HNN Debate: Was Ike Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Thousands of German POW's? Pro and Con
In 1990 Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose convened a conference of scholars in New Orleans to assess Bacque's claims. The scholars concluded that Bacque had misread the evidence and vastly overstated the number of POW's who died of neglect. Bacque subsequently revised his book after gaining access to secret Soviet-era archives. He stands by his account.
To help HNN readers sort out the main lines of disagreement, we asked Bacque to debate his critics.
 |
James Bacque and Ernest Fisher, Jr.
Mr. Fischer earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. He was in the 101st Airborne during World War Two. In 1945, he was ordered to take part in an investigation into allegations of misbehavior by U.S. troops in Germany. He called the investigation"a whitewash." He was for many years a senior historian with the United States Army Center for Military History in Washington, and wrote the official history of the U.S. Army campaign in Italy, Cassino to the Alps. Among his recent publications is a book on the American non-commissioned officer, Guardians of the Republic published by Ballantine.
Mr. Bacque was educated at Upper Canada College and Trinity College, University of Toronto (BA, 1952). He was for many years the Editor at Macmillan of Canada, and left to found New Press in 1968. He is the author of several novels, published by McClelland and Stewart and by Macmillan of London. His biography of a French resistance hero, Just Raoul, was published in Canada and the US. His books of German history are entitled Other Losses and Crimes And Mercies. His most recent work, Dear Enemy, is a collaboration with an ex-prisoner of war, Richard Mueller, of Aachen.
The revelations about the alleged plagiarism committed by Stephen E. Ambrose last year
are not only important to American historians and the public but also vitally
interesting to the authors of this article. We have both suffered considerable
personal embarrassment as a result of incorrect and deceitful allegations made
against us and our work. These were published in a book that Ambrose edited
(with Gunter Bischof) entitled Eisenhower And The German POWs. Ambrose
contributed the lead essay and he organized the conference, in New Orleans in
December, 1990 at which the original papers were presented.(1)
In the fall of 1987, Bacque and Fisher met for the first time under the auspices
of General Bruce Clark, to discuss some astonishing documents about United States
Army prisoner of war camps in 1945 which Bacque had uncovered while researching
his book Other Losses. Together, we went to the U.S. National Archives
to research this subject. We also interviewed the late Forrest C. Pogue, the
leading expert on the command structure of the army. We told him that our research
had shown beyond our doubt, that in the U.S. and French prison camps in Europe
in 1945-6, a vast tragedy had occurred, causing the needless deaths of approximately
800,000/900,000 Axis prisoners of war. Pogue advised us what we had to find
was the smoking gun in Eisenhower's hand.(2)
In the course of the next few months' research together, we visited the National
Archives in Washington many times, and the George C. Marshall Library in Lexington,
Virginia. In the spring of 1988, Bacque had finished the draft of the manuscript
and Fisher was preparing to write his foreword. Through the British historian
M. R. D. Foot, Bacque was introduced to Ambrose, then the chief of the Eisenhower
Center in New Orleans. Ambrose kindly read the manuscript, and offered many
suggestions by mail, and during a two-day editing session at his cabin in Wisconsin.
Among other things he said:
I have now read Other Losses and wish I had not. I have had nightmares every night since I started reading... You have a sensational if appalling story and it can no longer be suppressed, and I suppose (in truth I know) it must be published... I must withdraw my offer to write a Foreword; I just can't do it to Ike. I quarrel with many of your interpretations, [but] I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery.... you have the goods on these guys, you have the quotes from those who were present and saw with their own eyes, you have the broad outline of a truth so terrible that I really can't bear it.... You really have made a major historical discovery, the full impact of which neither you nor I nor anyone can fully imagine.... I have written at length about your script to Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon and Schuster.
The manuscript was typeset incorporating many of Ambrose's suggestions, Fisher
wrote the Introduction and the page proofs of the whole book were sent to Ambrose.
He read them and handed them back to Fisher at a meeting of an historical association
in Washington in the spring of 1989, with the words, "This book destroys
my life's work."
