The Eisenhower Genocide, history that is never taught in schools.

anuary 5, 2014 by admin

The untold story of “Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadows Death Camps – A Deliberate Policy of Extermination” of the Surrendered German forces by the Allies, in post-war Germany (Rheinwiesenlager).

GERMAN HOLOCAUST GERMAN GENOCIDE: EISENHOWER’S DEATH CAMPS – Other Losses – Crimes and Mercies [ Free E-Books ] The Last Dirty Secret Of World War Two – Saturday Night Magazine

If Video does not play, press [HD] Button or [Links] here: [Documentary: Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadows Death Camps – A Deliberate Policy of Extermination] [ LINK (2) ]


Scanned images of the text of the cover story published in the September 1989 issue of Saturday Night describes Eisenhower’s barbarism. Here is the truth.
Bacque tells the truth about how Eisenhower murdered thousands of German prisoners of war AFTER the surrender. General George Patton (who released all his German prisoners) wrote in 1945 that Eisenhower was using “practically Gestapo methods” in torturing and killing German POWs.
In August 1944 Dwight D. Eisenhower (who in the early 1960s ordered the assassination of Patrice Lamumba) and Henry C. Morgenthau came up with the Morgenthau Plan to inflict collective punishment upon the German people following the end of the Second World War.
This was, basically, a plan to starve millions of Germans, mostly citizens, to death.
Although the plan was officially cancelled, it was in fact implemented. Between 1945 and 1953 it is estimated between 9 to 15 million ethnic Germans were killed, mainly civilians.
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EISENHOWER’S DEATH CAMPS – The Last Dirty Secret Of World War Two – Saturday Night Magazine

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Bacque James Other Losses pdf
[ “Other Losses” – James Bacque ]

[ “Other Losses” – Bacque James ]


[ Crimes And Mercies ]


