Other Losses

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable, controversial, elucidating, shocking...
Review: "Contrary to popular belief, truth is NOT established by popular belief."

This topic will surely remain contentious for decades to come, unless further research bears more evidence for or against. Certainly, an allegation is not proof, individual pieces of evidence are hardly sufficient proof for a larger claim, and Bacque must be considered to remain on the defensive to stake a claim of credibility for his thesis. Certainly the accused remain innocent until proven guilty beyond doubt. Any refutations are highly relevent and welcome. Where are they?

However, beware of hyperbole and obfuscations from such characters as our friend Graham Broad, who blatantly states the insupportable by referring to Noam Chomsky. See what Chomsky really says.

Also, see what Bacque himself answers to critiques Ambrose, Keegan, etc... :

If argumentation such as Broad's were to prevail, think how easy it would be to assert revisionist holocaust denial! Or is it the other way around...? You decide.

Rating:
Summary: Not an easy read, but rings true, sadly
Review: I read about half the book, I have a hunch the author is indeed telling the plain truth, nothing more or less. While stationed in the US Army in West Germany in the mid-80's, I learned enough German to talk to (among others) some older men who had been POWs. I was mildly baffled then by their differing accounts: one who surrendered in North Africa was profuse with praise and gratitude for his captors. A couple who were rounded up at the end of the war around the Main river were glad that West Germany had turned out so well under U.S. control, but made no bones about how hard their captivity had been. I thought "must be sour grapes, because we Americans always treat the captured enemy to cream cakes and chocolate" and so on. However, my commanding officer, an avid historian himself, also mentioned he'd heard of a lot of German POW's dying at the end of the war. To make a long story short, there was a sort of whispered "oral tradition" in the US Army in Germany of stories passed from the old timers to the new guys about something pretty bad happening to the POWs in the Rhein-Main (confluence of two rivers) area. My father was the one who recommended the book to me. It is difficult going, because of so much attention to detail, etc., but the main thing is, it unfortunately corroborates with what I have heard from both German and U.S. sources. What to do? I think this episode is like that of slavery in the 19th century. We can't undo what's been done, but we can try to make sure we do better. And mostly we have, not one of the old Germans I talked to would have traded places with those who were captured by the Soviets.

Rating:
Summary: This book clears up questions I've had
Review: I remember being shocked to see on a town memorial marker that one of my WWII-casualty great-uncles on my German side (my father is Irish, mother from Germany), had actually died in October 1946, a full year and a half after the end of the war. I was then informed this one, Willi Kurz, had starved to death in a camp in France (after surviving years of hellish war), survived by his wife and young daughter.

So to suddenly stumble across this book was incredibly saddening & maddening, and to see that children suffered similarly long after the war was supposedly over was even worse. But it is true, and "the truth will out." And it is almost unknown. And it shatters the myth that only the "other" side's government is capable of mass murder. And now, I dislike Ike.

Rating:
Summary: An important examination of a hidden facet of WW II history
Review: James Bacque came across this topic while writing a biography of a wounderful Frenchman, Raoul Laporterie, who had saved 1600 Jews during WW II. Discovering that Raoul had also saved two German POWs from slave labor, he got into this topic and, with the assistance of a U.S. Army Col./historian, researched this book. It examines the treatment of POWs and the employment of slave labor by the western Allies. Recently he has published "Crimes and Mercies"; using newly available sources and expanding the topic to the massacres of German civilians in the East and what he believes was a process of deliberate starvation of German civilians for two years after the war. The tolls he computes: 1.1M POWs killed; 2M forced laborers employed in the west; of 900K forced laborers held by the French (mostly POWs but also civilians), 300K dead; 2.1 to 6 M civilians massacred in the East, and "excess" deaths of 5.7 M civilians from 1945 to 1950. Is this possible? (This is important, these books have been attacked as fantasy or worse.) I believe that it is. A principal corroberative source I have is the experiences of relatives and family friends. My cousin Siegfried was captured at the end of the war. The day the war ended the treatment of the POWs went from correct to brutal. He was then sent to France as a forced laborer, and only survived because the major commanding his last camp told the men that he had been a POW for 5 years and had been treated correctly, and what was being done to them was a terrible crime, and that he would do everything to see that they survived. A family friend, formerly a Ford (US) executive and then with VW, was kidnapped out of his office and sent to France as a slave; his family had no idea what happened to him. He luckily got out a year later. Other relatives died in the camps. Secondly, both these books are carefully documented, with hundreds of precise footnotes covering every assertion and dozens of pages of appendices, bibliographies, etc., the vast majority Allies documents and sources. I have never seen a critic call Bacque on his sources, attributions, etc. There seems to be two schools of denial. One, the name-calling school, calls Bacque a "revisionist", although he does not write about either the topic or the period of the Holocaust, and seems to have a conventional view of the Holocaust. Supposedly such a label, used without a single factual assertion or rebuttal, automatically negates years of research. The second I call the "Where's the beef!" school, who states no bodies, no crime. In fact many mass graves have been found ig Germany, and the government literally and figuratively covers them up, and, if necessary, the police threaten investigators. In summary, this is a very important area of history that has been covered up too long. Bacque's two books (and "Just Raoul" about Mr. Laporterie) deserve reading and contemplation.

