering to the sub and being shot was a war crime. Provided there was space for them on the sub for them to be taken captive!
If they had just sailed off then these same soldiers might have made it to land as noted. That is not acceptable.
Many sailors were left to their end by enemy fleets due to the hazard of picking them up and essentially killing them by not capturing them.
Sorry, but maritime rules are a bitch and the Japs were evil in their treatment of POWs so no tears shed here.
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