"Other Losses"

http://ukar.org/mclell24.html Website on the massacre of Germans

"Among those concerning whom a file could be opened is Henry Kissinger — who held a senior post in the American occupation forces — in order to determine the appropriateness of denying him entry should he attempt to visit Canada." — Lubomyr Prytulak
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The primary source for the arguments made below is James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991. Also quoted from is James Bacque, Crimes and mercies: The fate of German civilians under allied occupation 1944-1950, Little, Brown and Company, Toronto, 1997. Both books can be purchased from Internet booksellers such as www.amazon.com. Canadian purchasers may find that they can avoid postal surcharges for collecting GST by buying from www.barnesandnoble.com or www.chapters.com, although selection may be more limited than at Amazon.


From the German point of view this strategy delivered millions of German soldiers to what they believed would be the more merciful hands of the Western Allies under supreme military commander General Dwight Eisenhower. However, given General Eisenhower's fierce and obsessive hatred not only of the Nazi regime, but indeed of all things German, this belief was at best a desperate gamble. More than five million German soldiers in the American and French zones were crowded into barbed wire cages, many of them literally shoulder to shoulder. The ground beneath them soon became a quagmire of filth and disease. Open to the weather, lacking even primitive sanitary facilities, underfed, the prisoners soon began dying of starvation and disease. Starting April 1945, the United States Army and the French army casually annihilated about one million men, most of them in American camps. Not since the horrors of the Confederate-administered prison at Andersonville during the American Civil War had such cruelties taken place under the American military control. For more than four decades this unprecedented tragedy lay hidden in Allied archives.
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Dr. Ernest F. Fisher Jr., Colonel, Army of the United States (retired), writing in the forward to James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. xvii.


We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people, or you have got to treat them in such a manner that they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.
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President Roosevelt speaking to Henry Morgenthau, author of the infamous Morgenthau Plan for Germany, quoted in James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. 8.

Samples of the American-French atrocities committed against German prisoners:

The writer below is POW Charles von Luttichau, half-German and half-American, describing camp Kripp near Remagen on the Rhine.

The latrines were just logs flung over ditches next to the barbed wire fences. To sleep, all we could do was to dig out a hole in the ground with our hands, then cling together in the hole. We were crowded very close together. Because of illness, the men had to defecate on the ground. Soon, many of us were too weak to take off our trousers first. So our clothing was infected, and so was the mud where we had to walk and sit and lie down. There was no water at all at first, except the rain, then after a couple of weeks we could get a little water from a standpipe. But most of us had nothing to carry it in, so we could get only a few mouthfuls after hours of lining up, sometimes even through the night. We had to walk along between the holes on soft earth thrown up by the digging, so it was easy to fall into a hole, but hard to climb out. The rain was almost constant along that part of the Rhine that spring. More than half the days we had rain. More than half the days we had no food at all. On the rest, we got a little K ration. I could see from the package that they were giving us one tenth of the rations that they issued to their own men. So in the end we got perhaps five percent of a normal U.S. Army ration. I complained to the American camp commander that he was breaking the Geneva Convention, but he just said, "Forget the Convention. You haven't any rights."

Within a few days, some of the men who had gone healthy into the camp were dead. I saw our men dragging many dead bodies to the gate of the camp, where they were thrown loose on top of each other onto trucks, which took them away.
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Charles von Luttichau quoted in James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. 38.

The American-French atrocities were not limited to the creation of inanition and disease, but sometimes included unlawful execution.

One 17-year-old boy who could see his village in the distance used to stand weeping near the barbed wire fence. One morning the prisoners found him shot at the foot of the fence. His body was strung up and left hanging on the wire by the guards as a warning. The prisoners were forced to walk by the body. Many cried out "Moerder, moerder [murderer, murderer]!" In retaliation, the camp commander withheld the prisoners' meager rations for three days. "For us who were already starving and could hardly move because of weakness, it was frightful; for many it meant death." This was not the only time when the commander withheld rations to punish prisoners.
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, pp. 38-39.

The American-French atrocities were not inflicted merely on suspected Nazis, or even restricted to former belligerents, but were inflicted upon civilians as well.

Children as young as six years of age, pregnant women, men over 60, were among the prisoners in these camps. Because no records were made in the DEF [Disarmed Enemy Forces] camps, and most of the POW records were destroyed in the 1950s no one knows how many civilians were imprisoned, but French reports show that among [one batch of] about 100,000 people the Americans turned over to them supposedly for labor, there were 32,640 women, children and old men. Lt. Colonel Valentine Barnes, making his report on Bad Kreuznach, noted on April 22 that "a female infant was born to a female prisoner of war in enclosure A-3."
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. 40.


