The Allied War Crimes? : Books: An account of abuse of German soldiers by French and American troops at the end of World War II has stirred controversy in Canada.

We never saw the Red Cross. Nobody came to inspect us until two years later, to bring us blankets. That was the first time they came, in 1947. We were eating the grass between the buildings. . . .

But for the date, the description could be that of a Nazi death camp survivor, liberated by Allied troops at the end of World War II.

In fact, the words are those of “Pvt. Heinz T.,” a former Wehrmacht soldier rounded up by U.S. troops at the war’s end and imprisoned in a camp for surrendered Germans. A Canadian novelist-turned-amateur historian, James Bacque says he interviewed Heinz T. in Paris in 1986 and quotes him in his new book, “Other Losses.”

. . . Later, when the weakness really came and the slightest movement made (us) faint, we could calculate how many hours we would pass out. The malnutrition got to such a stage that the smallest gesture done too quickly would cause us to faint. The first time it happened to me, we were sitting down in the sun with nothing to do, absolutely nothing. I can remember saying to myself . . . OK, there is still six hours until the soup, and . . . if I do this quick little movement with my arm, I’ll be out for three hours, if I do it again, that’s another three hours, so (that’s) six hours altogether. . . .

Heinz T.’s disquieting story and others like it burst into the Canadian consciousness late last year, when “Other Losses” was published by Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., of Toronto. The book makes the case that French and American soldiers abused and neglected German soldiers in their care at the end of World War II, causing the slow deaths of thousands. Bacque calls the abuse a war crime, saying that the United States wriggled through a loophole in the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war by reclassifying the surrendered Germans as disarmed forces.

Since its publication, “Other Losses” has engendered a lively debate in Canada, with some readers, largely professional historians, challenging Bacque’s research methods, and others, elderly German immigrants, stepping forward to say they lived through American-made horrors just like the ones Bacque describes.

“This (book) is cracked, top to bottom,” says Brian Loring Villa, a University of Ottawa specialist on the raid on Dieppe, France. “The Liberty Bell looks like it just came out of the foundry compared to this.”

But Willi Pohl, 68, a German veteran who lives in Montreal, counters: “Many of the things Mr. Bacque wrote about in his book . . . are exactly what we experienced. They kept us for three months in the open fields without blankets. We received six teaspoons a day of food. (Men) died en masse.”

The debate surrounding the publication of “Other Losses” in Canada contrasts sharply with the situation in the United States. South of the 49th Parallel, few know such a book exists, much less hold an opinion of it. And in America’s ignorance, author Bacque asserts, there are lessons to be learned.

“If you want to know about freedom of the press, you’ve come to the right place,” he says in an interview in his Toronto living room. “It is a sometime thing.”

“Other Losses” offers detailed evidence of grave American and French breaches of the Geneva Convention. The book describes vast prisoner of war camps where Germans were denied blankets and tents on freezing nights; camps where thousands of Germans were fed a fraction of the calories needed to sustain life; camps without latrines where dysentery became epidemic; camps where drinking water was dumped tauntingly on the ground in front of thirsty men.

Some of the book’s eyewitnesses tell of emaciated bodies stacked in heaps and covered with quicklime. Others talk of prisoners drinking their own urine for lack of water. One describes a weakened 14-year-old boy who fell off a log flung over a trench-latrine and drowned in excrement.

Worse yet, “Other Losses” offers evidence that the International Committee of the Red Cross--which has the right to inspect POW camps and report abuses--was kept from the camps.

Bacque also found a letter from the Quakers to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower--then military governor of the U.S.-administered zone of Germany--asking permission to feed German children and find adoptive parents for orphans. Eisenhower responded that such assistance would be “unwise.”

Historians have long known that abuses occurred in American- and French-run prison camps, but little on the subject has been published. What has caused the “Other Losses” controversy is not Bacque’s willingness to throw light on a dark corner of history, but his use of what he found there to make broader allegations--allegations that go to the heart of America’s self-image as a democratic and humane model for the rest of the world.

First, Bacque claims the willful neglect of the surrendered Germans led to 800,000 to 1 million deaths. He arrived at that number by tabulating the deaths in one POW camp over a short period and applying that rate to other camps. Bacque admits the numbers are shaky, and he has been criticized for his statistical methods.

