Other Losses: An Investigation Into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II

by James Bacque

The first edition of this controversial book caused an international scandal by claiming that almost one million German prisoners of war had died of starvation in American and French death camps after World War II. In 1992, Bacque visited the newly-opened KGB archives where he discovered more evidence to support his claim. This revised edition of Other Losses presents all the relevant new material on the deaths plus new evidence of the suppression of truth by Western academics, press, and governments.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Germany, War, European History, Politics

305 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1989

About the author

Canadian novelist, publisher and writer of historic non-fiction.

Bacque studied philosophy and history and the University of Toronto, where he also holds an bachelor of arts.

Bacque was considered to be an mainstream writer until he began to write about allied war crimes against Germany and the fate of German prisoners of war.

Reviews

[Friedrich Mencken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something worth looking at in conjunction to this is the death of general Patton and his views on the post-war occupation policy in Germany.

Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton by Robert K. Wilcox: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...

Patton Assassinated to Suppress His Criticism of Post-War Policy: http://www.newnationalist.net/2018/01...

"The assassin recounted that OSS Chief William Donovan had personally ordered the killing on the grounds that Patton had “gone crazy” and was becoming a major threat to American national interests."

[Osred · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book when it first came out, which meant there was time to discuss it with an elderly German neighbour who had been a Sergeant, or whatever the German equivalent is, in WW2. He confirmed that what Baque revealed was already well known among German veterans. But he also revealed something else that should be investigated further. My neighbour surrendered in France and was interned at St Nazaire. He and his comrades were initially treated very well. Then they were issued with American uniforms and military equipment. Their impression was that they were going to be used as part of an Allied offensive against the USSR. That lasted for about a week - as far as I can recall from our conversation. Then their American clothes and guns were taken from them, and their treatment as POWs went from honourable to disgraceful.

[Michael Scharen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As if the horrors of WWI and WWII were not enough, mass slaughter may have taught our so-called elite ways to simply accomplish their goals even more quickly. General Harold G. Moore -- author of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam was quoted as saying, "The enemy is my enemy, until he is my prisoner. Then he is my responsibility." It is quite possible that the overrated political general -- Dwight D. Eisenhower -- succumbed to the very evils he claimed to be fighting. Certainly, he had no issue with bringing in thousands of Nazi war criminals to the United States and giving them clean records. (See review Operation Paperclip.)

Bacque's research is extremely compelling, to say the least. I for one, based upon inductive reasoning would say that he is correct in his assessment. Such crimes would be very easy to pull off in the immediate post-war environment where Eisenhower had near god-like status. Even those high up who knew about it need to buck up the criminals next to them to insure their own survival. And, someone such as Ike would be able to make all the evidence disappear. Besides, who is going to believe a bunch of German disarmed combatants (Where have we heard these terms before?) whose boots were on the necks of most of Europe and the Ukraine not long before? As we all know, the losers do not get to write history.

Read this book and others like it. Stop listening to the cheerleaders for the powers that be such as Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearnes Goodwin. Those are only shilling for your masters.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting, but rather troubling & puzzling book. It asserts that as many as a million soldiers of the German armed forces that surrendered AFTER Germany surrendered in WWII, were systematically starved to death in US & French POW camps. The evidence appears pretty solid, and it is well known (in Germany at least - I heard about it when I lived there from '78-'82) that the population level of Germans dropped by about 3 million between '45-'48 for unaccountable reasons. The usual explanation is that it was the slaughter of the Prussian civilians fleeing west that got trapped (and killed) by the Red Army, but no records of that were ever kept.

Maybe some things never need to be known???

[Johns · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Whoever controls the press proclaims that it is free." (Page 177.) This is the key point of Bacque's book. That a victor was able to hide some savage treatment of German soldiers and civilians after winning WWII is a horrendous example of too much power placed into the hands of willful and devious men. This extensively-footnoted work lays out a frightening scenario for the future. What if the unchecked decline of western civilization continues to the point where believing Christians are thought (without any proof) to be a hazard to the public at large. Think . . . while doing such is still legal!

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very tediously written (badly organized and repetitious--and looks like it was padded out for publication)--but the story it tells is appalling. How 1,000,000 Germans died in camps right after WWII; and all pretty much at the instigation of Eisenhower. I liked the last few paragraphs--culminating in: "Among all these people thought to be of good will and decent principle, there was almost no one to protect the men in whose dying flesh was our deadly hypocrisy. As we celebrated the victory of our virtue in public, we began to lose it in secret."

[Bob Bingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book goes a long way toward debunking the myth of America's leaders being benevolent saviors of the rest of the world. In particular, Eisenhower and his close friend and ally Walter Bedell Smith are guilty of atrocious war crimes.

