Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque
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former officers and NCOs in the US army who have admitted that conditions in those years were lethal for the Germans.
One of these was General Richard Steinbach who had been in charge of a US POW camp near Heilbronn in 1945; (See Other Losses, p. xxiii) another was Colonel Dr Ernest F. Fisher Jr, who had sat on a US army commission investigating allegations of war crimes committed by American soldiers in 1945. He has said the commission was ‘a whitewash’ [in conversation with the author]. Daniel McConnell, a corporal in 1945, was in 1998 awarded a 100% medical pension by the US government Veterans’ Administration for post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his experiences in a US army camp. In 1945, he had been ordered despite his ignorance of medicine, to take over a ‘hospital’ tent at Heilbronn, Germany, which had no medical facilities beyond bottles of aspirin. The mud-floored tent was simply a way to assemble moribund prisoners convenient to the trucks that would soon take away their corpses.* The Veterans’ Administration thus admitted that McConnell had been injured for life by the horrors he witnessed but could not prevent.
What happened to the German population in the years 1945 to 1950 was concealed in many ways, especially by the destruction of US Army prisoner of war documents in the 1940s and by the suppression of photographs of prison camps taken by JeanPierre Pradervand of the International Red Cross, and given by him to Eisenhower in Frankfurt in August, 1945. This vital evidence is not listed in the Smith collection of many thousands of other photographs in the Eisenhower Library. The New York Times’ star correspondent Drew Middleton has also admitted lying about the camps in three stories printed in that paper in 1945.*
Why this suppression occurred was not just a matter of shame and guilt. Reporters and politicians during the war propagandized the populations of the Allied powers to demonize the enemy and glorify their leaders; historians credulously accepted most of this, converted it into myth, and have perpetuated that mythology for more than sixty years. This is part of a natural human process – we like to think of ourselves as good people, and we hate to admit that we often commit cruel and senseless acts. But the study of history is supposed to rise above that, and so far it has not, at least not with respect to ourselves as the Allied powers, and Germany.
There is plenty of evidence in Crimes and Mercies for the view that Americans, British and Canadians do and have done much good in the world. The British, bankrupt and rationed in 1945–47, sacrificed a small part of their food to help others, including Germans. Canadians spent billions of dollars and continued rationing themselves long after the war so they could send some of their ample surplus to feed the former enemy (see map opposite page 129). Churches in North America rounded up food, clothing and money on a massive scale to help the destitute in Europe. Australians and Argentineans also helped with donations of wheat and meat. Herbert Hoover risked – and spent – much of his life and a good part of his fortune helping victims of war around the world, from 1914 through 1948. Together with the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, he led the greatest campaign of mercy the world has ever known, saving 800,000,000 lives from the famine that spread round the globe after the Second World War. Hoover was exemplary of the American mercies that finally ended but could not prevent the crimes of Eisenhower, Morgenthau and others.
How this strange conflict between good and evil arose in our western democracies, raged for years, and was denied to history, is the theme and intended value of this book.
* See Other Losses, Little, Brown edition, 2004, p. xxv.
* See Chapter 8, p. 172.
Injustice has been with us since time immemorial, and will persist for as long as mankind exists. Two thousand years ago the Romans noted a thought that even then was a platitude: homo homini lupus. Man is indeed a wolf to other men.
The seventeenth century experienced the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ (1618–48) with its incredible massacres of the civilian population. In Germany alone, one-third of the population perished in the name of religion. But Europe had seen many other genocides, fratricidal wars and natural disasters. We remember the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, launched by Pope Innocent III in 1209 against the Manichaean heretics of southern France, during which entire cities were exterminated in the name of the ‘true faith’ (over 20,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in Beziers alone), accompanied by the establishment of the Inquisition, the widespread practice of torture to obtain confessions and/or recantations, and culminating in innumerable butcheries of recalcitrant heretics and the ‘Bûcher de Montségur’ in 1248, where more than 200 leaders of the Cathar hierarchy were burned at the stake.
War, famine and pestilence have also punished the twentieth century. Indeed, the two so-called World Wars of the first half of the century could very well be called our ‘thirty years’ war’, beginning in 1914 with the murder of the Austrian heir to the throne in Sarajevo and ending with the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
James Bacque gives us an account of crimes and mercies in the twentieth century. How have we lived up to our democratic principles, to our Judeo-Christian values of love, solidarity and forgiveness? Bacque shows us that, in war as in peace, suffering is personal, not collective. He shows us the dreadful statistics of the calamities inflicted by the victors on the Germans after the Second World War, but he asks us to personalize that pain, to see that behind statistics there is flesh and blood, lest we too become as indifferent as statistics.
The facts are so horrifying that they are hard to comprehend. The work I have done myself in The German Expellees and Nemesis at Potsdam revealed the horrifying statistics behind the mass expulsions of fifteen million Germans from the Eastern Provinces and the Sudetenland into the Occupied Zones in 1945–50. At least 2.1 million are known to have died. Chancellor Adenauer himself wrote in his memoirs that six million of them died. And the (West) German government under Adenauer in 1950 determined that 1.4 million prisoners of war had never returned to their homes.1 They are missing to this day. Bacque revealed what had happened to them in his book Other Losses (1989). And now he uncovers evidence that as many as five million Germans may have starved to death while under Allied government after the war. These figures are so shocking that he has sent the whole manuscript to a world-famous epidemiologist, whom I met when he was working in Geneva as a special consultant to the World Health Organization. He is Dr Anthony B. Miller, Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto. Miller has read the whole work, including the documents, and checked the statistics, which, he says, ‘confirm the validity of [Bacque’s] calculations and show that slightly more than five million deaths of German civilians occurred in Germany as a whole during the post-war period through to the census of 1950, over and above the reported deaths. These deaths appear to have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the semi-starvation food rations that were all that were available to the majority of the German population during this time period.’
After the fall of the communists, Bacque visited the KGB archives in Moscow where he found further evidence of the startling death figures in Other Losses. Those archives contain documents revealing some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, committed by the Soviets. It is remarkable that such evidence was not immediately destroyed, but carefully preserved instead. As the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov has written in his book, Lenin: ‘Lenin was not moved to halt the crime against men and women aged between fourteen and seventeen, and merely wrote “For the archives” on the document, thus establishing the tradition that no matter how callous, cruel and immoral an act of the regime might be, it would be recorded and stored in the archives for a history that would never be written as long as that regime lasted.’2 Now Bacque has used those documents, along with others newly declassified in the Hoover Institute Archives in Stanford and the Library of Congress, to determine the fate