Second, Bacque argues that Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces and U.S. President from 1953 to 1961, not only knew what was going on but encouraged it. Bacque bases his assertion on Eisenhower’s decision to reclassify the German POWs as “Disarmed Enemy Forces,” or DEFs, thereby exempting them from the Geneva Convention.

“In my mind, he was personally responsible for much of this,” says Bacque, a judgment that sets off howls of protest from his critics in this, the centennial of Eisenhower’s birth.

Bacque, who went through three literary agents as he tried to peddle his manuscript in the United States, says that more than 30 American publishers rejected it.

It received a better reception abroad. After Canada, the book came out in Germany and France, and a British house has scheduled its release for later this year. Bacque says rights have been placed in Turkey, Holland and Japan, and the British Broadcasting Corp. has a documentary based on the book in the works.

In the United States, “Other Losses” has received unsolicited promotion through the Institute for Historical Review, a Costa Mesa-based revisionist group whose members doubt that Adolf Hitler had Jews exterminated as a matter of policy.

“It’s the closest thing I can think of to being published by samizdat in the United States,” says Bacque, who is keeping cautious distance between himself and the institute, but will not stop its promotion effort. “ Glasnost in America--that’s my cry.”

Bacque says his father was gassed by the Germans in Ypres, Belgium, during World War I, and says he never intended to write a book sympathetic to a people his parents taught him to fear. He had, in fact, set out to write a biography of Raoul Laporterie, a French Resistance hero who saved 1,500 French Jews from Nazi persecution. In 1986, he and a research assistant rented a villa near Laporterie’s home and received permission from the aging Frenchman to comb through his archives.

There, Bacque found a series of friendly letters from Hans Goertz. Bacque found this odd, since Goertz was not a Jew, but a former Wehrmacht soldier. Bacque and his assistant--who spoke German--traveled to Germany to ask Goertz why he had corresponded with Laporterie. When they did, Bacque says, Goertz told them the French war hero had saved his life.

The German explained that, at war’s end, Allied soldiers put him in a POW camp where, in a single month, a quarter of the prisoners died of starvation, dysentery and other causes. Goertz said Laporterie plucked him out of this misery and gave him work in his tailor shop.

That story changed the focus of Bacque’s work. He says he spent the next three years and more than $100,000 of his own money trying to find out how many Hans Goertzes there were, and why the Allied camp guards committed what he came to believe were atrocities.

His research brought him to Stephen Ambrose, director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, author of several volumes on Eisenhower and an editor of the general’s official papers. Ambrose says he looked over Bacque’s manuscript, found some merit in it, and even recommended it to his editor at Simon & Schuster.

“There is no doubt that German POWs died of starvation,” he says, noting that he himself has heard former Wehrmacht soldiers’ tales of beatings and deprivation. “Bacque is the first person to break this story into the open. . . .”

But, Ambrose says, he thought Bacque had read far too much meaning into his evidence in concluding that Eisenhower had conceived, or at least condoned, systematic mistreatment. Ambrose says he believes the starvation of POWs resulted from an effort to conserve food for the people Eisenhower most wanted to feed at the end of the war: Allied troops, liberated Europeans, and concentration camp survivors.

It was the failure to address such “flaws” that led Simon & Schuster to reject the book, not a pro patria bias, Ambrose says.

Henry Ferris, an editor for Houghton Mifflin, concurred. “I thought (the manuscript) was of very significant historical importance. But it didn’t hold together as a book,” he says, adding that Bacque failed to meet the house’s standard of excellence, set by writers such as Winston Churchill, Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Ferris says that he expects other historians to take up the “Other Losses” controversy now that Bacque has fired the first shot.

Indeed, Ambrose has called an international conference on the path-breaking themes of “Other Losses” at the Eisenhower Center for next January. Canadian historian Villa, who acknowledges that Bacque “reminds us of crimes against the helpless,” has written a long paper on the controversy and is seeking a U.S. publisher.

In Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Martin Brech, a retired Unitarian minister, has written an account of his own experience as a POW camp guard in Germany at the end of World War II. He still has flashbacks: starving prisoners eating grass, thirsty men bursting through barbed wire and dashing, amid gunfire, toward a nearby river.

“If we have the integrity to admit this atrocity, that means we have shared in the banality of evil,” Brech says.

Brech says that he sent his statement to major U.S. newspapers and magazines but none published it. Since he stepped forward, though, he says that his mailbox has been smashed, his car vandalized, and his phone now rings with threatening calls.