Bacque - Crimes and mercies : the fate of German civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950

CRIMES AND
MERCIES

The Fate of German Civilians
Under Allied Occupation,
19441950

JAMES BACQUE

To Herbert Hoover
and
Reverend John F. Davidson

CONTENTS

BY DR. ALFRED DE ZAYAS

Plate section (following p.128)

In 1945, the United States of America had billions of friends around the world, and her enemies were powerless to hurt her. Today, she has billions of enemies around the world and her friends seem powerless to help her. That historical change is rooted in the conflict expressed by the title of this book.

Intense international interest was aroused by the first edition of Crimes and Mercies and by my earlier book, Other Losses, both of which revealed that the German people were treated so harshly by the Allies after the Second World War that millions died of starvation, exposure and preventable disease.

The criticisms of both books offered by conventional professional historians to date have contained no new information of any historical significance. That fierce and famous critic of my work, Stephen E. Ambrose (author and chief of the Eisenhower Center) read the final MS of Other Losses in 1988 and wrote to me you have a sensational if appalling story and it can no longer be suppressed, and I suppose (in truth, I know) it must be published But three years later he pirouetted into the NewYork Times with a review of the published book contradicting his earlier observation. Having convened an historical conference on the book so fast that there was no time to research the books findings, he announced a major discovery: historians do not need to do research prediction suffices: When scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacques work to be worse than worthless, said Ambrose in the review. Why he reversed his initial position on Other Losses may be explained by a statement he made to Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher Jr, a senior historian at the US Army Center for Military History who had given the pageproofs to Ambrose for comment. In the spring of 1989 as he returned these page proofs of Other Losses, Ambrose told Fisher, This book destroys my lifes work.

Ambroses labor-saving ability to render a verdict without the bother of a trial is shared by other professional historians of postwar Germany. Professor Stefan Karner of the University of Graz has looked at the same documents in the KGB archives I cite which support this book. Taken with the German postwar documents, these show that the French and Americans were responsible for the deaths of about 1,000,000 German prisoners and the Soviets for about 500,000. Karner rejects those KGB documents not because he has found more accurate sources, but because he prefers estimates. His own estimates. These of course defend the conventional view that the Germans were not mistreated by the Western Allies after the war. By this evasion of the documentary sources, he ostensibly exculpates the Western Allies by shifting the blame onto the Soviets.

Similarly, Sir Michael Howard, writing in the Times LiterarySupplement, confessed himself an innumerate historian incompetent to judge statistics. Nevertheless, he immediately issued a judgment on Other Losses based on the criterion of inherent probability. He said, Which is in fact the more probable explanation; that a million German prisoners quietly died in American hands in 1945 without anyone noticing, or that the American authorities made mistakes in their initial figures? Sir Michaels form of reasoning it was not likely therefore it did not happen would be judged as fatuous by his fellow historians, beknighted or not, were it not for the fact that, like him, most of his audience want to believe that the Americans and the French did not commit such atrocities. It is equally clear that Sir Michael does not know, or perhaps does not care, that many of these prisoners did not die quietly. The survivors have been trying to tell the world about what happened in the American camps for sixty years, but their stories have been rigorously suppressed.

Among the suppressed are thousands of Germans around the world who have written to me and my publishers, thankful that their story has at last been told. Not a single ex-prisoner has written to say that he was well-treated in the Russian, American or French camps, though many have written to me to say that they were lucky to have been captured by the British and Canadians.

This is convincing enough, but they have been joined by many former officers and NCOs in the US army who have admitted that conditions in those years were lethal for the Germans.

One of these was General Richard Steinbach who had been in charge of a US POW camp near Heilbronn in 1945; (See OtherLosses, p. xxiii) another was Colonel Dr Ernest F. Fisher Jr, who had sat on a US army commission investigating allegations of war crimes committed by American soldiers in 1945. He has said the commission was a whitewash [in conversation with the author]. Daniel McConnell, a corporal in 1945, was in 1998 awarded a 100% medical pension by the US government Veterans Administration for post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his experiences in a US army camp. In 1945, he had been ordered despite his ignorance of medicine, to take over a hospital tent at Heilbronn, Germany, which had no medical facilities beyond bottles of aspirin. The mud-floored tent was simply a way to assemble moribund prisoners convenient to the trucks that would soon take away their corpses. The Veterans Administration thus admitted that McConnell had been injured for life by the horrors he witnessed but could not prevent.

What happened to the German population in the years 1945 to 1950 was concealed in many ways, especially by the destruction of US Army prisoner of war documents in the 1940s and by the suppression of photographs of prison camps taken by JeanPierre Pradervand of the International Red Cross, and given by him to Eisenhower in Frankfurt in August, 1945. This vital evidence is not listed in the Smith collection of many thousands of other photographs in the Eisenhower Library. The New YorkTimes star correspondent Drew Middleton has also admitted lying about the camps in three stories printed in that paper in 1945.

Why this suppression occurred was not just a matter of shame and guilt. Reporters and politicians during the war propagandized the populations of the Allied powers to demonize the enemy and glorify their leaders; historians credulously accepted most of this, converted it into myth, and have perpetuated that mythology for more than sixty years. This is part of a natural human process we like to think of ourselves as good people, and we hate to admit that we often commit cruel and senseless acts. But the study of history is supposed to rise above that, and so far it has not, at least not with respect to ourselves as the Allied powers, and Germany.

There is plenty of evidence in Crimes and Mercies for the view that Americans, British and Canadians do and have done much good in the world. The British, bankrupt and rationed in 194547, sacrificed a small part of their food to help others, including Germans. Canadians spent billions of dollars and continued rationing themselves long after the war so they could send some of their ample surplus to feed the former enemy (see map opposite page 129). Churches in North America rounded up food, clothing and money on a massive scale to help the destitute in Europe. Australians and Argentineans also helped with donations of wheat and meat. Herbert Hoover risked and spent much of his life and a good part of his fortune helping victims of war around the world, from 1914 through 1948. Together with the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, he led the greatest campaign of mercy the world has ever known, saving 800,000,000 lives from the famine that spread round the globe after the Second World War. Hoover was exemplary of the American mercies that finally ended but could not prevent the crimes of Eisenhower, Morgenthau and others.