Customer Reviews

Other Losses

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Mr. Bacque is to be congratulated for publishing this book which describes the fate German soldiers who had surrendered to General Eisenhower's forces at the end of WWII. They had expected to be treated according to the Geneva convention governing the conduct of armies in regard to captured enemy personnel. This was not to be the case. As Mr. Bacque points out an entire new category of "Disarmed Enemy Forces", DEF, was created. Its only purpose was to avoid having to feed and house these millions of ex-soldiers and thereby bypass the Geneva convention to which America was a signatory. One may argue about the precise numbers of ex-soldiers who died in these "temporary enclosures" but the fact that inhuman treatment did exist cannot be denied. Neither can the fact that a considerable percentage of them was subsequently given to the French for what is called today "slave labor," albeit this term refers nowadays only to non-German nationals. Readers who may feel negatively about Bacque's revelations should be aware that this treatment of former members of the German army was not just happenstance but the execution of the Morgenthau plan to render Germany harmless forever. The plan was not directed against the German leadership or Nazis, but the German people at large. Mr. Baque makes frequent reference to this unfortunate document but readers, who cannot conceive that U.S. personnel may also carry out atrocities should look at the Document section of Warren F. Kimball's "Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau plan for Defeated Nazi Germany."The book clearly shows that Roosevelt had endorsed a policy of "being hard on Germany" and Eisenhower was in full accord. That you cannot be "hard" on a country but only on its people and that this policy is bound to involve cruelties was not a consideration. The conditions changed only after Eisenhower's return to the U.S. and the appointment of Lucius D. Clay as High Commissioner. He clearly saw that the existing situation, even for the civilian population, made neither military nor political sense. It would merely turn the population to communism because even the Russians fed the people in their zone better than the Americans did. It is also to President Truman's credit that he quietly dropped the Morgenthau plan soon after the Potsdam meeting. As a former member of the Wehrmacht I had become aware of the Morgenthau plan in the winter of 1944-1945 but had regarded it as Nazi propaganda. I had always had high admiration for the principles America stood for and the Morgenthau plan seemed to be in total contradiction to those ideals. As mentioned in my book War and Mayhem I had intended to surrender to the U.S. forces towards the end of the war, but changed my mind on VE day and through the grace of God managed to avoid American as well as Soviet captivity. Having read Mr. Bacque's book I am even more grateful for the good fortune which kept me out of DEF status and instead allowed me to go to medical school within about six weeks after Germany's capitulation. I had no idea about the conditions German ex-soldiers were exposed to in those days, just as I had no idea about what really went on in the Nazi concentration camps until after the war. There are things people just didn't talk about. To "let it all hang out" became popular only in the late sixties and thereafter. But for the sake of historical accuracy both sides need to be heard and Mr. Bacque has done us this service for which he deserves our gratitude.

James Bacque deals with a topic most historians (especially Eisenhower apologists like Stephen Ambrose) want to avoid. It is the frightening account of how Allied forces, at the end of World War II, systematically used, abused and starved millions of German POWs in what Gen. George Patton described as "Gestapo tactics." As an historian, Army veteran, and grandson of a German army officer during that war, it's high time this story was told. So much is written about German atrocities during the war (Malmedy, Trois Ponts, etc). But little is discussed about such issues as this (another being "Operation Keelhaul"... forced 'repatriation' of Russians who served in the German Army). Bacque's evidence is convincing, thorough, and hard to avoid. Too bad so-called "historians" like Ambrose can't see this for himself. Must reading for any serious student of World War II history.

My uncle served in the US Army during WW2. When I was younger, he had told me about the US prison camps that he had seen as a member of an Army Engineering detachment. His stories are, sadly, supported by the book, "Other Losses".

Unfortunately, my uncle is now dead, or else, he could give everyone reading this review an eye witness account of the American attrocities perpetrated on the German people after the war had ended. As he had said, "We were supposed to be the Good Guys!"