Rating:
Summary: Sympathy for the devil
Review: James Bacque has exposed the scribes and pharesees for what they really are, hypocrites. This will be news to westeners but in post war europe who the real culprits were has been known for decades.

The devil who orchestrated the delivery of two thirds of europe into bolshevick hands, the devil who ordered the murder of general Patton beacuse he was realizing what was going on and was talking about it and exposing it. Dwight David Eisenhower of jewish descent. This is the history of the true holocaust, documented and exposed in all in it's horror. And the really amazing thing is that the key culprit hid and destroyed everything linking him to it. And mind you this is only the tip of the iceberg, what happened in Eastern Europe is another story just as horrible. The constant bombardment in western media condemning Hitler and Germany has dulled the senses of people to the reality of many things during and after wwii. Mr. Bacque's book has been mass attacked by these same forces of evil and misinformation, yet it is absolutely impossible to refute his charges for he extensively annotated and cross referenced all his claims. Of course the politically correct will bawl and scream epithets and false accusations.

You must approach this book with an open mind, free of the pre-installed mental configurations which are spoon fed to the masses by the pro jewish mass media in order to assimilate the extent of this monstrosity. As I will continue to argue to the end of my days, the mass of lies spoken and written about us axis soldiers is overwhelming, we are seldom allowed to speak our minds openly and expose the real culprits; Mr. Bacque has done just that and more. After this there can be no sympathy for the devil.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed & irresponsible but some important truth
Review: James Bacque is wrong. A million German POWs did not die in American and French camps after WW II ended. His estimates of death rates are a tangled mess, key witnesses have complained that he misrepresented their testimony, he ignores contrary documentation, and there are common sense problems with his theory that cannot be overcome.

All the same, Bacque should be read carefully and with some respect. The expert scholars who rebutted Bacque have made their own share of mistakes.

When the book came out in 1989, we had known for decades from a postwar survey that about 1.4 million Germans, mostly soldiers, were simply missing at the end of the war. We knew from post office and pay records that most were last heard from on the Russian front, in 1944 or early 1945. It was widely believed and said in the West that the Soviets captured them and they died in the gulag, along with millions of other people during Stalin's rule. Bacque argued that somehow in the chaos at war's end these people fled to the American or French-occupied zones of Germany, were captured, and died in POW camps there.

Scholars argued (correctly, in my view) that there was no way a million soldiers could disappear completely from post office and payroll, yet go on drawing their pay and rations and clothing and weapons for a year or more, and THEN be captured in the final stages of the Allied advance, hundreds of miles west of their last known location. It would leave too much of a paper trail. Friends and comrades would have seen them and reported that fact in interviews. So the Soviets seemingly had to have captured them on or about the date of their disappearance.

But in 1991, when the USSR collapsed, Bacque actually went to Moscow and examined the Soviet archives. There are millions of individual prisoner files for the gulag system: the KGB kept everything. To Bacque's satisfaction and confounding his critics, the 1.4 million missing Germans are not in the Soviet system, but 2.4 million other Germans are, of whom about 0.5 million died and 1.9 million came home. There is no possibility that the KGB would keep records proving they committed mass murder, but systematically fake upwards of 50 million pages of other evidence, merely to embarrass a few Western scholars -- especially as no Westerner would ever know of the fake unless the USSR collapsed first. I agree with Bacque that it's conclusive: they were never prisoners of the Soviets.

So where did they go? It now appears that the most likely explanation is that they died in the fighting, and that the Nazi bureaucracy never got around to producing official death notices. They are considered missing because no official paperwork could be found -- and the reason may be as simple as inefficient staff work. The same thing happened in earlier campaigns; for example in the 1940 conquest of France and the Low Countries, close to half of the German deaths were not properly recorded until a year or more after the battle had ended.

This may seem like a very obscure debate but it goes to the heart of what we know, or think we know, about WW II, as for example the relative fighting effectiveness of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. It makes a big difference whether a million soldiers surrender, or die fighting. It also makes a considerable difference whether the Soviets held a million foreigners prisoner and denied the fact, or not. Our history books are full of what amount to vague guesses, many of them wrong.

