Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of
the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
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.”
As Sher states, the family of Martin Bartesch, launched a
letter-writing campaign on his behalf. At that time, in 1987, the Washington
Post saw fit to print Heinz Bartesch’s defense of his Nazi father:
'FALSE ALLEGATIONS' ABOUT MARTIN BARTESCH
Over the past several weeks The Post has carried the story
of the Office of Special Investigations' prosecution of my father, Martin
Bartesch. The misquotes and false allegations have been so great that what most
Americans now know is a gross distortion of the truth and equals the
disinformation campaigns of the KGB. Some of the falsehoods that have appeared
in print:
It is alleged that Martin Bartesch lied on his immigration
form. He didn't lie -- his immigration form clearly states his service in the
S.S. in 1943-45. He did serve in the Prinz Eugene division. His only oversight
was to not list his duty as guard at Mauthausen for three weeks. A questionable
oversight, not a lie.
It is alleged that my father fled the country to avoid
prosecution. He didn't flee but left as a free man with a valid U.S. passport,
with full knowledge and consent from the government. He left willfully to avoid
financial ruin from a trial which, under the Holtzman Amendment, would have
been grossly unfair and therefore impossible to win.
It is alleged that he is accused of murder. As a guard, his
duty was to shoot at escaping prisoners. He shot an escaping convicted felon.
The Wehrmacht penal code clearly stated that failure to perform duties would
result in execution. This is exactly the command that the American GIs had who
did shoot and did kill escaping Japanese from our internment camps.
It is alleged that my father assisted in the persecution of
the Jews. His only guard duties before fighting on the Russian front were at
labor camps that contained prisoners of war, resistance fighters and convicted
felons. It is a known fact that the subcamps where my father was stationed had
very few Jews and no women and children. Most of the deaths at Mauthausen
occurred at the end of the war, long after my father left in October 1943.
Martin Bartesch committed no war crimes -- the OSI knows
this. The complaint against him never even mentioned any war crimes. Again, his
only "crime" was a questionable immigration infraction.
These are not all, but certainly the biggest of the
falsehoods presented in my father's case. What the OSI did to my father was
unfair, cruel, immoral and very un-American. It is appalling that the media
acted as a free public relations vehicle for the OSI to spread its lies. HEINZ
H. BARTESCH Corte Madera, Calif.
Was Heinz Bartesch being honest when he claimed that Martin
Bartesch didn’t lie on his immigration form—that he simply forgot to write that
he was a guard at Mauthausen? Put simply: no. When Bartesch was deposed in
1986, he refused to answer questions about what he did during the war
pleading the Fifth on the grounds that he feared foreign prosecution. This
suggests that Bartesch intentionally omitted the same key information on his
immigration form.
Bartesch wasn’t talking then. He sure wasn’t going to talk
in 1986, when the US government—with darned good reason—was after him.
At that point, the US government took Bartesch to court,
asking that he be compelled to provide answers to their questions. The court
did so, noting that the deposition and Bartesch’s responses would be sealed to
protect him from prosecution outside of the US.
From United
States v. Bartesch (1986) (emphasis added):
*428 I. FACTS
The government filed this denaturalization action against
the defendant Martin Bartesch on April 7, 1986. The government alleges that the
defendant misrepresented his activities during World War II when he applied for
and obtained immigration to, and citizenship in, the United States. As an
alternative ground for denaturalization, the government alleges that the
defendant acquiesced and personally assisted in persecution and conduct
contrary to civilization and human decency on behalf of Nazi Germany during
wartime. The wartime activities occurred during defendant's service as a
concentration camp guard in the Totenkopf-Sturmbann (Death's
Head Battalion) at the Mauthausen concentration camp system in Austria.
During his deposition conducted on June 2 and 3, 1986,
defendant, on advice of counsel, asserted a Fifth Amendment privilege and
refused to answer questions concerning his whereabouts and activities between
July 1, 1943 and August 25, 1945. In addition, he refused to answer questions
regarding his efforts to immigrate and obtain United States citizenship.
Defense counsel stated that the invocation of the Fifth Amendment was not based
on the possibility of prosecution in the United States, but rather on the
possibility of prosecution in West Germany, Austria, or Romania.
Relying on his Fifth Amendment privilege, defendant
refused to answer questions such as: (1) whether (during the period between
July 1, 1943 and August 25, 1945) he had ever been at Mauthausen or any
concentration camp; (2) whether he belonged to a Totenkopf-Sturmbann; or
(3) whether he performed military service. With respect to his immigration and
naturalization, defendant refused to answer whether he intentionally had
provided false information to United States officials and whether sworn
immigration documents placing him in the SS combat division "Prinz
Eugen" were correct. These questions are some examples of the
questions which defendant refused to answer in his deposition.
Defendant did answer "no" to the following questions:
(1) whether he had ever mistreated, shot, or killed a prisoner; (2) fired a
weapon; (3) touched a prisoner; and (4) was ever present at a hanging.
