Wars happen. War is a rough business. Unpleasant things are part of it. James Bacque writes about our side of matters. It is claimed that he is not reliable. I claim that I think he is on the right lines. Major crimes were committed deliberately, with malice aforethought by politicians with real power, that is the power to get away with abusing power. The Jew, Morgenthau was one such. Killing a million German prisoners by systematic neglect was crime. The Wikipedia article, Allied War Crimes is about relatively small scale events, as distinct from political crimes.
Amazon.com: Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians ...
An extraordinary book. It tells two of the most extraordinary stories of the 20th century simultaneously. Neither has been told before. One is the story of a great hero - Herbert Hoover, not J. Edgar the FBI boss, but a multimillionaire humanitarian whose courage, outspokenness, persistence and dedication saved literally tens of millions of people from starvation after the first world war and then after the second. And it's the story of why we never hear about this. General Eisenhower, war "hero" and later US president, of whom we have all heard, persued a deliberate policy of preventing available food aid into Germany between 1945-49. Laws preventing immigration turned the country into a prison. As Bacque revealed in earlier book OTHER LOSSES, millions of disarmed soldiers died in prison camps; further more, Bacque tells the story of the suffering of civilians, dying from starvation. It is a part of living memory that times were extraordinarily hard, but Bacque's research has enabled an estimate of the scale for the first time: at least 9 million. He has found the documents which trace the decisions leading to this second holocaust, leading back to Eisenhower and his advisors. It is a courageous act for a man aged more than 70 accuse a war hero and president of being commiting atrocities. Bacques thoughts on collective are thought provocing. It's a sign of the times that a book like this is out of print. By it before it becomes a historical document in itself. Read it and tell people. It's relevant to today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bacque
James Bacque (born 19 May 1929) is a Canadian novelist, publisher and book editor. He was born in Toronto, Ontario.
Fiction writing
Bacque was a mainstream fiction writer and essayist before turning his attention, in 1989, to the fate of German soldiers held as POWs by the Allies after World War II. His recent works include Dear Enemy (2000), with Richard Matthias Mueller, essays on Germany Then and Now. This was followed by a novel, Our Fathers' War (2006).[citation needed] Bacque had just completed a comic drama for the stage entitled Conrad, about a media mogul in prison, which was scheduled for production on October 2, 2009 at the George Ignatieff Theatre in Toronto. Bacque's latest book, Putting On Conrad, about the experiences of producers trying to put on his play in the face of libel chill, is an amusing satire on Canada's literary establishment.Other Losses
Other Losses
Academic Analysis
In Other Losses (1989), Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more are said to have perished. The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "protecting power" and POWs were reclassified as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" in order to avoid recognition under the Geneva Convention. Bacque argued that this alleged mass murder was a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. He laid the blame on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying Germans were kept on starvation rations even though there was enough food in the world to avert the lethal shortage in Germany in 1945-1946.
Academic reviewers question three major aspects of Bacque's work: his claims that there was no post-war food shortage in other European countries; Bacque's estimate of the number of German deaths; and the allegation that Eisenhower was deliberately vindictive. Bacque's critics note many of the German soldiers were sick and wounded at the time of their surrender, and say his work does not place the plight of the German prisoners within the context of the grim situation in Western Europe in 1945 and 1946.Writing in the Canadian Historical Review, David Stafford called the book "a classic example of a worthwhile investigation marred by polemic and overstatement."[1] R.J. Rummell, a scholar of 20th-century atrocities, has written that "Bacque misread, misinterpreted, or ignored the relevant documents and that his mortality statistics are simply impossible.".[2] More recently, writing in the Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, S. P. MacKenzie states, "That German prisoners were treated very badly in the months immediately after the war...is beyond dispute. All in all, however, Bacque's thesis and mortality figures cannot be taken as accurate".[3]
Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who helped edit Other Losses, wrote I quarrel with many of your interpretations, [but] I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery and acknowledged that Bacque had made a "major historical discovery", in the sense that very little attention had hitherto been paid to the treatment of German POWs in Allied hands. He acknowledged he did not now support Bacque's conclusions, but said at the American Military Institute's Annual Meeting in March, 1990: "Bacque has done some research and uncovered an important story that I, and other American historians, missed altogether in work on Eisenhower and the conclusion of the war. When those millions of Wehrmacht soldiers came into captivity at the end of the war, many of them were deliberately and brutally mistreated. There is no denying this. There are men in this audience who were victims of this mistreatment. It is a story that has been kept quiet.[4]
However, in a 1991 New York Times book review,[5] Ambrose also claimed that "when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously - nay, spectacularly - flawed in its most fundamental aspects. [...] Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945,[6] there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People's Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas."