Nevertheless he bravely stood by his earlier words when reporters came to him
for comments after the book was published in Canada in September, 1989. He largely
confirmed Other Losses to the interviewer for the Dan Rather Evening
News. He said to Time magazine (October 2, 1989, International edition)
that it was "a major historical discovery. 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 democracy and freedom, and they are not excusable."
When he was questioned by a student at a lecture in British Columbia why he
had not himself discovered the evidence that appeared in Other Losses,
he said frankly that he had never thought to look.
Sometime during the autumn of 1989, Ambrose accepted an appointment to lecture
at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. It appears
he suffered a sea-change in his attitude, for he soon began organizing a conference
to be held at the Eisenhower Center, which eventuated in the book Eisenhower
and The German POWs.
In February, 1990 he also published a review in the New York Times Book Review,
under very odd circumstances. Although the Times apparently has a policy
not to print reviews from writers who have helped to edit a book under review,
the paper ran Ambrose's review of Other Losses. This appeared on page
one, despite the fact that the book was not yet published in the U.S., was by
an author never before published in the U.S., and was issued by a minor publisher
on the west coast. Clearly it was the fame of Ambrose which had secured the
review, its length and prominence.
In that slam-bang attack presented as a review, Ambrose admitted frankly that
he had not done the research necessary to confute the book's thesis. He wrote,
"When the necessary research is done, it will be seen that...." and
went on to say that the book is "spectacularly flawed."
In December, Ambrose convoked his conference on the subject of Eisenhower and
the German prisoners of war. A number of scholars presented the papers which
constitute the book. These writers we have come to think of as "The Ike-minded."
Although there are very many errors in the book which confuse and obscure history,
we shall correct only the errors relating to the outstanding discovery in Other
Losses, the number of the dead in American and French camps.
In the first place, Ambrose and the Ike-minded in his book make the fundamental
error of relying on a secondary source, the report of the Maschke Commission
in Germany, when much better primary sources were available. The Maschke report
purports to give an account of the fate of German prisoners of war in allied
hands after World War Two. The editors did not visit the Soviet archives because
these were closed. The American prisoner of war records were open at the time
of the research and writing, but the writer Kurt W. Boehme did not visit them.
These U.S. POW archives themselves were reduced by deliberate destruction sometime
in the late 1940s, according to Eddy Reese, a senior archivist in Modern Military
Records. But much survived, and it was among these papers, which we researched
for many months through 1986-7 that we found the basic evidence for the deaths
in American and French camps. For instance, we found the total of captives in
U.S. hands in northwest Europe under Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary
Force (SHAEF) command in June 1945, which is 5,224,310. And in the same sets
of papers, we found the detailed statistical summaries week by week reporting
captures, transfers, discharges of prisoners, including the ominous heading,
Other Losses. The meaning of this term was explained by Col. Philip S.
Lauben, whose name we found on the circulation list for these G2 papers. Lauben
was expert, having been head of the German Affairs Branch of SHAEF and he was
unequivocal: Other Losses meant deaths, and "very very minor escapes,"
fewer than two per cent. It was only much later, under heavy pressure from the
U.S. Army that Lauben was induced to recant. (3)
The total of prisoners of war captured was clear enough, but Ambrose and the
Ike-minded do not accept U.S. army documents as sufficient evidence. They reduce
the number of prisoners to 3,800,000 by a very simple sleight-of-hand. They
point out that some of the prisoners were designated as Disarmed Enemy Forces,
and they then fail to give any further accounting for them. This reduces the
pool of potential victims, and thus inflates the proportion of those alleged
to have died. It also eliminates from the accounts 1,400,000 of the captives
who were worst treated, and who bore the largest proportion of losses.
Of the prisoners of war, they say, some 700,000 were sent to the French. Among
the remainder, some 3,097,000, the Ike-minded say that 4,537 died. This is a
very challenging statistic. Ambrose's book reports that the death total of 4,537
constitutes a loss ratio of 0.1%, while neglecting to report the time period.
This is one of their typical evasions, which usually obscure the picture. We
can partly rectify it here.