The German fatalities cannot be blamed on general conditions:

No comparable fatalities were observed in camps run by the British or the Canadians.


That it was possible to keep millions of prisoners alive in Germany in 1945 was shown by the British and Canadian experience. No peacetime atrocity has ever been alleged against the British or Canadians, except for the apparently inadvertent starvation of about 200-400 prisoners on the British camp in Overijsche, Belgium, in 1945-6.
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. 164.


And some U.S. generals deviated from the Roosevelt-Eisenhower campaign of annihilation, as for example General Mark Clark.


That it was possible for commanders in the U.S. Army in Europe in 1945 to keep prisoners alive without "spoiling" them was shown by the experience of the 291,000 prisoners in the hands of the U.S. Army under General Mark Clark in Italy. No mistreatment of these prisoners has ever been alleged by anyone. When these prisoners were weighed in a U.S. camp in Germany soon after their return from Italy, none was underweight, whereas of those kept in Germany "all were below standard."
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. 164.


And the treatment of prisoners under the command of U.S. General George Patton contrasts sharply with Eisenhower's who summed up with "it is a pity that we could not have killed more."


A general who knew Eisenhower well wrote in 1945 that Eisenhower was using "practically Gestapo methods" against the Germans. His name was George S. Patton.
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, p. 143.


This reason for Eisenhower's dislike of Patton is one that you will not find in the movie of the same name.


Not only the Congress had to be deceived. Certain officers may have presented a security risk as well — for instance, General Patton. For all his prejudices, Patton represented to a high degree the honor of the army and the basic generosity of the American people. He made this very plain in a reply to a question put to him by the army's Theater Judge Advocate: "In all these talks [to the troops] I emphasized the necessity for the proper treatment of prisoners of war, both as to their lives and property. My usual statement was ... 'Kill all the Germans you can but do not put them up against a wall and kill them. Do your killing while they are still fighting. After a man has surrendered, he should be treated exactly in accordance with the Rules of Land Warfare, and just as you would hope to be treated if you were foolish enough to surrender. Americans do not kick people in the teeth after they are down.'" He openly deplored Eisenhower's anti-German policies: "What we are doing is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole."
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, pp. 148-149.


Many other Americans did not go along with the Roosevelt-Eisenhower policy of annihilation, as for example the civilian advisor, Robert Murphy, described below, and perhaps also U.S. General Lucius Clay.


Civilian governors who believed in freedom of the press and democracy, instead of censorship and authoritarian rule, took a different line towards the beaten Germans. Robert Murphy, who was the civilian political advisor to Eisenhower while he served for a few months as Military Governor, "was startled to see," on a visit to one camp, "that our [German] prisoners were almost as weak and emaciated as those I had observed in Nazi prison camps. The youthful commandant calmly told us that he had deliberately kept the inmates on starvation diet, explaining 'These Nazis are getting a dose of their own medicine.' He so obviously believed that he was behaving correctly that we did not discuss the matter with him. After we left, the medical director asked me, 'Does the camp represent American policy in Germany?' I replied that of course it was contrary to our policy, and the situation would be quickly corrected. When I described the camp's condition to [General Lucius] Clay, he quietly transferred the grim young officer."
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James Bacque, Other losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II, General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991, pp. 149-150.



The German fatalities must be blamed on active American-French measures calculated to produce death:


As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an 'urgent courier' throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners.
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James Bacque, Crimes and mercies: The fate of German civilians under allied occupation 1944-1950, Little, Brown and Company, Toronto, 1997, p. 41.



One US Army officer who read the posted order in May 1945 has written that it was 'the intention of Army command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as many POWs as the traffic would bear without international scrutiny'.
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James Bacque, Crimes and mercies: The fate of German civilians under allied occupation 1944-1950, Little, Brown and Company, Toronto, 1997, p. 44.



Civilian women and teenage girls were shot, shot at, and imprisoned for trying to take food to the camps, although the Eisenhower order had purportedly given individual camp commanders a chance to exempt family members trying to feed relatives through the wire. The prisoner Paul Schmitt was shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to prisoners. [...] Martin Brech watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a hillside firing shots towards German women running away from him in the valley below.