This subject is hardly ever written about. It is time that the truth came out. My father was one of the German POWs sent to France, he was relased in 1948. This book covers much of what he told me, but what he told me was worse. Unfortunately, he died between the time the first reviews came out and the time that I was able to procure the book from Canada

James Bacque's "Other Losses" is an authoritative account of the awful conditions in which the Americans and French kept their former prisoners of war after world war II. The book is well researched and footnoted and provides much in the way of new information. The author convincingly argues that shocking crimes were comitted. The author comes to the very controversial conclusion that Eisenhower willfuly maltreated the former POWs after WWII resulting in mass deaths. It is shocking that there is so little evidence one way or the other about such a recent event. However James Bacque presents the data available for anyone to form their own conclusions.

Americans like to justify themselves by believing in the Hollywood notion that they can simply do no wrong. That is, of course, a self-deception. James Bacque has given a well-documented and superbly supported reason for Americans to ask themselves if they truly know what their military and government did in the so-called "Good War." If you are interested in learning some disturbing facts about the U.S. Army of Occupation in Germany, by all means read "Other Losses."

And as for the flak put up by the Establishment's court historians, most notably Stephen Ambrose, consider the words of Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, Jr., former historian at the Center of Military History United States Army, in the book's foreword: "Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequaled by anything in American military history. In the face of the catastrophic consequences of this hatred, the casual indifference expressed by the SHAEF officers is the most painful aspect of the U.S. Army's involvement." These words, obviously an expression of regret and not accusation, from a career U.S. Army officer carry far more weight than the pseudo-indignant cries of "Foul!" from an academic at LSU with an agenda to pursue.

The Book "Other Losses" tells the same story my father told. He was an ambulance driver in the war. After WW2 was over and his unit found out, the entire unit surrendered to the Americans who in turn sold(!) him and all others of his unit to the Russians for slave-labor in siberian coal mines. He managed to escape in 1951, but almost all others of his unit died of hunger and lack of food and medical help. He never recovered physically or mentally. My Father-in-Law survived an American POW-Camp, being just a pen in the open field with barbed wire and guards around it. No buildings, no food no nothing! He also told of the prisoners were just left to die.
A very good book.

I have read the book,and had a very hard time to see because I was crying at all times. Not way or how it was written, no, because I have been placed back from where the story came from. RHEINBERG.......1945..March-April May.In the midst of June we where pulled out and transfered to France. I visited the place,what is now a cemetary and called...Kriegs Gefangenen Lager Rheinberg.We......,the ones being there,do not want to be remembered....ever........!!!! ( Every word in this book is true)

My own father, drafted into the infantry and having fought in the European theater in '44 and '45, once admitted to having been ordered and having participated in the murder of German POWs (whether passively or actively) while his unit was on the march, since it would have been a burden to the Americans to move them. Whether this was part of Eisenhower strategy or not, it is further evidence of American atrocities. I grew up in the Dakotas as a baby boomer, where local atrocities less than a century old (against the Dakota and other native peoples) were still widely known -- and swept under the rug, never to be discussed. Atrocities do not belong exclusively to the Germans in WWII.

War is atrocity, and humans at war, on every side, commit atrocities, the atrocissima "blackest deeds" of the largest numbers of people. Bacque's numbers are bound to be squirrelly, because everyone involved was juggling those numbers. But he cannot be wrong, for too many people have gone missing, and too many survivors are telling dread tales.

But my uncle was a German. In his diaries he confirms that the treatment of unarmed surrendered soldiers was as described in this book, further a relative from the same village that he grew up in has had the same experience, It's hypocrisy at it's most cynical to think that we conducted war crime trials at the same time this atrocity was being perpetrated. Every American should have at the very least a sizeable footnote in the standard issue history book refering to these crimes. If your skeptical and even if your not you owe it to yourself to read this book and draw your own conclusions.