REVIEWS:
**** Not an easy read, but rings true, sadly
I read about half the book, I have a hunch the author is indeed telling the plain truth, nothing more or less. While stationed in the US Army in West Germany in the mid-80’s, I learned enough German to talk to (among others) some older men who had been POWs. I was mildly baffled then by their differing accounts: one who surrendered in North Africa was profuse with praise and gratitude for his captors. A couple who were rounded up at the end of the war around the Main river were glad that West Germany had turned out so well under U.S. control, but made no bones about how hard their captivity had been. I thought “must be sour grapes, because we Americans always treat the captured enemy to cream cakes and chocolate” and so on. However, my commanding officer, an avid historian himself, also mentioned he’d heard of a lot of German POW’s dying at the end of the war. To make a long story short, there was a sort of whispered “oral tradition” in the US Army in Germany of stories passed from the old timers to the new guys about something pretty bad happening to the POWs in the Rhein-Main (confluence of two rivers) area. My father was the one who recommended the book to me. It is difficult going, because of so much attention to detail, etc., but the main thing is, it unfortunately corroborates with what I have heard from both German and U.S. sources. What to do? I think this episode is like that of slavery in the 19th century. We can’t undo what’s been done, but we can try to make sure we do better. And mostly we have, not one of the old Germans I talked to would have traded places with those who were captured by the Soviets.
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***** Who are the good guys?
This shocking book shreds the notion of a higher moral authority most Americans take for granted as their legacy of victory in WWII. Mr. Bacque sifts through reams of Army records and exposes the cover-ups, obfuscations, and downright distortions perpetrated by Army high command in the heady days following Allied victory in Europe. He details General Eisenhower’s nearly pathological hatred of Germany and the German people and his systematic starvation and neglect of disarmed German soldiers and civilians. The death count is staggering, and the behavior of those in command, criminal. All the more so, because this type of spiteful retribution was unbeknownst and contrary to the will of the American people. The foreword is by Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, Jr. A retired Colonel, and senior historian for the U.S. Army
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***** Well Documented Account of Deceit and Hypocrisy
It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that this book did not inspire more research into the subject of the maltreatment of German POWs (or perhaps it did, in which case I am simply not aware of it). I tend to think, however, that academia and the media–the two institutions which could have launched any number of investigations–preferred to let sleeping dogs lie rather than take a chance on the accuracy of Bacque’s work. After all, what if Ike really had a pathological hatred of Germans? What if tens of thousands of German POWs died–in peace time–as a result of systematic deprivation and neglect? “Other Losses” is a carefully researched book which marshals the facts and reaches its conclusions by an inexorable process of elimination. I notice that WizardManO offers nothing in his review to refute Bacque’s veracity. He merely calls him a revisionist (as if that resolves the issue) and expresses his regret that the book was allowed to be published. Watch out for book burners, by whatever name they call themselves!
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***** An important examination of a hidden facet of WW II history
James Bacque came across this topic while writing a biography of a wounderful Frenchman, Raoul Laporterie, who had saved 1600 Jews during WW II. Discovering that Raoul had also saved two German POWs from slave labor, he got into this topic and, with the assistance of a U.S. Army Col./historian, researched this book. It examines the treatment of POWs and the employment of slave labor by the western Allies. Recently he has published “Crimes and Mercies”; using newly available sources and expanding the topic to the massacres of German civilians in the East and what he believes was a process of deliberate starvation of German civilians for two years after the war. The tolls he computes: 1.1M POWs killed; 2M forced laborers employed in the west; of 900K forced laborers held by the French (mostly POWs but also civilians), 300K dead; 2.1 to 6 M civilians massacred in the East, and “excess” deaths of 5.7 M civilians from 1945 to 1950. Is this possible? (This is important, these books have been attacked as fantasy or worse.) I believe that it is. A principal corroberative source I have is the experiences of relatives and family friends. My cousin Siegfried was captured at the end of the war. The day the war ended the treatment of the POWs went from correct to brutal. He was then sent to France as a forced laborer, and only survived because the major commanding his last camp told the men that he had been a POW for 5 years and had been treated correctly, and what was being done to them was a terrible crime, and that he would do everything to see that they survived. A family friend, formerly a Ford (US) executive and then with VW, was kidnapped out of his office and sent to France as a slave; his family had no idea what happened to him.Read more ›
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Re: Was There A German Holocaust After WWII?
June 6 2006
Canadian James Bacque has written on the topic yet most give no credence to his claims. Some of what he states I know for a fact to be true, so I try to look at his other claims with a more open mind instead of dismissing them outright.
http://www.serendipity.li/hr/bacque01.htm
As soon as the Second World War ended in 1945, Canada and the United States began shipping food to the hundreds of millions of people who were facing starvation as a result of the war. Unprecedented in world history, this massive program fulfilled the highest ideals for which the Western Allies had fought. Their generosity seemed to have no limit. They fed former enemies — Italy and Japan — as well as a new enemy, the Soviet Union.
Only Germany was left out.
It is well-known in the West that the Allies hanged Nazis for crimes — the murder of Jews, the brutal mass expulsions, the deadly forced-labour camps, the starvation of entire nations. What is not generally known is that these occupying Allied armies carved off 25 per cent of Germany’s most fertile land and placed it under Russian and Polish control, forcibly expelling about 16 millions people into what remained. It has also been forgotten — or hidden — that the Allies forbade emigration and kept millions of prisoners in forced-labour camps. International charitable aid to Germany was banned for another year, then restricted for more than a year. When it was permitted, it came too late for millions of people.
In a plan devised by U.S. secretary of the treasury Henry C. Morgenthau Jr., the Allies “pastoralized” Germany. They slashed production of oil, tractors, steel and other products that had been essential to the war effort. They cut fertilizer production by 82 per cent. They undervalued German exports (which they controlled), depriving Germans of cash needed to buy food. And a large percentage of young male workers were kept in forced-labour camps for years. During the six months following the end of the war, Germany’s industrial production fell by 75 per cent.
The loss of so much fertile land and the drop in fertilizer supplies caused agricultural production to fall by 65 per cent. Sixty million people began to starve in their huge prison.
The mass explusions from one part of Germany to another, approved at the Allied victory conference in Potsdam in July and August, 1945, were enforced “with the very maximum of brutality,” wrote British writer and philantropist Victor Gollancz in his book, Our Threatened Values (1946). Canadian writer and TV producer Robert Allen, in an article titled “Letter From Berlin”, in Reading magazine (February, 1946), described the scene in a Berlin railway station as refugees arrived in late 1945: “They were all exhausted and starved and miserable…. A child only half alive… A woman in the most terrible picture of despair I’ve seen… Even when you see it, it’s impossible to believe….God, it was terrible.”
In the West, the plan to dismantle German industrial capacity began at the British headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower in August, 1944. Meeting with Mr. Morgenthau, Gen. Eisenhower prescribed a treatment for Germany that would be “good and hard,” giving as his reason that “the whole German population is a synthetic paranoid.”
Mr. Morgenthau took a written version of their discussion to U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill when the two met in Quebec City in September, 1944. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, U.S. secretary of Cordell Hull and the U.S. secretary for war Henry L. Stimson all protested vigorously against the Morgenthau Plan because a pastoralized Germany could not feed itself. Mr. Hull and Mr. Stimson told Roosevelt that about 20 million Germans would die if the plan were implemented.
Most historians say the Morgenthau Plan was abandoned after the protests, but Mr. Morgenthau himself said it was implemented.
In the New York Post for Nov. 24, 1947, he wrote, “The Morgenthau Plan for Germany […] became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action… signed by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
I first happened on the outlines of this story while researching my 1989 book Other Losses, about the mass deaths of German prisoners of war in Allied camps. For 45 years, historians have never disputed a massive survey conducted over four years by the government of chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which stated that some 1.4 million German prisoners had died in captivity. What is still disputed by the two sides is how many died in each side’s camps. Each has blamed the other for nearly all the deaths.
The fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 provided a spectacular test of the truth: If the KGB archives recorded how many Germans died in Soviet camps, the world would know how many died in the West.
In 1992, I went to the KGB archives in Moscow, where I was permitted to troll the long, gloomy aisles, free to read and photocopy anything I wanted. And there I found the reports from KGB Colonel I. Bulanov and others showing that 450,600 Germans had died in Soviet camps. Given the figure of 1.4 million deaths, this meant that close to one million had died in Western camps.
In addition, the KGB records show that the Soviets had also imprisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians, of whom many thousands died.
This was the shadow of a greater tragedy, the fate of German civilians.
The recent declassification of the Robert Murphy Papers at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California, and the Robert Patterson manuscript papers in Washington focused the picture. Mr. Murphy had been chief U.S. diplomatic adviser in Germany, and Mr. Patterson the secretary for war after 1945.
Some of Mr. Murphy’s papers show a catastrophic death rate in Germany, highlighted by a surprising comment by Mr. Murphy in discussing German demographics. He said in a State Department position paper in 1947 that the U.S. statistical projection of births, immigration and officially reported deaths showed that over the next three years the German population should be 71 million, but that “to be conservative and in view of the present high death rate in Germany, a figure of 69 million will be used.” In other words, Mr. Murphy was basing high-level U.S. policy on the knowledge that the actual German death rate was approximately double the rate officially reported to Washington by the U.S. military governor.
In the National Archives in Ottawa, I found a document seized by Canadians in 1946, showing a death rate in the city of Brilon in north-central Germany almost triple the total reported by the Allies for their zones of Germany in 1945-46. The U.S. Army medical officer in Germany secretly reported that the actual death rate in the U.S. zone in May, 1946, was 21.4 per 1,000 per year, or 83 per cent higher than the military governor was reporting to Washington.
These documents in Ottawa, Moscow, Washington and Stanford, recently revealed or long neglected, show that the Allies not only destroyed most major German industry, they also reduced German food production to the point that Germans received less food for long periods during several years than the starving Dutch had received under German occupation.
“From 1945 to the middle of 1948, one saw the probable collapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation,” These are not the words of a revisionist historian of the 1990s, but the sober judgment of a U.S. Navy medical officer on the scene. Captain Albert Behnke compared German and Dutch starvation: For months in parts of Germany, the ration set by the occupying Allies was 400 calories per day; in much of Germany it was often around 1,000, and officially for more than two years it was never more than 1,550. The Dutch always got more than 1,394.
And for his part in starving people in the Netherlands, Nazi commander Arthur Seyss-Inquart was hanged by the Allies.
A comparison of the German censuses of 1946 and 1950 show the effect of the food shortages. The 1950 census showed 5.7 million people fewer than there should have been according to the number of people recorded in the 1946 census, minus officially reported deaths, plus births and “immigrants” (people expelled from the east and returning prisoners) in the period from 1946 to 1950.
Mr. Murphy had, indeed, been conservative, partly because he underestimated the number of prisoners due to return to Germany from Russia. The total tally of unacknowledged deaths among the prisoners, refugees and non-expelled civilians comes to around nine million people between 1945 and 1950, far more than the number who died during the war itself. All of these deaths were surplus to those actually reported.
While Germans starved, the Canadian-U.S. relief program swung into action in other parts of the world. Former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, then chief food adviser to president Harry Truman, flew around the world assessing need and supply. He found big regions of food poverty, as there has always been and still are, but not insurmountable world food shortage. In fact, world food production in 1945, according to the U.S. government statistics, was 90 per cent of the average of the years from 1936 to 1938. By the end of 1946, it was virtually normal.
Mr. Hoover begged, borrowed and bought enough food from the few other surplus countries — Australia and Argentina — to feed nearly all the world’s starving. He congratulated Canadians warmly for their co-operation in a CBC speech in Ottawa in 1946: “To Canada flows the gratitude of hundreds of millions of human beings who have been saved from starvation through the efforts of this great Commonwealth.”
As Mr. Hoover pronounced victory over the greatest famine threat in world history, Germans were entering their worst year ever. In early 1946, reports of conditions in Germany led U.S. senators, among them Kenneth Wherry and William Langer, to protest against “this addlepated… brutal and vicious Morgenthau Plan.”
Belatedly, Mr. Truman asked Mr. Hoover to intervene. Mr. Hoover spoke to all North Americans: “Millions of mothers are today watching their children wilt before their eyes.” Infant mortality rates in some German cities were 20 per cent per year, catastrophically higher than the average in Germany before the war or in contemporary Europe.
Cases of tuberculosis among children in Kiel, in the British zone, increased by 70 per cent over the prewar period.
Mr. Hoover called for mercy to Germany.
“I can only appeal to your pity and your mercy…Will you not take to your table an invisible guest?”
Canadians and Americans set the table for the invisible guest.
According to prime minister Mackenzie King’s chief foreign-affairs adviser, Norman Robertson, Canada was the only country that had kept its food commitments to help the starving. Only in Canada did rationing and price controls continue long after the war so that others could be fed.
This unique campaign saved 800 million lives, according to Mr. Hoover.
Some older Germans treasure the memory of the “Hoover Speise” (meal) that warmed their bodies at school in 1947. Many millions — including hundreds of thousands of Canadians born in Germany — also remember their homes in parts of Germany now under Polish or Russian rule. None dreams of reparations; all yearn for us to know their story.
This article first appeared in the Toronto Globe & Mail, 20 September 1997.
SOURCE: http://www.network54.com/Forum/211833/thread/1149622904/Was+There+A+German+Holocaust+After+WWII-
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Ethnic Germans “A Forgotten Genocide” full Video
Published on Nov 15, 2013
Google “The Morgenthau plan” “The Kaufmann plan” “The Hooton plan”
Three detailed plans for the total extermination of the German people written by jews.
Who wanted to exterminate who ?
“The Morgenthau Plan for Germany … became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action … signed by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” – New York Post (Nov. 24, 1947)
More than nine million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after the Second World War – one quarter of the country was annexed, and about fifteen million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Western governments continue to conceal and deny these deaths.
“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 unequaled by anything in American history . . . an enormous war crime.” – Col. Ernest F. Fisher, PhD Lt. 101st Airborne Division, Senior Historian, United States Army.The Morgenthau Plan:
“The Polish terror in the Ukraine today is worse than anything else in Europe. Ukraine became a country of desperation and destruction. The murderous deeds multiplied. The Germans have been tortured, mutilated, excruciated to death, their corpses were desecrated. Villages and palaces have been robbed, ignited, blown up. The depicted incidents in the official publication of the German government in 1921 exceed the worst actions one can imagine.” — Prof. Dr. René Martel in his book, Les frontières orientales de l`Allemagne (Paris 1930) about the Polish raids in Upper Silesia in 1921.
“We know that the war between Poland and Germany can´t be prevented. We have to systematically and energetically prepare ourselves for this war. The present generation will see that a new victory at Grunwald will be written into history´s pages. But we will battle out this Grunwald in the suburbs of Berlin. Our ideal is to chamfer Poland with borders along the Oder in the west and the Neiße at Lausitz and to absorb Prussia from Pregel to the Spree. In this war no prisoners will be made, there will be no place for humanitarian feelings.” — The censored, and closely to the Polish military dictatorship related newspaper Mosarstwowiecz (1930), three years before Hitler came to power.
“The millions of Jews who live in America, England and France, North and South Africa, and, not to forget those in Palestine, are determined to bring the war of annihilation against Germany to its final end.” (The Jewish newspaper, Central Blad Voor Israeliten in Nederland, September 13, 1939)
The Benes Decree
Documents on the expulsion of Sudeten Germans
Compilation and introduction by
Dr. Wilhelm K. Turnwald
“Any act, the object of which is to aid the struggle for liberty of the Czechs and Slovaks is not illegal.”
“Any violent act, including rape and the murdering of children, is sanctioned.”
In the town of Saaz, thousands of German women were herded into huge barracks. As night fell, hundreds of Czech militia entered the barracks and picked out their victims, mostly young women. Whoever wanted to could rape them. For two whole weeks, night after night, this mass rape continued. Without decent food and medicines, babies and young children were dying at a rate of up to fifteen per day. Eventually, when the survivors were transported to Germany, they left behind around 2,000 of their dead. In Troppau, in Silesia, 4,200 German women and children were expelled back to Germany, a journey by rail, in unheated freight cars, that lasted eighteen days. When the train arrived in Berlin, only 1,350 were still alive
The Evening Independent, St Petersburg, Florida, Tuesday, April 24, 1945
April prisoner bag over 1.000.000 (headline)
Paris, April 24-AP- The allied bag of German prisoners during April already has passed the one million mark with six more days left in the month.
From April 1 to 22 inclusive 992.578 prisoners were killed. It is estimated that well over 20.000 were captured yesterday.