Defendant's answer to the complaint, filed on June 13, 1986, took a similar
approach. In all, defendant invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to 21
paragraphs of the complaint (paragraphs 7, 9-11, 14-15, 18, 22, 36, 42, 48, 53,
55-58, 65, 70, 75-76, 79).
Also among the falsehoods in the letter the Washington Post
saw fit to print, Heinz Bartesch claimed that his father had nothing to do with
the “persecution of the Jews.” Furthermore, wrote Heinz, there were “very few
Jews” at places like Mauthausen. This too, is a lie.
From Yad
Vashem (emphases added):
In May 1944, Mauthausen admitted large transports of Jews
from Auschwitz. The number of Jews who died in Mauthausen that year topped
3,000. Many groups of Poles also arrived in Mauthausen in 1944, after the
Warsaw Polish Uprising was suppressed, in October 1944. Many Polish students
and underground members were killed soon after they arrived.
Almost 25,000 new prisoners came to Mauthausen in 1945,
including a stream of Jewish prisoners from Hungary who had been previously interned
in camps along the Austrian-Hungarian border, and forced to build a line of
fortifications. As the battlefront drew closer, their camps were emptied out
and the prisoners were marched on foot to Mauthausen. Many died en route.
The Jews interned in Mauthausen were treated much worse
than the other prisoners. They were forced to dig tunnels at the sub-camps for
underground ammunition factories and were expected to do so at an unbearably
fast pace. After a month or so, the Jewish workers were so physically broken
and exhausted they could hardly move.
On May 3, 1945, a police unit from Vienna took over the
camp's security. The next day, all work stopped at the camp and the SS officers
left. On May 5, American troops arrived and liberated the camp. Altogether,
199,404 prisoners passed through Mauthausen. Approximately 119,000 of them,
including 38,120 Jews, were killed or died from the harsh conditions,
exhaustion, malnourishment and overwork. Furthermore, the sick, weak and
"undesirable" prisoners were taken to the nearby Hartheim Castle to
be exterminated in the gas chamber during the periods of August 1941 to October
1942 and April to December 1944.
 |
| A US soldier looks at the Mauthausen crematorium during the liberation of the camp. Austria, May 1945. |
 |
| A US soldier with liberated prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, May 1945. |
 |
| A pile of corpses at the Russian Camp (Hospital Camp) section of the Mauthausen concentration camp after liberation. Mauthausen, Austria, May 5-15, 1945. |
 |
A view of the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where prisoners were subjected to forced labor. Austria, 1938-1945.
|
So many lies from Heinz. Heinz wrote that “Martin
Bartesch committed no war crimes -- the OSI knows this. The complaint against
him never even mentioned any war crimes. Again, his only "crime" was
a questionable immigration infraction.”
Again, false. As Neal Sher told Israel National Radio, the OSI had the murder
book, the “roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS
guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.” That
murder book identified Martin Bartesch as having shot and killed a French Jew.
From the NY Times (emphasis added):
One piece of evidence gathered against Mr. Bartesch by the
Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations was the Mauthausen
''Unnatural Death Book,'' a log kept from October 1942 to April 1945 of
prisoner deaths.
Entry No. 300 shows that on Oct. 20, 1943, a
French Jew named Max Ochshorn was shot to death at the main camp of Mauthausen
by Pvt. Martin Bartesch of the SS, who was then 17.
There is much more to say about Martin Bartesch, for
instance that he continued to collect social security after he was stripped of
his citizenship and deported for a further two years until he died. (I hope it
was painful.) Bartesch did evil and lied about it to get off scot-free. His
family was complicit in covering up his crimes against humanity, because yes.
Jews are human.
 |
| Martin Bartesch after the war |
Which leads us back to Jimmeh and his little note in the
upper corner of a letter from SS-Sturmmann Martin Bartesch’s daughter, asking
for clemency for her father. The letter, similar to that of her brother Heinz, was one filled with lies. As Neal Sher related, without any fact-finding process
whatsoever, the dead president decided to let the Nazi (unknown to Carter, already deported) off the hook. Why?
Because of “cases like this.” (emphasis added):
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
Now what are we to think when the “case like this” is, in fact, one in which
someone killed a Jew (and probably more) and covered it up? In light of the
now-dead president’s long history of, for example, cozying up to Jew-hating
terrorists like Haniyeh and preaching against Jews in church, there can be only
one conclusion.
From the perspective of Jimmy Carter the antisemite, in the case where the murder victim is Jewish, the perpetrator (and his family!) deserve special consideration for “humanitarian reasons.”
That sure sounds a lot like “Final Solution.” Which makes sense: in the antisemitic world of Jimmy Carter—or rather the one he just left—liquidating the Jews is something people do for “humanitarian reasons,” i.e.; to benefit humanity. Which is why many of us Jews are not sorry Jimmeh has, in the inimitable words of Monty Python, joined the bleedin' choir invisible.
I don’t wonder what awaits—I hope he loves a good fire.
Thursday, January 02, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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