The annual death rate for German civilians in the 1930s was around 12 deaths
per 1,000 people. The ambient death rate in 1945 in central-west Europe among
civilians was about the same. That 12 figure includes the most vulnerable in
society, babies and old people. Among young men in peacetime, the death rate
is always far lower. For instance, among resting American soldiers in base camp,
it was less than one third of that rate, or about 3.8. A total of 4,537 deaths
among 3,097,000 implies a death rate of 1.46 (per annum); since 80 percent of
the prisoners were kept on average 6 months, this death total implies a rate
of around 3.8. Thus the Ike-minded ask us to believe that the prisoners who
even Ambrose has admitted were starving, thirsty, living in mudholes for long
periods, somehow-miraculously-were just as healthy as were the well-fed, well-rested
and well-clothed U.S. soldiers living in base camp.
But the tedious statistical arguments have been settled by the appearance on
the scene of Soviet files. When the Soviet archives on prisoners of war for
the 20th century were opened after 1990, Bacque immediately flew to Moscow where
he was admitted to the gloomy KGB archives. There he was shown boxes containing
millions of documents relating to prisoners of war of every nationality from
World War II. He was allowed to patrol those dim aisles, to take down any box
he wished and to photocopy any documents he wanted. He brought away from Moscow
scores of copies of typical entries, including medical and legal records for
individual prisoners, ID documentation, date of death or discharge. He also
found the statistical summary of the fate of German prisoners of war.
This was a major find because it would confirm or destroy the work in Other Losses. The Germans knew, by a thorough survey, how many prisoners had never come home--about 1,400,000. The Soviet death figure would settle the argument between Ambrose and Other Losses as follows: from the missing 1,400,000 one subtracts the 800,000/900,000 deaths alleged in Other Losses to determine that there must have been 500,000 to 600,000 dead in Soviet captivity.
In forthright manner in several reports, most notably the Bulanov Report dated 28 October, 1956, the Soviets recorded the fate of 2,389,560 Germans, of whom 450,600 died., including 93,900 as they were being transferred from the front to the rear. A further 66,481 civilians died among people rounded up to replace dead and escaped prisoners. The total of the dead actually recorded in the Soviet archives is 517,081.
The authenticity of the Soviet archives is certain. The deaths of Japanese prisoners of war shown in the KGB prisoner archives match almost exactly the figures determined by the Japanese themselves. The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners at Katyn in 1940 is also confirmed in the KGB archives. Finally, the figures in Other Losses when tallied with the German figures for their own missing, confirm the KGB figures.
This amazing confirmation was never been admitted or discussed by Ambrose or any of the Ike-minded. No American publisher has offered to take on either of the books that have presented this research. They have, however, been published in the UK, Canada and Germany.(4)
Soon after this discovery, there was placed in our hands the "smoking
gun" demanded by Forrest C. Pogue. This was in the form of a letter sent
from Eisenhower's HQ to all German cities and towns under SHAEF's control, dated
May 9 1945. In it, the Germans are told that anyone who gathers together food
for the purpose of taking it to the prisoner of war camps was liable to be shot.
It was also a crime punishable by death to take food to the prisoners. We have
eye-witness evidence of the killing of several women and of prisoners near them,
by guards at American camps.
The personal consequences of all this for the authors have been distressing,
but far worse has been the effect on American and German history. Because of
the enormous influence of Ambrose and the New York Times, most American
reviewers dismissed Other Losses as sensationalist trash, or falsehood
as Ambrose called it. So the public has been deprived of their right to informed
public debate.
We are neither of us feeling much Schadenfreude these days. We are upset that
Stephen E. Ambrose did not live up to what is implied in his letter to Bacque,
that this story "can no longer be suppressed."
1. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1992.
2. Stoddart, Toronto, 1989
3. Kurt W. Boehme, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des 2. Weltkrieges:
Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in amerikanischer Hand In Europa, Ed. Erich Maschke,
Muenchen 1973.
4. Crimes and Mercies (Little, Brown, Toronto and London, 1999); Other Losses
(2d Edition, Little Brown, Toronto); Verschwiegene Schuld, Ullstein Verlag,
Berlin, 1995.