http://truedemocracyparty.net/2014/01/german-holocaust-german-genocide-9-to-15-million-germans-killed-1945-1953-the-morgenthau-plan-eisenhowers-death-camps-a-forgotten-genocide/


Absolutely flabbergasted when I found this, and many other links to it, including Wiki.   Going to do some more research.

Wow now there is some of the worst revisionist history I have actually read also before



Other Losses is a 1989 book by Canadian writer James Bacque, in which Bacque alleges that U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower intentionally caused the deaths by starvation or exposure of around a million German prisoners of war held in Western internment camps briefly after the Second World War. Other Losses charges that hundreds of thousands of German prisoners that had fled the Eastern front were designated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" in order to avoid recognition under the thirdGeneva Convention, for the purpose of carrying out their deaths through disease or slow starvation. Other Losses cites documents in the U.S. National Archives and interviews with people who stated they witnessed the events. The book claims that there was a "method of genocide" in the banning of Red Cross inspectors, the returning of food aid, the policy regarding shelter building, and soldier ration policy.
Stephen Ambrose and seven other historians examined the book soon after its publication, and came to the conclusion that it was inaccurate and the product ofconspiracy theory. Other historians, including the former senior historian of the United States Army Center of Military History, Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, who was involved in the 1945 investigations into the allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany and who wrote the book's foreword, argues that the claims are accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses




Some people should really research what they read, because like myself who studies and researches history its best to do this before posting up falsehoods as this article is

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW
In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps':
A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers
Martin Brech

In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the "Battle of the Bulge," my training was cut short, my furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the "kissing disease," I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.
By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a "repo depot" (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned, and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.
In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.
Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.
Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up." No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was "out of line," leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food, and that these orders came from "higher up." But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense," and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, "Why?," he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.
This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies. This amplified our self-righteous cruelty, and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.
These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.
Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.
The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when. I was put on the "graveyard shift," from two to four a.m. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something. I had to investigate.
When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way.
I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face.
Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades, and could only admire their courage and devotion.
On May 8, V.E. Day [1945], I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone [of occupation], where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps.
On this day, however, we were happy.
As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at their request. This thoroughly "broke the ice," and soon we were singing songs we taught each other, or that I had learned in high school German class ("Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my "Eisenhower jacket," and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy. I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion.
Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our "killing fields."
When I finally saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were "camp followers," selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some, and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn't think they deserved imprisonment.
More and more I was used as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal," which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He'd been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back," but I didn't think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work."
Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away.
When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told that their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.
Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt, and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we'd been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.
"So what?" some would say. "The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours." It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded, while ours was at hand. But two wrongs don't make a right. Rather than copying our enemy's crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history. This is why I am speaking out now, 45 years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government's murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.
I realize it's difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, that perhaps will remind other witnesses that "the truth will make us free, have no fear." We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all.

---

About the author
Martin Brech lives in Mahopac, New York. When he wrote this memoir essay in 1990, he was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Brech holds a master's degree in theology from Columbia University, and is a Unitarian-Universalist minister.
This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166. (Revised, updated: Nov. 2008)

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p161_Brech.html

The New Orleans panel[edit]

After the publication of Bacque's book, a panel of eight historians gathered for a symposium in the Eisenhower Center for American Studies^[38] at the University of New Orleans from December 7–8, 1990 to review Bacque's work.^[39] The introduction to a book later published containing each panelists' papers noted that Bacque is a Canadian novelist with no previous historical research or writing experience.^[40] The introduction concludes that "Other Losses is seriously—nay, spectacularly—flawed in its most fundamental aspects."^[39] The historians conclude that, among its many problems, Other Losses:^[39]

• misuses documents
  
  
• misreads documents
  
  
• ignores contrary evidence
  
  
• employs a statistical methodology that is hopelessly compromised
  
  
• made no attempt to see the evidence he has gathered in relation to the broader situation
  
  
• made no attempt to perform any comparative context
  
  
• puts words into the mouths of the subjects of his oral history
  
  
• ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively dealt with his central accusation
  
  

As a consequence of those and other shortcomings, the book "makes charges that are demonstrably absurd."^[39] Panel member Stephen Ambrose later wrote in the New York Times:

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, 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. Maj. Ruediger Overmans of the German Office of Military History in Freiburg who wrote the final volume of the official German history of the war estimated that the total death by all causes of German prisoners in American hands could not have been greater than 56,000 approximately 1% of the over 5,000,000 German POWs in Allied hands exclusive of the Soviets. Eisenhower's calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany in 1945-46 were too low and he had been asking for more food shipments since February 1945. He had badly underestimated the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies; more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million as German soldiers crossed the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians—about 13 million altogether crossing the Elbe to escape the Russians, and the number of slave laborers and displaced persons liberated was almost 8 million instead of the 5 million expected. In short, Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were at least 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected not to mention all of the other countries in war ravaged Europe, the Philippines, Okinawa and Japan. All Europe went on rations for the next three years, including Britain, until the food crisis was over.^[41]

Historians Gunter Bischof and Brian Loring Villa stated that a research report from the panel "soundly refuted the charges of Other Losses, especially Bacque's fanciful handling of statistics."^[42] The historians further stated:

It is not necessary to review here Bacque's extravagant statistical claims which are the heart of his conspiracy theory. The eight scholars who gathered in New Orleans and contributed to Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (1992) refuted Bacque's wily misinterpretations of statistics and oral history evidence in detail. Numerous reviews of the book written by the top talent in the military history profession such as John Keegan and Russel Weigley were persuaded by the findings of the book. These findings have since been further solidified by detailed case studies on individual American POW camps in Germany hastily built at the end of the war like Christof Strauss's exhaustive Heidelberg dissertation on the POW and internment in the Heilbronn camp.
The mountain of evidence has been building that Bacque's charge of the "missing million" supposedly perishing in the American (and French) POW camps in Germany and France is based on completely faulty interpretation of statistical data. There was never any serious disagreement that the German POWs were treated badly by the U.S. Army and suffered egregiously in these camps in the first weeks after the end of the war. That the chaos of the war's end would also produce potentially mismatches and errors in record keeping should surprise no one either. But there was NO AMERICAN POLICY to starve them to death as Bacque asserts and NO COVER UP either after the war. No question about it, there were individual American camp guards who took revenge on German POWs based on their hatred of the Nazis.^[42]

New Orleans panel conclusions regarding Other Losses[edit]

The New Orleans panel's book introduction concluded "[t]hat Bacque is wrong on nearly every major and nearly all his minor charges seem to us to be overwhelmingly obvious. To sum up: Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was indeed a severe world food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about DEF designation or about the Other Losses column. Bacque's "Missing Million" were old and young boys in the militia dismissed early from the American camps; they were escapees from camps and POWs/DEFs transferred from camp to camp in Germany and Europe for various reasons."^[43]
Villa states that "James Bacque's Other Losses illustrates what happens when the context surrounding historical persons and important events is lost. The effect to give known facts a twist that seems dramatically new in important ways, but this is means appearance of originality is a little deceptive. For the most part, Bacque's book is not very original at all. When it seems so, the price is purchased at the price of accuracy."^[44]He further stated that "[t]hose parts of Other Losses that might rise above a failing grade in an undergraduate term paper are not new. It has long been known that German prisoners of war suffered terribly at the end of World War II, that they died by the thousands after hostilities ceased in the European theater, and that many were required to work as forced laborers for the victors."^[44] The main lines of the story have long been known, written up for example in the extensive German "Maschke Commission" between 1962 and 1975.^[44] Villa states that Bacque only adds two "novel" propositions: first, that the number that died was in the hundreds of thousands, and seconds, that these deaths were the result of deliberate extermination on the part of Eisenhower.^[44] "The falsity of Bacque's charges can be easily demonstrated once the context, particularly the decision-making environment, is examined."^[44]
Bischoff concludes that just the application of common sense alone refutes many of the most "fantastical charges" of Bacque, such as asking the question "How could a single man order one million men killed without being caught in the heinous act? How could the bodies disappear without one soldier's coming forward in nearly fifty years to relieve his conscience? How could the Americans (almost one-third of whom are by ethnic background German) conspire for so long to cover up such a vast crime?"^[45]
In a 1989 Time Magazine book review, Ambrose did, however, apart from his criticisms of the book, concede that "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."^[46]

Other Losses documentary evidence of deaths[edit]

Other Losses claimed that "The victims undoubtedly number over 800,000, almost certainly over 900,000 and quite likely over a million. Their deaths were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep the prisoners alive."^[1] Other Losses asserts that roughly a million German prisoners—the "Missing Million"—disappeared between two reports issued on June 2, 1945, with one (the last of the daily reports) totaling prisoners in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in U.S. custody at 2,870,400, while the other (the first of the weekly reports) gives the figure as 1,836,000 prisoners in the Communication Zone (COM Z).^[23][47] As a consequence of this, according to Quartermaster Reports the number of rations issued to the camps was reduced by 900,000.^[48]
Historian Albert Cowdrey states that the reason for this is simply that COM Z is a subordinate of the ETO, and its figures omit prisoners held by other armies.^[47] In fact, Cowdrey states that the two documents further both cite exactly the same number of total prisoners in the ETO: 3,193,747.^[47] Cowdrey concludes "[t]o judge by these documents, there was no Missing Million. There was not even a missing one."^[47][49]
The title of "Other Losses" derives from the heading of a column in weekly reports of the U.S. Army's theater provost marshal, which Other Losses states is actually a "body count" of dead prisoners.^[47] Cowdrey states that, in many cases, as explained by the footnotes in the very documents themselves, the "other losses" were transfers between zones and camps, which were regularly done for a variety of reasons, none of them sinister and all properly noted in the accompanying documents.^[43][50] Cowdrey further states that, not only are these figures many times mentioned in the footnotes, but they are also reflected in the actual increase and decrease in numbers of each camp in the individual army reports.^[50] Cowdrey concludes "it is unclear how Bacque could have failed either to see these documents or, if he saw them, to understand their significance to the book he was writing."^[51] In addition, while Other Losses asserts that these prisoners died of diseases or slow starvation, Cowdrey states that even a cursory glance at the figures shows that this would have been impossible, with figures varying between zero and over 189,000 from week to week.^[50]
The introduction to the book publishing many of the New Orleans panel papers also noted that Bacque ignored the greatest source of for the "other losses" column, an August 1945 Report of the Military Governor that states "An additional group of 664,576 are lists as 'other losses' , consisting largely of members of the Volkssturm [People's Militia] released without a formal charge."^[43] It stated that Bacque ignored this document despite its presence in the National Archives, the Eisenhower Library and elsewhere.^[43] It further stated the dismissal of the Volksstrum (mostly old men and boys) "accounts for most, quite probably all, of Bacque's 'Missing Million'".^[43] Bischoff notes that, in his later American edition of Other Losses, Bacque discredits the document as a fake "with a further fantastic twist in his convoluted cycle of conspiracy theories, he claims that Eisenhower and the army 'camouflaged' dead POWs/DEFs by listing them as 'discharged Volkssturm.'"^[52] Even though Eisenhower himself did not write the document, Bacque concludes that it must have been "doctored".^[52]
Regarding prisoners in French custody, historian Rudiger Overmans states that, while the total number of prisoners dying in French custody might have exceeded the official statistic of 21,000, no evidence exists that it was hundreds of thousands of deaths higher than that figure, as Bacque claims.^[53] Overmans states that, in addition to the various problems with the Bacque's "death rate" calculations regarding theRheinwiesenlager transit camps, he ignores that these camps were managed almost entirely by Germans and falsely claimed the no record existed of the handover of the camps to the French in June and July 1945, when detailed records of the handover exist.^[54] Overmans also said that Bacque incorrectly claimed that the United States did nothing to help with the French Rheinwiesenlager camps, when the United States engaged in a large operation to raise the caloric intake of those prisoners.^[54] Bacque's claims that the 167,000 in French camps that were dus pour des raisons divers (other losses) actually died in the winter of 1945-46 not only are not supported by the evidence, but they ignore French documents stating that that figure reflects the release of Volkssturm, women and the sick from those camps.^[55]
In addition, Overmans states that Bacque's claim that the 800,000 to 1,000,000 missing prisoners were originally German soldiers that fled from the east into western hands contradicts Soviet POW evidence "well established that we can exclude the idea of an extra million hiding somewhere in the figures."^[55] Overmans states that Bacque's claim that one million less prisoners were taken by the Soviet Union than thought produces absurd results, such as that only 100,000 total prisoners could have died in Soviet hands when it is well documented that this amount was exceeded by the dead prisoners from Stalingrad alone.^[56] In fact Bacque claimed that up to 500,000 of the missing prisoners were in Soviet camps. Post war Soviet POW evidence was discredited when the KGB opened its archives in the 1990s and an additional 356,687 German soldiers and 93,900 civilians previously recorded as missing were found to be listed as dying in the Soviet camps. Overmans also states that, did they as Bacque claims, flee to the American Rheinwiesenlager camps, they could have easily had contact with their relatives and that it is "quite inconceivable that these prisoners would not have been reported as missing by the their relatives."^[55] Moreover, Overmans states that the vast majority of this extra million would have been recorded in registrations that occurred in 1947-1948 and 1950, "but the registrations showed nothing of the kind."^[55] Overmans further states that, as evidence that Germans believed that missing veterans were mostly in the west, Bacque relies on a statement by Chancellor Adenauer that turns out in the minutes of the purported meeting to be a "statement related to a TASS report concerning the POWs in the Soviet Union. So much for Bacque's careful use of sources."^[56]

