Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II - Tapa blanda

Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as 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.

An attempted book-length disputation of Other Losses, was published in 1992, featuring essays by British, American and German revisionist historians (Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, edited by Ambrose & Günter). However, that same year Bacque flew to Moscow to examine the newly-opened KGB archives, where he found meticulously and exhaustively documented new proof that almost one million German POWs had indeed died in those Western camps.

One of the historians who supports Bacque’s work is 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. In the foreword to the book he states: Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated about one million [German] men, most of them in American camps Eisenhower’s hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the ­horror of death camps unequalled by anything in American military ­history How did this enormous war crime come to light? The first clues were uncovered in 1986 by the author James Bacque and his ­assistant.”

This updated third edition of Other Losses exists not to accuse, but to remind us that no country can claim an inherent innocence of or exemption from the cruelties of war.

James Bacque
James Bacque is a novelist, book editor, essayist and historian whose work has helped raise awareness in human rights issues associated with war crimes, particularly spurring debate on and research into the treatment of German POWs at the end of World War II.

His fiction titles include The Lonely Ones, 1969 (Big Lonely in the paperback edition, 1970); A Man of Talent, 1972; Creation (with Robert Kroetsch and Pierre Gravel), 1972; The Queen Comes to Minnicog, 1979; and Our Fathers’ War, 2006. His history titles include Crimes and Mercies, an immediate bestseller upon release, and Other Losses.