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James Bacque discusses his devastating research into allied war crimes against a defeated Germany in post-World War Two Europe, as detailed in his most famous book, Other Losses; Eisenhower imposes starvation on surrendered German soldiers interned in death camps; official records of German POWs and refugees purged and hidden; eyewitness and survivor accounts of American brutality; the Morgenthau Plan to ravage and grind into dust post-war Germany; Geneva Convention not followed; Soviet KGB archival records of refugees and POWs opened; evidence of war crimes and mass deaths of German prisoners still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the US, France, Britain and Canada; the real life consequences of a reinterpretation of history.
James Bacque discusses his devastating research into allied war crimes against a defeated Germany in post-World War Two Europe, as detailed in his most famous book, Other Losses; Eisenhower imposes starvation on surrendered German soldiers interned in death camps; official records of German POWs and refugees purged and hidden; eyewitness and survivor accounts of American brutality; the Morgenthau Plan to ravage and grind into dust post-war Germany; Geneva Convention not followed; Soviet KGB archival records of refugees and POWs opened; evidence of war crimes and mass deaths of German prisoners still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the US, France, Britain and Canada; the real life consequences of a reinterpretation of history.
This is Guns and Butter.
Eisenhower issued an order on May the 7th or 8th of 1945 in German from his headquarters in Frankfurt and sent it by courier to every province of Germany. The order in that courier message was that if anybody gathers food together with the intention of taking it to the camps or takes food to the camps, he or she may well be shot. And some people were shot.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, James Bacque. Today’s show: Let’s Stop Torturing Germany. James Bacque is a former journalist, book editor and publisher. He has written novels, essays, short stories, a biography, a play, and books on the history of post-war Germany. His best sellers, Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies, have revealed atrocities committed by the Allies against German POWs and civilians after World War II. Today, we have an in-depth discussion of his most famous book, Other Losses: An Investigation Into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the Americans and the French After World War Two. We also touch on the real-life consequences of overstepping the bounds of orthodox history.
Bonnie Faulkner: James Bacque, welcome.
James Bacque: Thank you very much.
Bonnie Faulkner: I’ve just read your astonishing book, Other Losses, published in 1989, An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the Americans and the French After World War Two. The treatment of surrendered German soldiers was so horrifying it was hard to read. Why did you title your book Other Losses?
James Bacque: Because in the American prison camp systems starting in 1944, there were boxes showing week by week the total of prisoners on hand, sick, transferred, discharged, and so on. There was no category for death, none. It was really hard to believe that the total captured being over 7 million people, many of them wounded, that there were no deaths for years. In fact, it was impossible.
So there was one category that said “other losses.” It had enormous numbers, millions, in the category and I thought, well, that’s where they’ve hidden deaths and they’ve just called it “other losses”. I then found, from one of the guys who ran that prison system, Colonel Philip S. Lauben, that that was indeed true, that that was where they hid the deaths, statistically, and so that’s why I called it Other Losses.
Bonnie Faulkner: In Colonel Ernest Fisher’s foreword to Other Losses, he states that, “Eisenhower’s hatred produced the horror of death camps unequaled by anything in American military history. Some idea of the magnitude of this horror can be gained when it is realized that these deaths exceed by far all those incurred by the German army in the west between June 1941 and April 1945.” Eisenhower's hatred of Germans was apparently not shared by General Patton, Lee or Bradley. Can you account for the brutality of Dwight Eisenhower toward defenseless prisoners of war?
James Bacque: I speculated on that once in the process of writing the manuscript. I sent the typescript before publication to a great expert on Eisenhower. His name was Stephan E. Ambrose. Steve read it over for me, very kindly, and then I went out to his place in Lilly Lake, Wisconsin. We talked about Eisenhower and why he was like this, and Steve advised me not to speculate, “Don’t guess. You’ve got an amazing story here; stick to it.” And so I did. I did not speculate, and I hardly want to know. It happened, and it was horrifying, and why it happened is really hard to say. That’s between him and God.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well now, when you said that the records that you examined hid all of the deaths under an innocuous category called “other losses”, why do you think that was done?
James Bacque: Because they were ashamed of what they were doing, and they knew it was a war crime and they didn’t want to get caught.