The plausibility of Eisenhower getting away with such atrocities[edit]

Overmans states that, comporting with the most basic matters of common sense, "if indeed 726,000 soldiers had died in the American camps (Bacque's number excluding those who supposedly died in French custody or after discharge), what became of the bodies?"^[56] Given that the Rheinwiesenlager stretched along 200 kilometers of the Rhine river, "Bacque's 726,000 dead would mean roughly 3,600 dead per kilometer or 5,800 per mile – better than one corpse per foot. Yet despite the widespread construction work carried out after the war, not a single one of these legion of dead was found."^[56] However, the sites where the camps were located are considered war graves where excavation is officially forbidden making such research problematical.^[57]
Villa states that, by Bacque's reasoning, George C. Marshall, who gave SHAEF as much or more attention to detail than did Eisenhower, would be similarly guilty, perhaps more so under his reasoning, though "Bacque" who cares little for exploring the context, does not even raise the question."^[58] Villa states that "It is a virtual impossibility that Eisenhower could have executed an extermination policy on his own" and "a near absolute impossibility that Marshall would not have noticed it, let alone that he would ever have tolerated it" and "what about the scores of officers and millions of soldiers who served under Eisenhower?"^[59]
Other Losses explains that Eisenhower's staff must have been implicated, charging "[t]he squalor of the camps came from the moral squalor polluting the higher levels of the army."^[9][59] Villa states that "[p]erhaps realizing that he already has a thesis involving a massive American conspiracy, Bacque is careful to exclude British officers from any participation or even knowledge of the crime. Although in his vast indictment, Bacque has included virtually Eisenhower's entire staff, all the doctors and personnel running the camps, the press who failed to uncover the monstrous crime and a whole generation of knowing but silent Germans, he has included not a single Briton."^[59] Villa notes that Bacque ignores that SHAEF was a fully integrated Anglo-American command, and many of Eisenhower's top officers were Britons who would have also had to cover up the conspiracy.^[59] Villa states that Bacque did not even need to read books to realize this, "all he had to do was to look at the pictures: in slightly more than half the portraits contained therein, the staff officers wear British uniforms. Bacque, one understands, wants a villain in the piece. A complicated modern military bureaucracy such as SHAEF, is a tedious subject to study, unlikely to yield the insidious conspiracy apparently sought by this ex-publisher."^[60] Villa stated regarding the plausibility of the claims in Other Losses that "The impossibility of Bacque's selective crime thesis—an American but not a British crime—becomes all the more evident when one examines the basic decisions affecting occupation policy."^[60]
Regarding the impossibility of a conspiracy on the scale purported by Bacque, Villa states that "n truth, had Eisenhower committed the crimes Bacque alleges, someone surely would have gossiped, ratted, leaked, or even just hinted. None did. Not even Field Marshal Montgomery. Certainly, if there had been a holocaust, it could never have been covered up."^[61] Regarding the overall bureaucracy within which Eisenhower had to operate, Villa stated that "Although the average reader of Other Losses would never know it, there was a constellation of authorities to whom Eisenhower had to report his actions. Examining the situation as of May 8, 1945, when his murderous policy is said to have gone into full gear, no responsible historian could ignore the many limitations on Eisenhower's authority that made it impossible for him to carry out an independent policy in Germany."^[44]

Other Losses methodology[edit]

Cowdrey stated that Bacque's methodology for determining just the "Other Losses" figures was also "slipshod", with Bacque filling gaps in the records where no "other losses" were recorded by "comput[ing] the number of deaths by applying the death rate given in Army statistics for another period to the known number of prisoners at hand."^[62] Cowdrey states that the "rate given in Army statistics" turned out to be a "rate invented by Bacque himself."^[62] Cowdrey states that, with regard to Bacque's attempt to analyze a U.S. Army hospital record document, Bacque not only missed an obvious typo throwing his calculations off by 10, but he also badly erred in the math used to tabulate purported death rates of 30%, which he attempts to use to support his claim that the "other losses" column in the weekly army reports reflects a body count.^[62]Cowdrey concludes that "the mathematical blunders of Other Losses are elementary. One turns from them feeling only embarrassment for the author who naively grounds his thesis upon them."^[63]
Historian Rolf Steininger stated that Bacque's claim that the failure to publish the 1960s and 1970s German Maschke Commission finding death figures to be a "cover up" contradicts that the entire 22 volume series was actually published in 1972 without any restrictions, to which only an oblique reference is made in an Other Losses endnote.^[64] Steininger says that "Bacque himself is one of the mythmakers" and that, when Bacque attacks the Maschke Commission scholars as "client-academics", "he oversteps the bounds of mythmaking and enters the territory of libel."^[64] Historian Gunter Bischoff states that it is simply "outrageous to dismiss this vast and impressive body of scholarship as being designed to produce 'soothing conclusions' for the German public, as Bacque puts it."^[65]
Bischoff said that while "most scholarly reviewers of Bacque's book have pointed out that Bacque fails to establish the proper historical context", "worse, the historical records that Bacque did use are amateurishly misrepresented and often misleading or wrong. Once Bacque's endnotes are checked, frequent misreadings of documents are easily discernible."^[66] As an example, Bischoff states that Bacque charged that General Mark Clark's raising of caloric intake in the Ebensee camp was "trying to exculpate himself before history" of Eisenhower's scheme to exterminate Germans.^[66] Bischoff states that Bacque fails to tell his readers, first, that Ebensee was not even an Allied prisoner of war camp, but a camp for displaced persons that was actually housing Polish Jews liberated from a nearby concentration camp, second, that Clark raised the caloric intake levels in response to a report critical of the treatment of liberated Jews that had just been released and, third, that Eisenhower soon thereafter also raised the levels for his Jewish displaced persons in camps run by Eisenhower.^[67]

Oral histories[edit]

