James Bacque

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James Bacque is a Canadian novelist and book editor. Bacque was a fiction writer and essayist before turning his attention, in 1989, to the fate of German soldiers held as POWs after World War II.

In his 1989 monograph Other Losses, Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower deliberately caused the starvation of almost a million German prisoners of war from 1944 to 1949. In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies (2003), Bacque claimed that western Allied policies led to the premature deaths of millions of German civilians by starvation after World War Two.

Bacque argued in Other Losses this alleged mass murder was a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. With the help of Col. Ernest F. Fisher Jr., a US Army senior historian, Bacque argued in Other Losses he found evidence in US, French and Soviet archives that German POWs were deliberately starved to death.

His supporters say his findings have been confirmed by survivors of the Allied camps, who, they claim, have written by the thousand to Bacque's publishers to confirm his findings, and by US army soldiers who worked at the camps, among them Private Martin Brech, Corporal Daniel McConnell, Captain Fred Siegfried, and General Richard Steinbach--who actually commanded the US camp at Heilbronn.

However, the overwhelming majority of professional historians who have investigated them reject Bacque's claims. The military historian Sir John Keegan has referred to his argument as "a crackpot thesis". Writing in the recent Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, S.P. MacKenzie states, "That German prisoners were treated very badly in the months immediately after the war...is beyond dispute. All in all, however, Bacque's thesis and mortality figures cannot be taken as accurate" (p294). A review in the Military History Quarterly in 1990, stated that a figure of 70,000 deaths is more probable. The latter figure is about 1.2 per cent of Germans held by the Western Allies. Bacque's critics note many of the German soldiers were sick and wounded at the time of their surrender, and say his work does not place the plight of the German prisoners within the context of the grim situation in Western Europe in 1945 and 1946.

A book length disputation of Bacque's claims, entitled Eisenhower and the German POWs, appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and German historians. Stephen Ambrose, the editor of the volume, acknowledged that Bacque's work was significant in that it had drawn attention to the ill-treatment of German POWs in Allied captivity. However, Ambrose and his colleagues uniformly rejected Bacque's central thesis: that almost a million German POWs had died in Western Allied captivity. "Scholars...will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless," Ambrose wrote in the New York Times. "It is seriously - nay, spectacularly - flawed in its most fundamental aspects."

Ambrose does however also 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."^[1]

Bacque's Crimes and Mercies met with far less hostility from historians, who acknowledge the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians held in Soviet captivity, and possibly up to two million civilians who died in the mass expulsions of Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, western Poland, Silesia, the Sudetenland and Romania.

Bacque's historical works are sometimes defended, not so much on their factual accuracy, but because they have spurred further research into the important question of the treatment of German POWs and German civilians at the end of the Second World War, a topic about which English-speaking historians have shown comparatively little interest.

1 Notes
2 Bibliography
3 See also
4 Further reading
5 External links

[edit] Notes

^ Ike's Revenge? Time Magazine, Monday, Oct. 2, 1989

[edit] Bibliography

Other Losses Prima Publishing; ISBN 1-55168-191-9
Crimes and Mercies, Little Brown & Company; ISBN 0-7515-2277-5; (August 1997)

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

"Other Losses" in The Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, 2nd Edition. Jonathan Vance, ed. (Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2006), 294-295.

Gunter Bischof and Stephen Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower and the German POWs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

S.P. MacKenzie, "Essay and Reflection: On the Other Losses Debate," International History Review 14 (1992): 661-680.