[Frank Butry · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look into American treatment of German solders after WW2

[Frmertd · Rating 2 out of 5]

As pointed out, this book has been considered incorrect and put together using incorrect methodology. Mark Felton, a professional historian and respected leader in the study of WW2 has pointed out a few reasons to not believe this book. Check out his youtube video on it.
Dr Felton points out the following:
1.)The author is a Canadian author and not a historian at all, not using methodologies appropriate to history.
2.)The idea that a MILLION pows starved to death in the allies hands would make this one of the largest war crimes in history. That this could be covered up until 1982 begs belief. How could the German people in the 1960's and 70's not have found out about this??
3.)The German government in the 1970s set up a commission to study if the allies had committed war crimes against German POW's and extensively interviewed hundreds of German POW's, to ask this very question. Their answer was "no". It never happened. The German government found the death rate approx 0.3% which was appropriate and expected for a country with no infrastructure to move food around. (The railways were destroyed by allied bombing). Again, the actual German POW's said this.
4.)Mark Felton explains some other methodologic errors of how the author came up with his enormous incorrect figures, but they are boring and I won't bore you with how they figured out the numbers are wrong by an order of magnitude.
5.)If you know about WW2, then you know German soldiers were on starvation rations as early as 1944. Read The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer, and you will have a first hand account of what it was like serving in the Weremacht. He had lost 30 pounds before they ever surrendered. The reasons for this was the railway systems were destroyed by Allied air bombing. No food could be moved from one place to another. If the cow wasn't next to you, you didn't get milk.
Anyway, semiinteresting book , but don't believe that the Allies allowed a million POW's to starve to death and die of exposure because it just didn't happen.
We all know that we live in an age of tribalism and confirmation bias. The "America haters" will see a book like this and believe every word as gospel, and the "America lovers" will dismiss it outright. Just as the Trump lovers believe every book on him and the Trump haters have their opposite books to reconfirm what they already believe.
Confirming your strongly held beliefs by screening the information you take in is what uneducated people do nowadays. And we have plenty of those bozos in 2021.

[ANN M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about the murder of 7.5 million German soldiers & civilians immediately after WW2 ended. This is not a light read and reads as it appears, as a English translation. It is NOT a novel, but rather more like a dossier for a legal case of an attempted genocide. This was all orchestrated under the Morgenthau Plan by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. It was halted after Gen. Marshall brought it to light, that IF it didn't stop, an estimated 25 MILLION Germans would die. History is written by the victors so this book is a tear-jerker, "almost wish you DIDN'T read it" account. It's a big pill to swallow. But the truth will out.

Without recreating the other positive reviews. I will just say this: Next time you hear that some other country's leader is a "terrorists" you need to consider the source of the intel. Is it propaganda using "terrorist and weapons of mass delusion as a pretext to murder 100s of 1000s of civilians just to "remove this bad leader"??

Anyone who has a problem with this information as being biased, either hasn't read the book and slanders the author as a "Nazi sympathizer" is just ludicrous and baseless. This author is clearly an advocate for the truth of the horrors that happened to the Germans, so THAT no other peoples experience this attempted genocide.

Having said that, as Gen. Smedley Butler said in his book, WAR is a RACKET, it's obvious this horror continues. Just in the last 22 years since 9/11, millions of innocent people have died and all to get ONE "boogieman" "terrorist". The moral objective is another lie. This book exposes the ugly unspoken truth of what is NOT taught in American & European public schools which are themselves all run by the Frankfurt School since WW2.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another emotional book written by a Nazi sympathizer. Private Franz says that the Americans "were really shitty". And that is also supported by Private Heinz who remembers decades later how they were fed "almost nothing". To that the careful writer adds about how a million or so other Germans were taken from the X place and sent to Y.

How about some numbers? How about the average calorie count? How about photos? It's all a Jewish conspiracy, right, and the Holocaust never existed.

[Dominic · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The German is a beast.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Do you know what Eisenhower, Morgentheau, Stalin, and Roosevelt, all had in common? They hated Germans. Not Nazis . . . but Germans. Nearing the conclusion of World War II with an inevitable Allied victory on the horizon, these men met on many occasions to discuss the fate of Germany. This is nothing unusual, as such talks take place at the conclusion of every war. But what was remarkably strange was the eerie obsession with which these men had with treating the Germans “roughly” (a phrase they would often use) and how they would make the German people suffer as much as possible. This was not just about reparations of resources, or the partitioning of land, but about labor camps and intentional starvation.