Regarding oral histories, Bischoff concludes that "Bacque abuses the process through his highly selective presentation of oral histories and memoir literature."^[68] Other Losses cited Colonel Phillip S. Lauben as the source for the claim that the "other losses" weekly report column covered up deaths. The New Orleans panel noted that Lauben himself twice has since repudiated this.^[49] When describing his interview with Bacque, Lauben stated "I am 91 years old, legally blind, and my memory has lapsed to a point where it is quite unreliable ... Often during my talk with Mr. Bacque I reminded him that my memory has deteriorated badly during the 40 odd years since 1945. Mr. Bacque read to me the USFET POW figures for discharge and transfers to other national zones. It seemed to me that, after accounting for transfers and discharges, there was nothing left to make up the grand total except deaths and escapes. I.e.: the term OTHER LOSSES. I was mistaken ... many POWs were transferred from one U.S. Command to another U.S. Command. This left one with a loss and the other with a gain."^[51]
Bacque described his other witness, John Foster, as a camp guard "in charge of the work detail of fifty men, Germans and Americans, who did nothing all day but drag bodies out of the camp."^[69] Bischoff cites a researcher for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) who tracked down Foster who told the researcher that "he never was a member of a burial detail, he never buried a body in his life. And he's unaware of any such activity in any camps."^[69] When the CBC interviewer confronted Bacque with Foster's denial, Bacque responded "well, he's wrong. He's just wrong."^[69]
Bacque also interviewed Martin Brech, a U.S. soldier who was a guard at the Andernach camp. Brech discussed his experiences in detail, in which he witnessed the poor conditions in the camp, the large number of deaths, and the systematic starving of the prisoners. He said "The silence about this atrocity has pained me for forty-five years and I'm deeply grateful that James Bacque's 'Other Losses' has at last brought the truth to light."
Bacque states that he has received letters and phone calls from about 2,000 Germans who survived the camps, expressing gratitude that the truth about their experience has finally been published.

European food shortage[edit]

Historian James Tent concludes that "James Bacque might be willing to relegate the world food shortage to the category of myth. Few others will do so. Perhaps he can try the interviewing techniques that he employed in Other Losses—namely putting words in the mouths of selective eyewitnesses."^[70] The introduction to the New Orleans panel's book concludes that Bacque's insistence not only defies common sense, but it would have shocked anyone in Europe in 1945.^[49] Other Losses states "There was a lot more wheat available in the combined areas of western Germany, France, Britain, Canada and the USA than there had been in the same year in 1939."^[31][71] Tent states that Bacque selectively cited diary entries and other sources to come to the conclusion of a food abundance and the lack of transportation problems.^[72] Tent further stated that Bacque's statements that the German population was 4% smaller in 1945 than in 1939 while mentioning only an "influx of refugees from the East", completely ignored that that "influx" consisted of a staggering 10 to 13 million Germans displaced from the east and south into Germany that had to be fed and housed.^[72] The panel introduction also stated that Bacque ignored the overriding reality that German agriculture had suffered extreme productivity decreases in 1944 and 1945, a shortage of synthetic fertilizers had developed after nitrogen and phosphate stocks were channeled into ammunition production,^[73] Tent stated that Bacque completely ignored that, because coal reserves had disappeared from the industrial pipeline, fertilizer plants and other food production facilities were inoperable, meaning that German farmers could expect little if any fertilizer over the next one to two years and that fuel was next to non-existent to power run-down farm equipment.^[74] In addition, the panel introduction said that Bacque ignored that the destroyed German transportation infrastructure created additional logistical nightmares, with railroad lines, bridges and terminals left in ruins, the turnaround time for railroad wagons was five times higher than the prewar average, and, of the 15,600 German locomotives, 38.6% were no longer operating and 31% were damaged.^[75]
The introduction to the panel's book also states that Bacque ignored that Eisenhower himself was the one warning his superiors about food shortages as early as February 1945—months before the war had even ended—then again in May when Eisenhower requested food imports from the United States.^[49] Tent stated that Bacque also misleadingly cited only part of a June 1945 war report that 630,000 tons of imported wheat would meet the minimum German civilians minimum food requirements, leaving the reader thinking that the food shortage could easily be solved by United States shipments, without informing the reader of an accompanying report that the Allies brought in 600,000 tons of grain, and that it was quickly used up.^[76]
While Other Losses claims that the United States dismissed the Swiss Government from its role as a protecting power,^[77] Villa states that Bacque ignores that it was the Soviets that had vetoed permitting the continued existence of the German government in May 1945, leaving the Swiss no longer wanting to remain the protecting power because they no longer had a German government to which to report, and that the United Nations—including Canada—had concluded the same.^[78] Villa adds that, contrary to Bacque's implications, there is no evidence that Eisenhower would not have wanted the German government to continue operating under Doenitz' leadership in Flemsberg.^[78] Even with regard to the supposed Canadian protest, Villa states "this is another case of Bacque's outrageous editing of a document" with Bacque using ellipses to edit out of his quote of the document the key text stating "in the present unique situation there can be no protecting power for a Government which cannot exist."^[78]
Bischoff stated that, even in Bacque's later released American edition, "Bacque refuses to address the overwhelming evidence that there had been a great shortage of food in central Europe, beyond admitting that there was a food crisis in Germany in 1946" and "but again he turns the evidence on its head when he charges that 'Allied food policy [no longer does he heap the blame on the Americas alone, as in his Canadian edition] deliberately hampered the Germans in attempting to feed themselves.'"^[79] Bischoff states "the opposite is true", citing the large amounts of U.S. Army GARDA Aid, without which "German and Austrian civilians would have had a much tougher time surviving the hunger months of 1945 and 1946."^[79]

Other Losses treatment of Eisenhower statements[edit]

Bischoff and Ambrose stated that Other Losses states that of Eisenhower, "he felt ashamed that he bore a German name", citing Stephen Ambrose and Colonel Ernest Fisher, when what Ambrose said to Fischer was "It is rumored that Ike once said, 'I'm ashamed my name is Eisenhower,' but I've never seen it, never used it, and don't believe it."^[80] They concluded that "[s]uch twisting of historical evidence—both primary and secondary—is not unusual in Other Losses. In the end, Bacque usually resorts to conspiracy theories to salvage his outrageous charges."^[80] Regarding another example, Bischoff and Ambrose stated that "[o]ne of Bacque's strongest quotations is a line from one of Eisenhower's letters to his wife, Mamie: 'God I hate the Germans.' Bacque seems not to understand that the words were appropriate to the subject, that Ike was by no means unique, and that John Eisenhower printed the letter in his book Letters to Mamie, where Bacque found it, without embarrassment."^[80] They also stated that, when in 1943, when discussing that he had never been trained for such logistics when he faced a similar problem in Tunisia, Eisenhower stated "we should have killed more of them", which Bacque took seriously in "Other Losses" (it was also removed in 1969 from a report lest it offend Allies).^[81] POWs from Tunisia fared well after being shipped to the United States, where they were well fed in U.S. POW camps.^[81]

Other Losses discussion of DEF designations[edit]