Bonnie Faulkner: The content of Other Losses is extensively documented. How did you conduct your research for Other Losses, and what kinds of different evidence did you include?
James Bacque: Oh, Bonnie, have you got a couple of years?
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, that’s what it took, right?
James Bacque: Yeah, that’s right. Well, it really began when I read War and Peace, and I thought at the end of reading that book, when I was in boarding school in Canada, when I was 16, this man Tolstoy has made me understand people who are completely alien to me - Russian nobility of 1812 and I was just enchanted. I grew up. He became a hero of mine, and Gandhi. I went to live in France for a while, because my wife and I wanted to live in France with the kids, and we did. And we there encountered a man name Raoul Laporterie, who had been the Mayor of a small town called Bascons, near Bordeaux in the South West, and he, during the war, had saved hundreds and hundreds and maybe 2,000 people, mainly Jews in the rag trade from Nazi persecution during the war.
So I said, “Can I write your story?” He said, “Yes.” I got a friend to come and help me, and I settled down in his village and began reading his correspondence from the year 1942-43 and ‘44. This was now in the year 1986, so I was reading his correspondence about 40 years later.
And in the correspondence there were letters from people with German names like, Hans Goertz and Adam Heil, and they said to Laporterie in these letters, which they wrote to him after the war—thus in 1946 or ’47—remember, the war was over in May, 1945. They kept thanking him and writing to him as a friend saying, “You’re a wonderful man. How is your wife? How are the kids?” and so forth.
So I went to Laporterie and said, “Look, you fought these Germans in the First World War. You could have been killed by them in the Second World War. How come you’re friends?” And he said, “Well, after the war, in 1946, the French government had a whole lot of prisoners, many of them turned over by the British and the Americans and the Canadians to French hands, and they were being used as slave labor to help rebuild France after the war. Mr. Laporterie had treated these 70 slaves very well, and they made friends.
So here I am, in 1986, talking to Germans later on who had been friends of Mr. Laporterie. And when I went to see one of them he said, “Mr. Laporterie saved my life.” I said, “How did he do that?” “Well, he took me out of the prison camp.” “Well, what was wrong with the prison camp?” “Well, monsieur, you’ve got to understand, we were starving to death.” “What? In 1946?” I said. “Of course,” he said. “Twenty-five percent of the men in that camp died in one month.”
Bonnie Faulkner: Wow.
James Bacque: And that was because the French hated the Germans so much that they were murdering them by starvation. The Americans were doing the same in their camps, I later found, murdering them by starvation and exposure.
Bonnie Faulkner: Was American record-keeping of German prisoners of war adequate for your research?
James Bacque: Yes, it was. Once I understood the code. Some of the records were destroyed by Eisenhower himself when he became President after the war. He destroyed some of those records. I was told this by the chief archivist of modern military records in the United States, a man named Eddy Reece. He said that all the known record material was destroyed. But there was enough left that with the help of Colonel Fisher and Colonel Lauben, I was able to piece together the actual week-by-week deaths and illnesses and so on.
Bonnie Faulkner: Could you describe the American enclosures, as opposed to Soviet camps, that German prisoners were kept in?
James Bacque: Much worse than the Soviet camps. The Soviets at least gave their prisoners, after the war, a roof and primitive clothing. In the American camps the prisoners, some of whom were wounded and had been dragged to the hospital half-alive at the end of the war, were flung into these enclosures, which were just fields surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun towers. That was it. That was it. They were left to die there. There was no food. There was not even water. the Americans killed off three-quarters of a million healthy young men in the first year or less than a year.
Bonnie Faulkner: How were surrendered German soldiers treated then by the American Army?
James Bacque: It was deadly. There were about 7 million total in the capture of whom maybe 6 million were German, and in the period of the first year after the war, about three-quarters of a million died and a quarter of a million were turned over to the French, really to die.
Bonnie Faulkner: In Other Losses there are descriptions of death by disease, starvation, exposure, gunfire, even the bulldozing of live German prisoners within the enclosure. Many of these descriptions were made by eyewitnesses, both survivors and U.S. Army personnel, isn’t that right?