Other books that cover this topic tend to focus on massacres committed by Russia on the East Germans, or about the dreaded U.S. bombing of Dresden, but Bacque’s book primarily focuses on the meticulously planned starvation, forced labor, and other mistreatments of German soldiers and even non-soldiers. Churchill initially showed strong resentment to the plans conjured up by the men above, but was essentially peer pressured and falsely led to believe Britain would somehow benefit from this plan.

Upon hearing Churchill’s initial objections and after he stormed out of the meeting, Roosevelt told the other men, “We have got to be rough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people, or you have got to treat them in such a manner that they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” How is it that our history books never tell us about ethnic persecution against Germans? Or about how the world leaders that are supposed to be heroes wanted to commit ethnic genocide against them?

Morgenthau’s plan had to do with the pastoralization of Germany and moving it away from its industrialization, with special attention to its mining industry. This is important to note since industrialization is what saved Germany’s economy from the end of WWI to the end of WWII (). Here is the issue: the bulk of Germany’s farmland was in the East, most of which was to be given to Poland and Russia. Germany then would lose all of its industrialization in the West, and all of its agriculture in the East. They would be left with nothing, and this was deliberate. “The Morgenthau Plan” wrote Cordell Hull, “would wipe out everything in Germany except land, and the Germans would have to live on the land. This meant that only 60 percent of the German population could support themselves on German land, and the other 40 percent would die.”

Fast forwarding to the actual handling of German prisoners, the Allied forces, especially the United States, were horrendous from the start. Already in February of 1945, Colonel Gill had reported that he only received 7,004 prisoners when 17,417 were expected. What happened to them? They found out the next month in March, when several rail cars had arrived at various checkpoints full of dead bodies. Even more dead prisoners were found in the Mailly and Attichy camps. Eisenhower was furious that he had to issue an apology for this incompetent handling of POWs. But was it incompetence, or was it deliberate?

In the same year around the same time, many European nations were in fear of a “World Food Storage.” Authorities including Brigadier General T.J. Davis warned Eisenhower and others that there was worry that countries all over Europe would not have adequate amounts of food, let alone prisoners of war. However, this contradicts what was set forward in the Morgenthau Plan. Everyone was told that with the pastoralization of Germany, the Germans would still be able to feed themselves, and the Allied forces would be able to feed the prisoners. This means that they either lied, or again, they were extremely incompetent in their analysis. Yet if it were the latter case, they would be without excuse because many had pointed out, as Hull did above, that this plan would inevitably lead to starvation of German civilians and prisoners. Given the track record so far of Eisenhower and his insiders, it leads one to believe this was deliberate. Adults were supposed to consume 2,250 calories per day. German civilians were cut down to 1500 per day, while German prisoners had anywhere from half the daily amount to no food at all. Allied troops on the other hand were averaging 4,000 calories per day!

To get around the legal ramifications of starving Germans to death, Eisenhower changed their status from POW to DEF (Disarmed Enemy Forces). This essentially meant they were not allotted the same international rights as POWs. By the time May came around, there were more reports that these prisoners were consuming less than 1000 calories per day, and some of them none at all, leaving the prisoners to ration among themselves the little food they had. This food shortage had gotten so bad that Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley simply released them that same month in May, for fear of mass starvation. Yet shortly after their release, Eisenhower came to the rescue, countermanded this release, and retained the prisoners! Bradley, Lee, and Patton had then given Eisenhower direct orders not to take any more prisoners, but he did not listen. Just a few days after the countermand, he had taken in over 2,000,000 DEF. What conclusion can we draw from this other than the fact that Eisenhower wanted nothing but to commit genocide against Germans? He knew he could not feed them, not house them, was given direct orders not to retain them, and went against the actions of his fellow commanders.

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, Captain Julien’s visit to the Dietersheim camp had revealed some more disturbing information. He found “no food at all.” There were only two doctors there, both of which were German prisoners who themselves were malnourished and had no resources. The blankets and clothing were filthy. The prisoners had to take shade from the sun under pieces of cardboard and barricade themselves in holes in the ground. Most disturbing and perplexing of all was that there were women and children in this camp. If the camps were meant for POWs and DEF, why were there women and children? These prisoners, which were supposed to tally to 103,500, were supposed to be sent to France for labor. Upon hearing Julien’s report, French forces were sent there immediately to evaluate the situation. They immediately released 32,640 of them who were “old men, women, children under eight years of age, boys eight to fourteen, terminally sick and cripples.”