The most gruesome killing was witnessed by the prisoner Hanns Scharf, formerly of California, who was watching as a German woman with her two children came towards an American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband, who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground and killed the prisoner with five shots. The other prisoners howled, which brought round US Army Lieutenant Holtsman of Seattle, who said, 'This is awful. I'll make sure there is a stiff court martial.' In months of work in the Washington archives of the army, no court martial of this or similar incidents has ever turned up. Captain Lee Berwick, who was in command of the guard towers at Bretzenheim nearby, has said that he was never aware of any court martial for shootings at Bretzenheim or at Bad Kreuznach.
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James Bacque, Crimes and mercies: The fate of German civilians under allied occupation 1944-1950, Little, Brown and Company, Toronto, 1997, pp. 45-46.

 

http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/articles/1266.html

History network debate featuring the primaries involved.

 

Treatment of German WWII POWs Examined
Other Losses
By James Bacque
General Paperbacks, Toronto, 1991.
Available in paperback at local bookstores for $6.95

Reviewed by Rolf Auer

Other Losses is a brilliant investigation into one of the most hideous and least publicized war crimes perpetrated this century.

At the end of World War II, more than 5 million German prisoners of war (POWs) were interned in American and French prisoner of war camps primarily located in Europe. Owing to intentionally cruel prison camp conditions, nearly 1 million German POWs died from starvation, disease, overcrowding, and exposure.

Most of the deaths occurred in American prison camps. Some witnesses observed that the starving German POWs resembled the gaunt prisoners discovered when the Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Dachau were liberated. In the U.S. Army's weekly POW reports, the truth about deaths in American prison camps was concealed under the euphemistic heading "Other Losses."

As James Bacque observes in Other Losses, historical records show that in Europe there was no shortage of the food, materials, manpower, and transportation needed to keep the POWs alive. Yet in American camps, "(g)uards, water, food, tents, space, barbed wire—everything necessary for prisoners—was kept fatally scarce."

According to the testimonies of survivors transcribed by Bacque, the prisoners' only shelter from snow and rain were holes dug in the mud with their hands. Latrines were logs thrown across ditches. Clothing and footwear, hospital care, and even cooking facilities were withheld. In some camps, the men were so crowded they could not even lie down.

The resulting German POW fatalities totaled more than ten times the number of German soldiers who died in battle on the western European front from 1941 to 1945, and more than twelve times the number of Japanese killed on August 6, 1945 by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

In comparison, 98 percent (about 2 million) of the French, American, British, and Canadian POWs returned from German prison camps. The International Committee of the Red Cross food packages they had been allowed to receive by mail had kept them in good health.

The Geneva Convention stipulates that POWs must be adequately fed and sheltered, may send and receive mail, and may receive visits from ICRC delegates. Although Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies on VE day (May 8, 1945) technically rendered the Geneva Convention inapplicable to Germany, the Allies generally continued to uphold the Geneva Convention after VE Day.

But at the same time as the U.S. Government and Army repeatedly affirmed their adherence to the Geneva Convention, they completely disregarded German POWs' Convention rights and all complaints about POW mistreatment. Bacque wrote that "(t)he squalor of the camps came from the moral squalor polluting the higher levels of the army."

The U.S. Army kept its actions secret through censorship, lies, euphemism, propaganda, restriction of camp visits, records alteration, records destruction, and restriction of access to records. Had the public learned the truth about the prison camps, their protests and help might have prevented many POW deaths. The cover-up has persisted up to the present.

Other Losses declares that "(t)he value of a humane, free press, and legislature, is one of the motifs of this book." In 1978, then Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry (one of many friends thanked by Bacque for assistance) wrote: "Freedom of the press fuels and keeps alive the flame of democracy."

James Bacque's newest book is undeniably a masterpiece of meticulous, scrupulous research, in spite of many officials' attempts to block it. Other Losses uncovers shocking truths about some of the darkest days following World War II, when freedom of the press was heavily censored and the flame of democracy burned low.

Converted February 6, 2001 - Lg


review of "other losses"

 

What to do with the German POWs

Throughout the war the allies had captured many prisoners. The majority of the prisoners captured where Germans. The allies needed some way of containing so they used the obvious POW camps. The allied forces had not anticipated such masses of people, most of them striving to survive in a wasteland. Eisenhower had anticipated capturing 3 million German soldiers the actual amount captured was closer to 5 million. Some were shipped to the U.S. and other allied countries and the rest were put in camps around Germany.

