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James Bacque is a Canadian novelist and book editor. Bacque has written several novels to no great success, but one of his non-fiction works created widespread controversy. 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 1945. In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies, Bacque claimed that Allied policies led to the premature deaths of millions of German civilians by starvation after World War Two. A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ...
Dwight David Ike Eisenhower (October 14, 1890–March 28, 1969), American soldier and politician, was the 34th President of the United States (1953–1961) and supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, with the rank of General of the Army. ...
The group of countries known as the Allies of World War II consisted of those nations opposed to the Axis Powers during the Second World War. ...
German soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad World War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the worlds nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. ...
Bacque argued in Other Losses that this alleged and previously unnoticed mass murder was a direct result of the policies of the Allies, who ruled as an exclusive Military Occupation Government over the partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. However, the overwhelming majority of professional historians reject Bacque's claims: the eminent military historian John Keegan has referred to his argument as "a crackpot thesis", for instance. 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. Sir John Keegan (born 1934) is an English military historian. ...
A book length refutation of Bacque's claims, entitled Eisenhower and the German POWs, appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and indeed 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 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." Stephen Ambrose, at the 2001 premiere of Band of Brothers. ...
The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ...
Bacque's historical works are sometimes defended, not so much on their factual accuracy, but on the basis of their having 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.
Bibliography
- Other Losses Prima Publishing; ISBN 1-55168-191-9
- Crimes and Mercies, Little Brown & Company; ISBN 0-7515-2277-5; (August 1997)
- This Man Is A Genius! the truth
See also // Accusation of genocide According to Canadian novelist James Bacque hundreds of thousands or millions of German POWs died of starvation or exposure while held in post-war internment camps. ...
Disarmed Enemy Forces is a designation for captive enemy soldiers. ...
The Morgenthau Plan showing the planned partitioning of Germany into a North State, a South State, and an International zone. ...
The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were transit camps for millions of German POWs after World War II. There were some deaths, with a few thousand German POWs dying from starvation and exposure. ...
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.
External links - James Bacque official site
- Did the Allies Starve Millions of Germans? -- This James Bacque article seems to be the main source for the genocide accusation
- New York Times Book Review of Other Losses by historian Stephen Ambrose.
- A Lengthy Critique of "Other Losses"
- Bacque and US Army historian Fisher's reply to Ambrose
- Bacque's rebuttal: http://www.serendipity.li/hr/bacque01.htm
- Bacque On Wikipedia: http://serendipity.li/hr/bacque_on_wikipedia.htm
- Várdy, Steven Béla and Tooly, T. Hunt: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe Available as MS Word for Windows file (3.4 MB) Subsection: Richard Dominic Wiggers, The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II pp. 274 - 288
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