James Bacque: Yes. They were confirmed by civilians outside the camps who could see what was happening inside the camps through the barbed wire. The death policy against Germans was extended quite soon after the end of the war to include the whole population. So there were some 60 million Germans penned up in what was really just one prison camp, extending from the North Sea to the Alps and east to west from France to Poland. Those people were starved, too. So, far more German civilians were starved to death in that vast enclosure than died during the war. Somewhere between 7 and 14 million German civilians died as a result of Allied action after the war, which is way more than died during the war.
Bonnie Faulkner: What is the evidence that Dwight Eisenhower re-designated or reclassified prisoners of war, POWs, as Disarmed Enemy Forces, or DEFs? Why was this done, and what were the consequences?
James Bacque: It was done partly to make a statistical camouflage. Remember, he was a general and a soldier; he loved camouflage. And the camouflage helped to divert attention away from the deaths. I talked to the senior war correspondent of The New York Times who was named Drew Middleton and who was there in the war in 1945 and he was still alive when I was doing research in 1986. I went to New York and I showed him my evidence for the crime. He said, “I’m not surprised that you found something bad in that period.” I said, “Well, you wrote in The New York Times that you visited the camps, and everything was all right. There were no deaths at all, and there was nothing wrong, and you published that. You wrote three stories like that in The New York Times.” He had nothing to say, except, “Well, it was a bad time.” That was part of the camouflage. The New York Times lied about that in those days and they’ve lied about me and my books ever since, many times.
Bonnie Faulkner: So with regard to Eisenhower’s reclassification of prisoners of war to call them disarmed enemy forces, why did he do this and what were the consequences?
James Bacque: He was able to keep the Red Cross out of the camps that way. He was able to draw a fictional cloak over it all. And you see how in Washington today—and all over the world, really—people tell lies at the highest levels, and they can get away with them partly because they’ve given the people, deceived people, at least something to believe. It’s not true, but it’s something they can believe in instead of the truth.
Bonnie Faulkner: In what ways were the rules of the Geneva Convention broken by the U.S. Army Command that was in control of German prisoners?
James Bacque: Just about every way you can think of, but one of the chief ways was to deny food that was readily available. The Red Cross sent three trainloads of food into Germany for the prisoners and the army refused to allow them to unload and the Red Cross had to take the food by the trainload out of the country. That was in the spring of 1945.
Eisenhower issued an order on May the 7th or 8th of 1945 in German from his headquarters in Frankford and sent it by courier to every province of Germany—which is like a state in the United States—and sent those. The order in that couriered message was that if anybody gathers food together with the intention of taking it to the camps or takes food to the camps, he or she may well be shot and some people were shot.
Bonnie Faulkner: Was there a world food shortage in 1943 to 1945?
James Bacque: I consulted the records of the Department of Agriculture, I read a magazine report written by the UN in 1946, and I talked to some Canadian people who fed Germans after the war, and my conclusion was that there was no world food shortage, that there was a food distribution shortage, just the way there is now. Some people in the world are starving and because of such bad distribution they don’t get food that’s readily available. You and I eat all the time and yet in our very cities there are people on the edge of starvation. It’s the same then.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now according to the Geneva Convention you’re required to feed prisoners of war, aren’t you?
James Bacque: Yeah. You’re required to feed prisoners of war the same nourishment that your own peacetime soldiers get in base camp, In other words, plenty.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, another provision of the Geneva Convention, aren’t you then, by international law required to provide shelter to POW’s?
James Bacque: Oh yes. There was no shortage of tents.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, then, was there any shelter provided to these POWs?
James Bacque: No, basically no. The British and Canadians were not so bad. They let their prisoners live in hotels and so on and just told their commanding officers at the end of the war, “If you guys behave, you’ll go home soon,” and that’s pretty well what happened. There were some deaths, but not a huge number. There was no mass atrocity. Part of the reason was that Winston Churchill wanted to make war against Russia, and he thought he could hire the Germans as mercenaries and he needed them alive for that, of course. So he made sure there was enough food for the Germans in the Canadian and British sections—not so in the French, American, and Russian sections.