The British left the Americans to deal with the vast majority of the surrendered German personnel. At the beginning of the war the British and the Americans had agreed to split the prisoners and refugees fifty-fifty, but by the end of the war the British had backed out. The British said that they didn't have anywhere to put them or the men to watch them and that moving them to England would raise resentment among the British people. The British refusal to accept more German prisoners resulted in shortages in U.S. food rations amounting to 25 million prisoner-days rations and growing. Eisenhower tackled the food problem by requesting the power to distribute imported foodstuffs if the situation deemed necessary. Eisenhower begged the government for any amount of food that could be spared to be shipped to Europe. At the time there was a shipping shortage in the spring and summer of 1945 ships were needed for the expected invasion of the Japanese home islands. Even when the food was shipped the mass bombing had destroyed almost all the transportation network making it even more difficult to get food to starving prisoners.

In 1945 the entire German population was living on starvation diets. German agriculture had suffered serious decreases in production in 1944 and 1945. The available nitrogen and phosphates were used in ammunition production causing a shortage of synthetic fertilizers as early as 1943. Without proper fertilizers the crops had decreased 20to 30 percent by the end of the war. The allied bombing had destroyed thousands of farm buildings and made many food-processing plants disabled. The Germans had virtually no agricultural production to support the population laying a huge strain on the Americans to supply food for the captured prisoners.

The food shortage was the most severe problem facing the Germans. The food shortage resulted in many deaths all the deaths can some how be attributed to the war directly and indirectly.

 

http://www.jamesbacque.com/


bacques website

 

It's good that you have put in the explanations for both view-points!

 

James Baque is in the same league as David Irving. Only maybe not as objective or professional. The "other losses" conspriacy theory was debunked about ten years ago when the book first came out.

 

Not only have you quoted just one author, ensuring that may he be proven wrong all your evidence is gone in one swoop; it is also very obvious that mr. Baque is biased. "Americans, Russians and French" committed these atrocities according to his books. Which other major Allies are we left with? Canada and Britain. "Published in Britain and Canada"; hmm, typical.

 

But Roel, us British (& Commonwealth) are good sports!

 

Ah, fellas these great, long postings belong in the Library section. Please.

 

Could we hear something about how/why these theories were debunked?

 

Maybe after we determine the value of this source. I wouldn't want our Library to be filled with sources you can't really trust.

 

I find it quite interesting that there is offered no proof in terms of photographs or primary sources for the claims that a million German POWs died.

 

Mutant Poodle wrote

The island is called Gruinard and is about 1 mile off the coast in gruinard Bay, west coast of Scotland between Laide and Ullapool. It was used for experiments with Anthrax. About 10yrs ago the (Brit) government handed it back to the original owners after spending a few million "sterilising" it with sea water and some other gunk.

The owners now keep sheep on it. At least I presume that's what those white fluffy things with 4 legs are you can see running around on it are.

 

I saw a documentary about the "million dead German POWs" theory a few years ago, Ricky. For one thing, the German government has never said a word about anything like this happening. Given how their current government is left-leaning, I don't think they'd miss a chance to make the USA look bad. Then there's the fact that the author of this theory is a novelist by profession, and according to the program, his research was nothing short of sloppy. What *did* happen is that after the May 8, 1945 German surrender, Eisenhower, faced with trying to feed his own troops and hordes of civilians in formerly occupied countries with barely adequate resources, gave orders that no more German troops were to be taken into the POW cages, where they would have to be fed. Instead, their namess, ranks, and units were to be taken down and the men then released, to be on their own after that. And some of them, number uncertain, did indeed starve to death.

 

We've already been through this once. The truth is out there.

 

Thank you for the info and the update.
I just watched a special on the huge bunkers the Germans built to hide, build and launch the V-3 rockets. Wow!! Also there was a mentioning of how some of the documents in regards to theses underground facilities are still classified today; something to do with a deadly nerve agent to be used in the warheads of missles launched on England.
The program used German WWII footage of a monkey experiment dying, and then a poor little cat suffering, unbelievable suffering, when exposed and let to just sit there wreathing in agony. When judgement day comes how can any scientist, let alone centient being, defend such actions?! :angry: :cry: :bang:

 

I assume you mean V-2?

 

gave ya 3 books chock full of photos an documents...

nothing was ever disproven or debunked. it was buried.. big difference.

 

Oh please, nothing was ever proven. You've qouted one source and a bunch of reviews of that source. When you're the one making extraordinary claims the burden of proof is on you. Nothing has been buried or hidden because there's nothing to hide or bury.