Response to ‘Allied War Crimes’

Re “The Allied War Crimes,” May 3: A Canadian novelist named James Bacque charges that the United States Army permitted almost 1 million German prisoners to die from deliberate neglect. This happened, Bacque states in his recently published book, “Other Losses,” despite the fact that there were supplies on hand to save them. He points the finger at the Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was, according to Bacque, completely indifferent to the hunger and suffering of the millions of German captives taken at war’s end and kept in the German Rhineland during most of 1945. Bacque insists that these deaths, so shockingly high, became a buried American secret, carefully concealed for the past 44 years. He presents himself as the discoverer of this allegedly horrible deed, and views criticisms of his thesis to be conspiratorial.

Can Bacque’s sensational claims be true? The answer must be a resounding no, for when subjected to knowledgable, critical analysis, the thesis begins to unravel.

First, a look at Bacque’s sources, or perhaps lack thereof. He found U.S. Army reports in the National Archives that contained figures on the weekly losses of German captives camped in that fateful year along the Rhine. By his calculations these losses reached the astounding figure of 793,239 men who had died (an additional 167,000 who had been turned over to the French also died). Bacque refuses to interpret “other losses” as anything but death, nor admit that military records are notoriously faulty.

The tabulations in question were done not by experts or trained officers, but by GIs whose highest priority was to return home. At the same time the veterans were being rapidly replaced by new, green occupation troops from the United States. There was no careful counting as Bacque would have his readers believe for the GIs relied on the German commanders for their weekly figure. There was not even a careful guarding, and here is where Bacque’s thesis begins to falter, for tens of thousands of these German captives simply slipped away and went home. Their disappearance was listed under the heading of “other losses.”

Of the 2 to 3 million German captives held in the Rhine (not 5 million as Bacque claims), how many did die as a result of American neglect? A variety of German sources place the lowest figure at 8,000 men and the highest at 40,000 men. The exhaustive study of the German prisoner of war experience in World War II undertaken at the request of the West German government, and headed by Prof. Erich Maschke, produced 22 volumes of published materials and a massive collection of documentation deposited in the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg. This definitive work places the number of dead captives at about the 8,000 mark based upon voluminous eyewitness accounts and a careful search of grave yard records along the Rhine. But Bacque, who does not read German and did not investigate the Maschke collection, dismisses it all as being based upon falsified records from U.S. military authorities designed to keep the terrible secret. He also ignores the records compiled by an independent German Prisoner of War Committee created in 1947-1948, that concluded, after extensive research and public questionnaires directed at German war veterans, that the millions or so German soldiers who were still unaccounted for were either killed in battle on the Eastern Front or were languishing in Soviet labor camps.

Certain basic questions are either left unanswered or ignored completely that would have immediately been confronted by a trained historian. For example: What happened to a million bodies? Why hasn’t there been an outcry from the widows or next-of-kin of loved ones who never returned? The answer is that most of them did return.

The very unfortunate thing about Bacque’s book is the initial impact that it has begun to enjoy without serious rebuttal. Many German readers will accept his thesis because it looks like it has solid evidence, and because it appears to prove that others too can be guilty of war crimes. The book needs to be put in perspective; it is the work of a novelist and should not be construed as history.

ARTHUR L. SMITH JR., Professor of History, Cal State Los Angeles