You might wonder how these atrocities flew under the radar and avoided international scrutiny. The U.S. simply denied the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to their camps. This was “in direct defiance of American obligations under the Geneva Convention.” The master plan behind this was to remove Switzerland from their role as the Protecting Power. In short, with the dissolution of the German government, Switzerland as the Protecting Power was the authority in place with which the ICRC would report to. What the U.S. did then to prevent this from happening was dismissing the Swiss minister in Washington from his role of Protecting Power, which allowed the State Department to inform the ICRC that they had no need to pay visits to any camps since there was no authority to report to. This goes to show the lengths to which the U.S. was willing to go to commit their international crimes and ethnic cleansing.

Many critics of Bacque’s work, both here on Goodreads and elsewhere, point out that he is not a professional historian and therefore his reporting should not be trusted. However, notable historians have covered the same material, such as Alfred-Maurice de Zayas in A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, or R.M. Douglass in Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. John Sack gives a more unique perspective of the mistreatment of Germans after the war in An Eye For An Eye. Critics should therefore focus on the material itself rather than attempting to dismiss it by shifting focus to the author’s lack of academic credentials. These people should be shunned for German genocide denial.

[Douglas Dubrish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many GI's coming back from WW2 didn't want to talk about it and this is why. Eisenhowers 18 starvation camps where 2.2 million Germans were simply starved to death after the war. Aged 8 to 80 men, women and children. Our army guys were ordered to stay away from these POW camps where the Germans themselves were turned to skin and bone. Incredible to think that Hitler and many more did escape to South America according to FBI and CIA files recently released. They knew Hitler lived and didn't go after him. A lot of documentation in this book and banter between Generals in French and American armies. War is he'll and this really proved it.

[Lion]

I was just skimming some pages, but it's a riveting read that pulls you in.
What could be bad about aiding and abetting genocide, just because it's socially dominant? It's not like that's going to help it happen again, or anything like that.

[Denny Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. Credible and well researched. Right up there with David Irving. Honorable author among those willing to do the unpopular thing and stand by their conclusions. Defenders of D. Eisenhower (I was one of them) beware! Pedestrian history is just as bad as the internet!

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Were we the good guys??

[Ronnie Koch]

it is intriguing to read this Canadian evaluation of USA 's. political and military policy. it will be much more pertinent to read this Canadian analysis once Canada becomes the 51st state.

[Chad Montabon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a 'cancelled' book that has been blacklisted. My copy was a not great one on Kindle so some of the statistics pages were all jibberish, but it is a side not being told by many.

[Alex Ronk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tenía planeado hacer ésta reseña unos días antes, pero he tenido algo de trabajo y se me fue la semana como Flash xD pero aquí la traigo, además de que fue la primer lectura en inglés del año y me sorpendí al leerlo más rápido de lo que pensaba :O

No es una lectura muy fácil de digerir, si es que así le puedo decir, porque tiene situaciones un poco intensas, eso sí, tiene muuuuchas cifras y al final lo único que pensé es que realmente no se sabe cuántas prisioneros de guerra murieron por la falta de humanidad. Probablemente se puede pensar que no tiene nada de cierto y no busco ofender a nadie con éste tipo de reseñas, pero es bueno leer la otra parte de lo qué pasó en la Segunda Guerra Mundial y es lo que en éste libro sucede y a lo que me refiero con no ofender es que hay otro lado de la historia que hoy día muchas personas cuestionan y que al leer algo así te das cuenta que la falta de humanidad no fue de los alemanes a los judíos y que la historia la cuentan los ganadores.

Lo recomiendo si quieren saber más sobre el tema, ya el año pasado si mi memoria no me falla leí Through Innocent Eyes que va un poco sobre lo que se vivía en Alemania y cómo educaban a los niños y jóvenes desde lo que la autora encontró en el diario de su mamá.

Con éste libro se trata de una investigación por parte del autor con ayuda de otras personas que incluso hubo amenazas en la publicación y que a pesar de querer negar todas las cifras que se manejan, las personas que lo niegan o negaban jamás probaron su punto por lo que sin duda hay mucho más detrás de lo que sucedió en esos años. Se narra cómo mataban a recién nacidos sólo por ser alemanes, mujeres embarazadas, ancianos y la poca humanidad que tenían para no tenerlos en lugares limpios y con un trato digno, los dejaban sin comer, no tenían dónde dormir y preferían que la comida se acumulará antes que darles lo que les correspondía, pero aún con eso no tenían el control de las personas que realmente murieron por ese trato que orden o no de los superiores les dieron a personas inocentes, por eso se llama Other Losses, porque eran muertes que se ponían en esa categoría al no saber con exactitud cuántas personas fueron.

Así que lo recomiendo sin duda si quieren saber más del tema y sin ánimos de ofender a nadie, actualmente es un tema que me interesa y que honestamente siempre cuestioné lo que se dice del holocausto y cómo es que muchas cosas las cuentan como les conviene.

[Greta G]

Highly controversial.