With regard to DEF designations, Historian Brian Loring Villa stated that Bacque ignores the 1943 debates of the European Advisory Commission (EAC) and the 1944 EAC's instruments of surrender, not picking up until the March 1945.^[82] Other Losses states that "in March, as Germany was being cracked ... a message was being signed and initialed by Eisenhower proposed a startling departure from the Geneva Convention(GC)—the creation of a new class of prisoners who would not be fed by the Army after the surrender of Germany. The message, dated March 10, reads: ... "^[3][82] Other Losses then quotes the cable from the third paragraph, which, Villa states, permits the casual reader to believe that Eisenhower invented the term "disarmed enemy forces", specifically omitting the other parts of the document referencing the EAC's draft surrender terms suggesting a designation to avoid the Geneva Convention categories, or the later use of the term "disarmed enemy forces."^[83] Villa states that, when the actual full correspondence is read, Eisenhower was merely proposing, in March 1945 with thousands of prisoners surrendering, to act on the surrender condition drafts worked out months earlier.^[83] Villa concludes that "[a]ll Bacque had to do was look for the EAC draft surrender terms mentioned in the cable—these can readily be found in the standard collection of printed United States Diplomatic documents."^[83]
Villa further states that Other Losses wrongly cites a March CCS directive to Eisenhower, claiming that it directs Eisenhower to not take any prisoners after Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, when in fact, the directive states that those taken after V-E day should not be designated as "Prisoners of War" under the Geneva Convention.^[84] In fact, JCS 1067 required Eisenhower to continue to take prisoners after V-E Day.^[84]Moreover, if Bacque truly believes that Eisenhower was supposed to stop taking prisoners, Villa states that Bacque does not explain how Eisenhower could have gotten away with taking 2 million prisoners after this date without CCS action.^[84]
Villa also states that Bacque's assertion that the British rejected designations to not comply with the GC requirements are entirely unfounded and ignore that the British themselves requested that they be permitted to use such designations, with that request being granted by the CCS and used in surrenders to British troops.^[85] Villa states that Bacque also entirely ignores that it was the Soviets that had first raised issues about GC requirements in wartime conferences because they were not GC signatories, and as such, did not want condition surrender terms reflecting GC requirements.^[86] Villa stated that Bacque goes further regarding the Soviets, implying that the scale of Soviet gulags were a myth invented to cover up the American crime he asserts.^[86] Villa also stated that Bacque claims that Eisenhower initially underestimated the expected POW figures as part of his attempt to starve them, while in actuality, Eisenhower was desperately requesting to have food imports approved.^[86] Other Losses fails to cite JCS 1067, the primary restriction on food importation, even once in its notes.^[87] Villa also states that Bacque misrepresented a June 5, 1945 memorandum in a way that makes the reader believe that Eisenhower could have requisitioned additional food if he had wanted to, while the memorandum itself makes clear that Eisenhower had requested and was denied additional imports.^[87] Villa concludes: "Need it be added that anyone going back to the documents to find purported confessions of an extermination policy by one of Eisenhower's principal staff officers will find nothing even suggestive of it? Bacque has simply distorted the context beyond all recognition."^[88]

Other evidence for German POW deaths[edit]

Several historians rebutting Bacque have argued that the missing POWs simply went home, that Red Cross food aid was sent to displaced civilians and that German POWs were fed the same rations that the U.S. Army was providing to the civilian population. U.S. and German sources estimate the number of German POWs who died in captivity at between 56,000 and 78,000, or about one percent of all German prisoners, which is roughly the same as the percentage of American POWs who died in German captivity.^[89] The book Other Losses alleged 1.5 million prisoners were missing and estimated that up to 500,000 of these were in Soviet camps. When the KGB opened its archives in the 1990s, 356,687 German soldiers and 93,900 civilians previously recorded as missing were found to be listed in the Bulanov report as dying in the Soviet camps.^[90]
German POW expert Kurt W. Bohme noted that, of the 5 million prisoners in American hands, the European Theater of Operations provost marshall recorded a total of 15,285 prisoner deaths.^[91] In 1974, the German Red Cross reported that about 41,000 German MIAs were last reported in western Germany, which is also the location of the prisoner camps.^[92] It is reasonable to assume that some deaths in transit camps just before the end of the war went unreported in the chaos at the time.^[92] Historian Albert Cowdrey estimates that the total figure is unlikely to be above the aggregate of the recorded deaths and the MIAs, which together total 56,285.^[92] That maximum number would constitute approximately 1.1% of the 5 million total prisoners held by U.S. forces.^[92] That figure also is close to Bohme's estimate of 1% for deaths of prisoners held by the Western powers.^[92]
Many of these occurred in the initial Rheinwiesenlager transit camps.^[93] The German Maschke Commission which studied prisoner deaths in the 1960s and 1970s concluded that 557,000 prisoners lived in the Rheinwiesenlager camps.^[93] The official death toll for those camps was 3,053.^[93] The number registered by local Parish authorities was 5,311.^[93] The Maschke Commission noted that the largest claim was that "32,000 fatalities had been heard of", but the Maschke Commission considered this account to be impossible, as was anything in excess of double the Parish authorities' figure.^[93][94]
While harsh treatment of prisoners occurred, no evidence exists that it was part of an organized systematic effort.^[95] Bohme concluded that Eisenhower and the U.S. Army had to improvise for months in taking care of the masses of prisoners to prevent a catastrophe: "In spite of all the misery that occurred behind the barbed wire, the catastrophe was prevented; the anticipated mass deaths did not happen."^[95][96]
The total death rates for United States-held prisoners is also far lower than those held by most countries throughout the war. In 1941 alone, two million of the 3.3 million German-held Soviet POWs—about 60%—died or were executed by the special SS "Action Groups" (Einsatzgruppen).^[95][97] By 1944, only 1.05 million of 5 million Soviet prisoners in German hands had survived.^[98][99] Of some 2–3 million German POWs in Russian hands, more than 1 million died.^{[98][100][101]} Of the 132,000 British and American POWs taken by the Japanese army, 27.6% died in captivity—the Bataan death march being the most notorious incident, producing a POw death rate of between 40 and 60%.^[102]
The historian Niall Ferguson claims a significantly lower death rate of 0.15% for German POWs held by Americans, less than every other country except for fellow allied power Britain.^[103] Ferguson further claims that another advantage to surrendering to the British rather than the Americans was that the British were also less likely to hand German prisoners over to the Soviet Union.^[104] Large numbers of German prisoners were transferred between the Allies. The U.S gave 765,000 to France, 76,000 to Benelux countries, and 200,000 to the Soviet Union. The U.S. also chose to refuse to accept the surrender of German troops attempting to surrender in Saxony and Bohemia. These soldiers were instead handed over to the Soviet Union.^[105] (The Soviet Union in turn handed German prisoners over to other Eastern European nations, for example 70,000 to Poland)^[106] According to Ferguson the death rate of German soldiers held prisoner in the Soviet Union was 35.8%.^[107]
Ferguson tabulated the total death rate for POWs in World War II as follows:^[108]

[th] [/th][th]Percentage ofPOWs who died[/th]

Russian POWs held by Germans	57.5%
German POWs held by Russians	35.8%
American POWs held by Japanese	33.0%
German POWs held by Eastern Europeans	32.9%
British POWs held by Japanese	24.8%
British POWs held by Germans	3.5%
German POWs held by French	2.58%
German POWs held by Americans	0.15%
German POWs held by British	0.03%

Lack of records[edit]

There are no longer any surviving records showing which German POWs and Disarmed Enemy Forces were in U.S. custody prior to roughly September 1945. The early standard operating procedure for handling POWs and Disarmed Enemy Forces was to send a copy of the POW form to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS). However, this practice was apparently stopped as impractical, and all copies of the POW forms, roughly eight million, were destroyed.^[109][110] By way of contrast, the Soviet archives contain dossiers for every German POW they held, averaging around 15 pages for each

By early 1945 half of almost all German soldiers taken prisoner in the West were held by U.S. forces, while the other half were taken by the British. But in late March 1945 as Allied forces struck into the heart of Germany after crossing the Rhine at Remagen, the number of German prisoners being processed caused the British to stop accepting any more prisoners in their camps. This forced the U.S. Army to take immediate action and establish the Rheinwiesenlager in the western part of Germany.
The creation of the camps was made easier because prisoners would be deemed as Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs), a decision that had been taken in March 1943 by Eisenhower. Furthermore, all captured soldiers would no longer have the rights of prisoners of war guaranteed by the Geneva Convention because they belonged to a State that ceased to exist. Incidentally the Wehrmacht employed a similar strategy with imprisoned Italian soldiers following the surrender of fascist Italy in 1943. Italian prisoners were deemed Militärinternierte (English: Military Internees) and used as forced labour.
The camps were also established to stop any German insurgency following the surrender on 8 May 1945. The Allied leadership was worried some die-hard Nazi units might try to mount an effective guerilla campaign against the occupation. Historian Perry Biddiscombe believed the decision to keep hundreds of thousands of men in poor conditions of the Rheinwiesenlager camps was "mainly to prevent Werwolf activity" in post-war Germany.^[2]