A book-length disputation of Bacque's work, entitled Eisenhower and the German POWs, appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and German historians.
One of the historians in support of Bacque was Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, 101st Airborne Division, who in 1945 took part in investigations into allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany and later became a Senior Historian with the United States Army. In the introduction to the book he states "Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated one million [German] men, most of them in American camps . . . Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequalled by anything in American history . . . an enormous war crime."
Despite the criticisms of Bacque's methodology, Stephen Ambrose and Brian Loring Villa, the authors of the chapter on German POW deaths, conceded the Allies were motivated in their treatment of captured Germans by disgust and revenge for German atrocities.[7] They did, however, argue Bacque's casualty figures are far too high, and that policy was set by Allied politicians, not by Eisenhower.[8]
Nevertheless, Stephen Ambrose conceded, "we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable."[9]
Jonathon Osmond, writing in the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "Bacque...has published a corrective to the impression that the Western allies after the Second World War behaved in a civilised manner to the conquered Germans... The voices of those who suffered give harrowing accounts of cruelty and suffering... It is clear that he has opened up once more a serious subject dominated by the explanations of those in power. Even if two-thirds of the statistical discrepancies exposed by Bacque could be accounted for by the chaos of the situation, there would still be a case to answer."[10] Joan Beaumont, writing in the December, 1995 issue of The Journal of Modern History, discussed the reactions to the book and concluded "(T)he landscape of the history of the Second World War, and of prisoners of war, remains permanently changed by Bacques's work."
Crimes and Mercies
In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies (1997), Bacque claimed that Allied policies (particularly Soviet policies) led to the premature deaths of 5.7 million German civilians, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German P.O.W.s due to Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the five years following World War II. The book also details the charity work conducted by the Allies, primarily Canada and the United States, crediting it with saving or improving the lives of up to 500 million people around the world in the post war period. This work was led by Herbert Hoover at the behest of President Truman, and by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, together with Norman Robertson and Mitchell Sharp. This was the largest relief program ever organized, and expressed the ideals of many of the allied combatants.Crimes and Mercies met with far less hostility from historians, who acknowledge the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians held in Soviet captivity, and possibly up to two million civilians who died in the mass expulsions of Germans from East Prussia, eastern Brandenburg, Pomerania, western Poland, Silesia, the Sudetenland and Romania.
From http://www.rense.com/general46/more.html
Mass Slaughter Of 7-8 Million
More Germans, 1945-1950
12-30-2003
In 1997 James Bacque published his Crimes and Mercies, which showed that more than nine million Germans (mostly civilians) died as a result of Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the first five years after World War II. These deaths were not accidental, but were the result of deliberately genocidal policies instituted by Dwight Eisenhower and Henry Morgenthau. They began planning for this in 1944, before the extent of the atrocities of the death camps became known. (That more Germans did not starve to death or die of illness in the post-war years was due to the humanity of Herbert Hoover and others.) Awareness of this act of genocide has been suppressed for fifty years not only by the Allied governments but also by the German government. James Bacque: Did the Allies Starve Millions of Germans? Here is a review of James Bacque's Crimes and Mercies By Eric Blair - Crimes and Mercies: A Hidden Holocaust--Revealed Chapter VIII of the book: History and Forgetting. The book is available from Amazon US and also from Amazon UK, where a reviewer writes: "Bacque's book is an amazing revelation of some of the worst crimes ever committed in this century - the fact that they were covered up for so long only makes it worse. After reading this book you will ask yourself who the 'good guys' really were. The truth is that there were no good guys - only amoral manipulators and criminals - on both sides. [Well, actually, as Bacque makes clear, there were some good guys: Herbert Hoover, Mackenzie King, Norman Robertson and Victor Gollancz among others.] This is the book the establishment does not want you to read - and with good reason! It tells of deliberate allied policy to 'reduce' the German population after the war by mass starvation. Well, they succeeded, by 5.7 million to be precise - this in addition to the 1.1 million starved prisoners of war, 2.5 - 3 million murdered ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and tens of thousands of civilian forced labourers killed from maltreatement in France. Bacque's other excellent book - Other Losses - gives more information about this hidden Holocaust. Order this book now and forget the lies your history teacher told you - remember that history is only the version as told by the winners." The book been translated into German as Der geplante Tod and is available from amazon.de. http://www.serendipity.li/hr.html#c&m