What is particularly disturbing is that Bacque has since made even larger claims, about postwar starvation of German civilians (in his later book Crimes and Mercies), and these claims have been handled in even less convincing fashion (mainly silence) by his critics. We know that there was starvation in Germany as late as 1947 and 1948, and we know that the official numbers put out by the occupation governments of the time are absurd and wrong. We can not trust Bacque or his critics to get at the truth by themselves. We are left with the uncomfortable suspicion that millions of people may well have died, in part at least due to official American, British, or French policy, and that the truth of their deaths has remained hidden -- a vast campaign of revenge against the German people. But we do not know this, and the real explanation might easily prove (like the missing death notices) much less scandalous.

I recommend that anyone interested in modern history read Bacque's books, as well as Eisenhower and the German POWs, the rebuttal study. But be very careful, and very skeptical.

Rating:
Summary: My grandfather says this is true.He was there
Review: My grandfather, an American-Jewish officer with the U.S. Army, says Mr. Bacques book is so true that it upsets many people who both know it is true and don't want to see it written about or even brought up for discussion. He says Hatred is like that no matter what our nationalities or religions. I know what he means.
Hatred wasn't just limited to German political fanatics; it infected Americans,too, just like it has infected some of us Jews. G-d knows the Truth. Thomas Jefferson wrote many prophetic and true statements about our American homeland, but this one is relavent to this passage in our history: "I tremble for my country when I remember that G-d is just."
I see lots of material out there telling non-Jews to be tolerant and not hateful, and that's fine. But we really need to see that any of us can be hateful and try to justify murder in the name of our countries. But it's still murder.
Isn't there enough injustices in our world that we can't control?
Do we have to knowingly inflict more injustices on other people
in the name of our country? I don't think we have to, I think that often we just choose to do so. We are capable of better behavior, and we know it! So does G-d.

Rating:
Summary: we should have proved we were better, but did not
Review: Other Losses is one of those rare books that make you see life as it really was and is. No matter what the orthodox, official historians tell you, you know there's an official slant & need, for the sake of Truth, to know more. I know the orthodox are making a shameless industry of my peoples suffering and automatically and pervasively revile anyone who speaks of German suffering. Millions of Germans wrongfully suffered at the hands of the allies armies just as we Jews suffered at the hands of others. It's not retribution. It's just murder! Thank You James Bacque for your courage & kindness!

Rating:
Summary: Unmask the Grotesque American Lie
Review: Shall James Bacque forever be commended for this resilient masterpiece! He has unlocked the door for brave historians intent on re-educating the unaware/ignorant public. After reading & browsing through many WWII books & watching countless documentaries I was never less than proud of how yet again our country of America had successfully & bravely `righted a wrong' by overthrowning Hitler & then miraculously bringing Germany to the success it is today. Such was my distorted view formed by the influx of like material & information on the subject readily awaiting the eager mind. Such was my view that I vehemently debated any derogatory remarks about our leadership & values as a world power.

Amidst all the patriotism we have created a nationalism that has refused to admit fault in any foreign affairs. But, this particular "foreign affair" went well beyong everything admired about the country which was thought to be set apart for its ingenuity, humanity, ideals, beliefs - our Constitution. These crimes discarded our country's underlying principles. Basic freedoms were hampered to prevent public awareness, humanitarian aid was refused, the Geneva Convention (during & post-war) was deliberately discarded & murder was the end result. Most appalling is the ease with which our leaders were able to sidestep the Constitution. Still appalling is the gripping power which has managed until today to silence & suppress this evil truth. The victors have managed to write their own history & eager to shift shame, as is the case in `The Fall of Berlin 1945' by Anthony Beevor.

Enlightining, is the knowledge that more minds will expand through these revelations. While re-visiting the museum at Remagen, upon reading about the victorious 9th Armored Division's heroic capture of the Remagen brigde in Germany, I first learned about this book by chance (I call it luck) by picking up Bacque's other book `Dear Enemy'. Living in Germany for almost 2 yrs. now has allowed me to objectively evaluate America as a whole & reading Bacque's books has made that possible.

Rating:
Summary: Writing fiction disguised as fact
Review: This is a work of fiction that does not stand up to scholarly review. Do not misunderstand me, times were dificult all throughout Europe at the end of WWII, not just for prisoners. But this work by Bacque is at best a work of fiction. Please read the bulletin found at: German Historical Institute, Washington DC (Issue Number 23, Fall 1989). Also read the review by Stephen E. Ambrose (should be easy to find with a google search).

This book is another in the long line of 'conspiracy' theory books. The author mixes in just enough facts to make the theory sound real...sort of like Roswell, NM - you know...where the spacecraft crashed back in the 1940s and the aliens were captured. If you believe that kind of garbage, then this book is for you!!