Bonnie Faulkner: In another provision of the Geneva Convention, aren’t prisoners required to be able to send and receive mail?
James Bacque: Yes, and they didn’t. They didn’t get that privilege at all in the American camps.
Bonnie Faulkner: And as well, visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross. That’s also a provision of the Geneva Convention, isn’t it?
James Bacque: Yes, that’s right, but they were in on it. In 1986, with most of this story in hand, I went to the headquarters of the ICRC in Geneva and they refused to allow me to look at their records. And yet an Israeli writer, a Swiss writer, and Alfred De Zayas, my friend in the UN, they were all permitted to go into the archives, but they kept me out because they knew what I was up to.
Bonnie Faulkner: Are you saying that you think the ICRC then was complicit in this?
James Bacque: After the war they certainly were. During the war, I don’t think so, maybe in Germany in 1945 through 1950 perhaps. I couldn’t say. But they certainly were complicit in the cover-up when I was snooping around.
Bonnie Faulkner: Exactly. I mean, obviously they’re complicit in the cover-up, but then again, if the U.S. Army Command was not allowing the Red Cross to go into the camps or to provide food, there probably wasn’t much of anything the Red Cross could have done about that, do you think?
James Bacque: They could have turned up at the UN. There were meetings of the UN beginning in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, during the immediate weeks after the war, and they could have raised that right there, but they didn’t do it. They’re all bureaucrats. They don’t care much.
Bonnie Faulkner: I see. So then, in general, how do provisions of the Geneva Convention protect prisoners of war?
James Bacque: They don’t.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, provisions of the Geneva Convention do.
James Bacque: Yeah, but they don’t work. People don’t pay any attention to them. They will work so long as there’s a hostage system in place. While the war was on and there were Americans, 100,000 of them, being held in German prison camps that worked, because it meant that the Germans could starve Americans if the Americans starved Germans. That happened with the Canadians. They shackled some German prisoners and when the Red Cross found out about it, they told on the Canadians and the Germans said, okay, we’re going to shackle your boys. And that worked. Both sides then took the shackles off.
Bonnie Faulkner: I understand from your book that only prisoners in American custody were denied prisoner of war status and that the British refused to go along with this.
James Bacque: That’s largely true, yeah.
Bonnie Faulkner: According to your research, Eisenhower’s denial of prisoner of war status to surrendered German soldiers was kept secret and that Eisenhower lied to the public about the treatment of German prisoners. Is that right?
James Bacque: Oh yes, frequently, lied frequently, caused others to lie, hid evidence, and presided over a vast murder machine—not just the army during the war, but after the war as well. But the funny thing is that there was a man named Robert Patterson, who was the Secretary of War under Truman. He and some Canadians got together and sent food over, entirely against army policy, and they sent food over, by the millions of tons, to feed starving people in Europe—at first excluding Germans but within a few months including the Germans. And that was a mercy put on by the North Americans, where there was plenty of food. That’s the only really happy part of this whole dismal story, that the Canadians and the Americans said no to Eisenhower, no to vengeance, yes to Christian charity, compassion, and sympathy.
Bonnie Faulkner: So then, this food that you’re referring to, sent basically by the public, did this actually reach starving people in Europe?
James Bacque: Oh, yeah.
Bonnie Faulkner: And what year was that?
James Bacque: It started in 1946 when the starvation was getting near the worst and it went on for a couple more years. There was one very funny story there, that some Mennonites in Canada and the States, rounded up wheat in sacks, thousands of sacks of wheat, and because they were sending them over to Mennonites to be distributed in Mennonite churches, they put some Bibles in. So the Mennonites at the other end who were throwing the wheat in big bags off the ships, then took the bags and dumped them into macerators to start the process of turning them into flour. And when they got the flour they looked in and they saw these bits of paper floating around and they realized that they’d chopped up—they didn’t know the Bibles were in with the wheat—so they chopped up the Bibles and they sent a message over to the Mennonites in Canada saying, “What’s going on here? What’s happened?” And the Mennonites wrote back to them saying, “Read your Bible. Man does not live by bread alone. You’ve got to eat your bible, too.” How do you like that one?