Location of Rheinwiesenlager

location of the Rheinwiesenlager
Listings are from north to south with official number

• A4 Büderich
  
• A1 Rheinberg
  
• A9 Wickrathberg
  
• A2 Remagen (the Golden Mile)
  
• A5 Sinzig
  
• Siershahn
  
• A11 A14 Andernach
  
• Diez
  
• A13 Urmitz
  
• A10 Koblenz
  
• A8 Dietersheim
  
• A12Heidesheim
  
• A6 Winzenheim/Bretzenheim
  
• A16 A17Hechtsheim
  
• A7 A15 Biebelsheim
  
• A3 Bad Kreuznach
  
• C1 Ludwigshafen
  
• C2 Böhl-Iggelheim
  
• C3 C4Heilbronn
  

Camp construction

In the beginning, there were plans to bring the prisoners of war to Britain, where they would remain until capitulation, because there they could be better provided for. After the failure of the Ardennes offensive, 250,000 German soldiers surrendered. After the breakdown of the Ruhr pocket another 325,000 were taken prisoner. After capitulation there were 3.4 million German soldiers in the custody of the Western Allies. With such large numbers of prisoners, it seemed more logical to keep them in Germany.
The camps were founded in April 1945 and remained in existence until September. There was a similar plan for the construction of all the camps. Open farmland close to a village with a railroad line was enclosed with barbed wire and divided into 10 - 20 camps, each housing 5,000 to 10,000 men. Existing field paths were used as streets of the camp and surrounding buildings as the administration, kitchen and hospital.^[3] The prisoners of war, forced to surrender their equipment, had to dig holes in the earth by hand in which to sleep. Soon the camps were grossly overcrowded; e.g., Camp Remagen, intended for 100,000, grew to 184,000 prisoners.^[4]
"Some of the enclosures resembled Andersonville Prison in 1864".^[5]

Operations and management

Aerial view of an unknown camp inside Allied-occupied Germany.
To circumvent international regulations that dealt with the handling of POWs, the surrendered forces were termed "Disarmed Enemy Forces" (DEF) and the term "Prisoners of war" (POW) was not applied. Due to the numbers of prisoners, the Americans transferred internal control of the camps over to the Germans. All administration such as doctors, cooks and work forces were all undertaken by the prisoners. Even the armed guards were former troops from the Wehrmacht's Feldgendarmerie and Feldjägerkorps. Known as Wehrmachtordnungstruppe (English: Armed Forces Order Troop), they received extra rations for preventing escapes and keeping order in the camps. In June 1946, these military police would be the last German soldiers to officially surrender their arms.
Within weeks of the camps being established, some prisoner releases were started. First to be allowed to leave were members of the Hitlerjugend and female personnel who were deemed to have no affiliation with the Nazi Party. Professional groups, such as farmers, drivers and miners, soon followed because they were urgently required to assist in the reconstruction of German infrastructure. By the end of June 1945, the camps at Remagen, Böhl-Iggelheim and Büderich had been emptied.
On 12 June 1945, the British forces took control of the two Rheinwiesenlager camps designated to be in the British Zone. On July 10, 1945, all releases were halted after SHAEF handed control over of the camps to the French. The deal was struck because the government of Charles de Gaulle wanted 1.75 million prisoners of war for forced labor in France. In total roughly 182,400 prisoners from Sinzig, Andernach, Siershahn, Bretzenheim, Dietersheim, Koblenz, Hechtzheim and Dietz were given to France.^[6] The British handed over those fit for work from the two camps it controlled at Büderich and Rheinberg, while releasing the remainder.
By the end of September 1945 nearly all the Rheinwiesenlager camps had been closed. Only a camp at Bretzenheim near Bad Kreuznach remained open until 1948 serving as a transit camp for German prisoners released from France.

Conditions and death rates

Women prisoners held in the Third U.S. Army enclosure at Regensburg, Germany, May 8, 1945.


The exposed conditions within Sinzig POW camp, May 16, 1945.
Throughout the summer of 1945, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was prevented from visiting prisoners in any of the Allies' Rheinwiesenlager. Visits were only started in the autumn of 1945, at a time when most camps had closed or were closing. The Red Cross was granted permission to send delegations to visit camps in the French and UK occupation zones. On February 4, 1946 the Red Cross was allowed to send relief to those in the U.S. run occupation zone. The International Red Cross website states "The quantities received by the ICRC for these captives remained very small, however. During their visits, the delegates observed that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions. They drew the attention of the authorities to this fact, and gradually succeeded in getting some improvements made."^[7]
Official United States statistics conclude there were just over 3,000 deaths in the Rheinwiesenlager while German figures state them to be 4,537. American academic R. J. Rummel believes the figure is around 6,000.^[8]
In 1972, the official German inquiry into the numbers of deaths was published by the Maschke committee (named after its chairman, Erich Maschke). It had conducted detailed research of the camp histories on behalf of the Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte (English: German Federal Ministry of Displaced persons, Refugees, and War Victims).^[9] According to their results camps with the highest mortality were:

1. Bad Kreuznach (Lager Galgenberg und Bretzenheim)
   
2. Sinzig near Remagen
   
3. Rheinberg
   
4. Heidesheim
   
5. Wickrathberg
   
6. Büderich
   

An analysis of the documents of the local administrations around the camps of Remagen yields similar results^[which?].^[10]
Canadian historian James Bacque has argued in his 1989 book Other Losses that the true number is likely in the hundreds of thousands, and may be as high as 1,000,000.^[11]
Historians including Stephen Ambrose, Albert Cowdrey and Ruediger Overmans have examined and rejected Bacque's claims, arguing that they were the result of faulty research practices.^[12] More recently, writing in the Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, military historian S.P. MacKenzie stated: "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".^[13]
The official death rate for Germans held by the American military was among the lowest experienced by surrendered combatants during and after the war.^[14]

Postwar conclusions

In 1969, Lieutenant General Leonard D. Heaton prepared and published an exhaustive report for the United States Army Medical Department, that examined preventive medicine and the problems associated with housing such a large number of German prisoners after World War II. The report found a number of problems, including:

• The army had lost track of some of the locations where POWs were held.^[15]
  
• The number of prisoners greatly exceeded expectations.^[16]
  
• Organization of the camps was left to prisoners.
  
• Food and water supplies were insufficient during April and May 1945, though they later improved.^[17]
  
• The 1200 to 1500 calories ration that the Disarmed Enemy Forces were receiving in August 1945 was inadequate.^[18]
  
• The lack of food led in some cases to "extensive malnutrition."^[18]
  

In 2003, historian Richard Dominic Wiggers argued that the Allies violated international law regarding the feeding of enemy civilians, they both directly and indirectly caused the unnecessary suffering and death of large numbers of civilians and prisoners in occupied Germany, guided partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance when creating the circumstances that contributed to their deaths.<sup>[19]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinwiesenlager</sup>









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<sup>Joy!



Looking at the conditions, I think the number who died was probably nearer to the number estimated by</sup>
James Bacque

You can keep making the most appalling claim to a holocaust, which lessens the actual holocaust and its victims by continuing to post up revisionist nonsense

Nobody denies some Germans died in POW camps, but a holocaust and the numbers claimed is babble on every level

Rightly real historical scholars have taken apart this falsified claim, which has no validity at all