James Bacque (19 May 1929 – 13 September 2019) was a Canadian writer, publisher, and book editor. He was born in Toronto, Ontario.
Bacque was educated at Upper Canada College in Toronto and then the University of Toronto, where he studied history and philosophy, graduating in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was a member of Seaton's House, one of the school's boarding houses.
Bacque was a mainstream fiction writer and essayist before turning his attention, in 1989, to the fate of German soldiers held as POWs by the Allies after World War II. His recent works include Dear Enemy (2000), with Richard Matthias Mueller, essays on Germany Then and Now. Bacque had just completed a comic drama for the stage entitled Conrad, about a media mogul in prison, which was scheduled for production on 2 October 2009 at the George Ignatieff Theatre in Toronto. Bacque's latest book, Putting On Conrad, about the experiences of producers trying to put on his play in the face of libel chill, is an amusing satire on Canada's literary establishment.
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Main article: Other Losses |
In Other Losses (1989), Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more are said to have perished. The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "protecting power" and POWs were reclassified as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" to circumvent recognition under the Geneva Convention. Bacque argued that 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. He laid the blame on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying Germans were kept on starvation rations even though there was enough food in the world to avert the lethal shortage in Germany in 1945–1946.
Academic reviewers question three major aspects of Bacque's work: his claims that there was no post-war food shortage in other European countries; Bacque's estimate of the number of German deaths; and the allegation that Eisenhower was deliberately vindictive. 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.
Writing in the Canadian Historical Review, David Stafford called the book "a classic example of a worthwhile investigation marred by polemic and overstatement."[1] R.J. Rummell, a scholar of 20th-century atrocities, has written that "Bacque misread, misinterpreted, or ignored the relevant documents and that his mortality statistics are simply impossible."[2] More recently, writing in the 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".[3]
Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who helped edit Other Losses, wrote "I quarrel with many of your interpretations, [but] I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery" and acknowledged that Bacque had made a "major historical discovery", in the sense that very little attention had hitherto been paid to the treatment of German POWs in Allied hands. He acknowledged he did not now support Bacque's conclusions, but said at the American Military Institute's Annual Meeting in March 1990:
"Bacque has done some research and uncovered an important story that I, and other American historians, missed altogether in work on Eisenhower and the conclusion of the war. When those millions of Wehrmacht soldiers came into captivity at the end of the war, many of them were deliberately and brutally mistreated. There is no denying this. There are men in this audience who were victims of this mistreatment. It is a story that has been kept quiet."[4]
However, in a 1991 New York Times book review, Ambrose claimed:
"when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously—nay, spectacularly—flawed in its most fundamental aspects. […] Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945,[5] there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People's Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas."[6]
A book-length disputation of Bacque's work, entitled Eisenhower and the German POWs, appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and German historians.
Despite the criticisms of Bacque's methodology, Stephen Ambrose and Brian Loring Villa, the authors of the chapter on German POW deaths, conceded the Allies were motivated in their treatment of captured Germans by disgust and revenge for German atrocities.[7] They did, however, argue Bacque's casualty figures are far too high, and that policy was set by Allied politicians, not by Eisenhower.[8]
Stephen Ambrose said, "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."[9]
Jonathan Osmond, writing in the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said:
"Bacque […] has published a corrective to the impression that the Western allies after the Second World War behaved in a civilised manner to the conquered Germans […] It is clear that he has opened up once more a serious subject dominated by the explanations of those in power. Even if two-thirds of the statistical discrepancies exposed by Bacque could be accounted for by the chaos of the situation, there would still be a case to answer."
Osmond also called the book "emotive and journalistic".[10]
One of the historians in support of Bacque was Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, 101st Airborne Division, who in 1945 took part in investigations into allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany and later became a Senior Historian with the United States Army.[11] In the foreword to the book he states:[12]
"More than five million German soldiers in the American and French zones were crowded into barbed wire cages, many of them literally shoulder to shoulder. The ground beneath them soon became a quagmire of filth and disease. Open to the weather, lacking even primitive sanitary facilities, underfed, the prisoners soon began dying of starvation and disease. Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated about one million men, most of them in American camps."[13]
In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies (1997), Bacque claimed that Allied policies led to the premature deaths of 5.7 million civilians among the indigenous population of East and West Germany (in excess of recorded mortality) between censuses in October 1946 and September 1950, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German P.O.W.s due to Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the five years following World War II.
The book also details the charity work conducted by the Allies, primarily Canada and the United States, crediting it with saving or improving the lives of up to 500 million people around the world in the post war period. This work was led by Herbert Hoover at the behest of President Truman, and by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, together with Norman Robertson and Mitchell Sharp. This was the largest relief program ever organized, and expressed the ideals of many of the allied combatants.
Bacque's figures for prisoners of war and expellees are in excess of those accepted by historians, and his claim of 5.7 million unrecorded civilian deaths in East and West Germany between 1946 and 1950 censuses has no correspondence at all in historical literature. A review of "Crimes and Mercies" by German historian Bernd Greiner considers the aforementioned 5.7 million claim to have no substance, contextualizes Bacque's book with attempts of the extreme right to gain mainstream acceptance, and expresses surprise at historians' passivity in the face of such tendencies ("Es ist mehr als erstaunlich, wie Wolfgang Wippermann unlängst zu Recht anmerkte, daß die seriösen Fachhistoriker diesem Treiben noch immer ungerührt zusehen.").[14] A panel of scholars gathered at the annual German Studies Association meeting in Salt Lake City in October 1999 and found the charges of "Crimes and Mercies" even more extravagant than those proffered in "Other Losses". The panel's papers were never published, however, since the participants thought that the business of refuting Bacque's claims again and again and in detail gives more credence to his wild conspiracy history, and trying to revive the debate was yet another attempt by him to gain acceptability in the scholarly community.[15]
According to the German Federal Archives in 1956, more than 2 million refugees/expellees from the eastern territories of the former German Reich in its 1937 borders and from ethnic German minorities outside Germany's 1937 borders perished during and after the war.[16] However, this order of magnitude is under considerable dispute by historians.[17]