Bonnie Faulkner: In your book speaking of Dwight Eisenhower, “He was talking about reducing rations for prisoners of war who were already dying of starvation under the eyes of U.S. Army doctors.” Did German soldiers ever get much food, and was food readily available?
James Bacque: I tried to tell you this already, Bonnie, but you don’t want to believe it and I don’t blame you, it’s so ugly. No, they never got any food to speak of. When they got a little bit of food, the guards might take it away from them or they were already too sick to digest and they just vomited up the little food they got or whatever. It was just a ghastly scene.
Bonnie Faulkner: According to your book, thousands of women, children and the elderly were also imprisoned in these horrible American death camps.
James Bacque: Yeah, that’s right. Not very many, I don’t think, but nearly every man in Germany, nearly every male over the age of 14 or so was imprisoned and I don’t know where they stopped short, maybe if they had arthritis and they couldn’t walk, I don’t know, but quite a few woman. All I know is that there were some.
Bonnie Faulkner: Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was Secretary of the Treasury and worked very closely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt on plans to deal with a defeated post-World War II Germany. First of all, why would the Secretary of the Treasury be working on these plans rather than the Secretary of State?
James Bacque: Because he hated Germans and he wanted to be there in Germany making things hard for the German people. There was incredible hatred of Germans then, and it’s still there. There are lots of Americans and Canadians who hate Germans to this day, to the extent that they cannot believe that in the war the Germans did anything but murder and rape and torture people.
Bonnie Faulkner: Can you describe what came to be known as The Morgenthau Plan for post-World War II Europe to destroy German industry and turn Germany into an agricultural country?
James Bacque: Yes, that was part of it, but the main purpose was to kill Germans and they did. And it was a success in the sense that Henry Morgenthau, who got fired by Truman, who didn’t like him partly because he was so vengeful and stupid—he was a very stupid person. He went over for The New York Post in 1946 or ‘47, I’ve forgotten the year, to write a series of articles about how Germany was doing under American and British and Soviet and French occupation. He wrote a series of articles in which he confirmed that the Morgenthau Plan had been implemented as part of overall Allied policy in Germany, and Germans were dying as a result. That’s quoted in the book.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, who was it that was writing these news stories?
James Bacque: Morgenthau.
Bonnie Faulkner: Oh, he wrote them himself?
James Bacque: Yeah, they were published over his byline in The New York Post.
Bonnie Faulkner: How was he presenting his own Morgenthau Plan?
James Bacque: He worked it out with a guy called Harry Dexter White who was a communist, and he and White worked up this plan. They gave it to Roosevelt and Churchill at their meeting in Quebec in 1944 and they both signed it. This was their policy to starve and beat down the Germans as much as they could, so it became an official policy. And then when the newspapers got ahold of it, they said, “You can’t do that. That’s terrible. That’s not what we’re fighting the war for, this vengeance. We want the war to be over.” So Roosevelt covered up and hid it all and pretended that it was not going to be implemented. But it turned up again in the spring of 1945 as JCS 1067, which means “Joint Chiefs of Staff Policy Directive 1067, How to Treat the German People.”
Bonnie Faulkner: Right. And the Morgenthau Plan was then incorporated into this official U.S. government directive. Isn’t that right?
James Bacque: That’s right.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, how is it that Morgenthau and Roosevelt—they were close weren’t they?
James Bacque: Very close friends.
Bonnie Faulkner: Does that seem somewhat strange to you?
James Bacque: Well, they were political allies. Morgenthau sucked up to Roosevelt, flattered him. Who knows? Maybe he bribed him, although Roosevelt was rich. Maybe he thought he had political or newspaper influence. It’s hard to say what constitutes a friendship.
Bonnie Faulkner: And then Roosevelt completely approved of this Morgenthau Plan and even in your book it says that Roosevelt reiterated his enthusiasm and support for the Morgenthau Plan the day before he died.
James Bacque: Yes. He was kind of an extremist then, and he was probably just hoping to get rid of Morgenthau who was a pest, and Roosevelt was feeling terrible, of course. He had a brain tumor, I think it was. And he was probably saying, “There, there, Henry. We’re going to beat up the Germans, don’t worry.” Something like that probably. I’m only guessing there.
Bonnie Faulkner: I understand from your book that Winston Churchill was initially horrified and refused to go along with the Morgenthau Plan, but was eventually persuaded by the argument that British industry would benefit.
James Bacque: Yeah, well he said he was. It’s hard to say. The funny thing is, what’s funny about this, if the idea was to beat down the Germans so they wouldn’t be rich again, then by 1965, just a few years after the war, the Germans were once again the richest people in Europe. He couldn’t stop them, he still can’t, and the reason is, of course, they work hard, they’re smart, they’re well educated, and they’re organized.
Bonnie Faulkner: Yes, it is quite amazing.
James Bacque: Yeah. It just shows how stupid war is—that war, especially, but both the First and the Second World War were conducted, fomented by the British to beat down the Germans, do them in, and kill them all if they could, and it failed. They won the war and lost their empire, and after the war they couldn’t extinguish German strength.
Bonnie Faulkner: Yes, it’s interesting. Both World Wars were pretty much a contest between the British and the Germans, right, in that the wars were basically brought on by Britain, not Germany?
James Bacque: That’s right, and the Canadians played a terrible part of it too. We in Canada did our very best to push you guys in the States into the war. Most of you didn’t want to go to war, you didn’t care about it one way or the other, and we sent people down to bribe your newspaper columnists. And your government said to tell them that the Germans were committing atrocities, which wasn’t true, and to bribe your writers and so on into saying that Germans were evil and torturing people and all of that has endured and then the Americans finally came into the war. A Gallop poll in August of 1942, after Pearl Harbor, said that 67% of American people had no idea why you were in the war.
Bonnie Faulkner: Wow. Now, what is Canada’s angle in all of this? Why did Canada want this war?
James Bacque: Well, because Canada just did whatever the British said to do. Not only that, but that was a large part of it. But you guys did the same. You were completely independent of Great Britain, but you came along finally. Roosevelt got persuaded by Churchill to get into the war, and he did all he could to foment Pearl Harbor and so did Churchill. Anyway, we won’t get into that, but the Americans under Roosevelt had already said, “We won’t go into this war. We don’t have a dog in that fight,” but they went in anyway.
Bonnie Faulkner: According to your research, 73% of all German prisoners were taken by the West. The death rate of German prisoners under American control was calculated at one point to be 43% per year. According to then German Chancellor Adenauer, over 1.4 million to 1.7 million German soldiers that were alive after the war remain unaccounted for. What is the “dead in the East” theory?
James Bacque: The dead in the East theory is that most of the Germans who died after the war were in Russian prison camps and there was a huge death rate. That’s partly true, but it did not account for all of the missing prisoners.
Bonnie Faulkner: It actually covered up missing prisoners in the West, isn’t that right?
James Bacque: That’s what it was intended to do. Yeah, that’s right.
Bonnie Faulkner: After the first publication of Other Losses in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1992 and 1993 you flew to Moscow to investigate the newly opened Central State Special Archive of the KGB containing millions of documents about prisoners of war. What is your assessment of the Soviet archives, and what did you find there?
James Bacque: I found a really big building, very well organized, with lots of documents, and the chief thing about it was that it was reliable. The documents which were stored by the Soviet people, before the Soviet regime collapsed, told the truth about the Soviet regime, because they felt no shame in murdering their own people, murdering the Kulaks, murdering the Finns, murdering the Germans. It didn’t matter. They proceeded by murder. Their gulag was vast death camps.
So you can see that the archives are reliable if they’re storing records of their own atrocities and they checked out with the figures produced later by the Germans and the Japanese and other people who had many prisoners in those gulags. I was able to get any paper I wanted and have it translated and bring it home in Xerox copies, and I did that—74 or 50, or maybe 100 papers all told that I brought home—that proved the real death rate in the Soviet camps was not enough to account for all of the missing in the West. So the real figures turned out to be about half a million dead in the Soviet Union, about a quarter of a million dead in the French camps, and about three-quarters of a million dead in the American camps, plus all the many, many, many millions of women and children who died as the result of starvation in Germany between 1945 and 1950.
Bonnie Faulkner: And this was forced starvation, right?
James Bacque: Oh, yes. The Allies forced the Germans to stop making fertilizer for the fields, stop making oil to run the tractors, they sank fishing boats in harbor, on and on and on like that.
Bonnie Faulkner: And this forced starvation of the German population, this continued right up until 1950, didn’t it?
James Bacque: Yes, that’s right. It was diminishing, but it was still bad. You wouldn’t take anybody out to dinner in Germany in 1949.
Bonnie Faulkner: How did Soviet work camps contrast with the American enclosures?
James Bacque: Oh, my God. What a huge question. The gulag was bad, but it wasn’t quite as bad as the American camps. On the other hand, the gulag would last for years and years; the American camps were all pretty well empty by two years after the war.
Bonnie Faulkner: But now how were POWs treated in the Soviet—I guess they were work camps, weren’t they?
James Bacque: Pretty much they were, yeah.
Bonnie Faulkner: But, then again, the Soviets provided shelter and food, etcetera, didn’t they?
James Bacque: Yes, they did. It wasn’t really enough to sustain life, but it wasn’t as bad as the American camps. People didn’t die directly right away of starvation. It was the diseases that killed them, really, and the Soviet camps not quite as fast as they died in the American camps.
Bonnie Faulkner: What about the British delivering Russian Revolution defectors back over to the Soviets after World War II? What did this entail and why was it done?
James Bacque: When the Germans attacked Russia, there were a whole lot of Ukrainian Russians who were dissidents, who did not like the regime, and they were willing to fight for the Germans. So they tried to join up. Hitler wouldn’t have them at first, as it diluted the racial purity of the Wehrmacht, but eventually he did. So there were a whole bunch of people under General Vlasov, who became called Vlasovites, who put on German uniforms and fought against the Russians on the German side.
These were Russian-speaking Ukrainians for the most part, and they were regarded with horror and hatred by Stalin, because, of course, they showed up the horror of the Soviet Regime. After the war, the Soviets demanded that Eisenhower and the British turn over all the ones they’d captured. The British had most of them, some 70,000 I think, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000, quite a sizable army. The British forced those people at gunpoint to get on the trains, to go back to Russia to be murdered.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, were these largely Ukrainians or were they Russian Revolution defectors from other European countries?
James Bacque: They were largely, as I understand it, Ukrainians. This was not my field of research, so I didn’t find out enough about them to answer your question for sure.
Bonnie Faulkner: You write that, “The evidence of these war crimes of mass deaths of German prisoners is still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the U.S., France and Britain.
James Bacque: And Canada.
Bonnie Faulkner: And Canada, okay. Why haven’t Germans countermanded the official Western propaganda about World War II and its aftermath?
James Bacque: Because right after the war, the German government was taken over by the Americans, the French, the Russians so on, and if anyone tried to protest against Allied policy of starvation and so forth, they were punished. They might be deprived of food, they might be shot, they might be taken to jail, who knows? So by force and by lies and deceit and by bribery, the Germans were gradually re-educated to believe that they were all criminals and all their ancestors were criminals and there was nothing worthy or respectable about Germany at all. And that situation continues today. Most Germans today are ashamed of their past and ashamed to be German and all they have to do in life, they think, is work hard and get rich.
Bonnie Faulkner: What happens to persons in Germany who seek to locate mass graves of World War II German prisoners or who question the official narrative of World War II itself?
James Bacque: They’re thrown in jail. Deprived of their job and thrown in jail and maybe tortured. It’s like the gulag, and it’s supported by Americans, French, Canadians and British.
Bonnie Faulkner: What about the real-life consequences of overstepping the bounds of orthodox history? What have been the effects of your discoveries on you and your family? For instance—
James Bacque: I’m bankrupt, and I can’t publish.
Bonnie Faulkner: What was the reaction in 1989 when the first edition of Other Losses was published?
James Bacque: Disbelief and incredulity and amazment, except in Germany where there were still millions of people in 1986, 1989 who knew that I was telling the truth.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, after the publication of Other Losses, weren’t you then contacted by many, many eyewitnesses and survivors of Eisenhower’s death camps?
James Bacque: Yes, many of them contacted me and they still are. I had my 90th birthday the other day and people were phoning me form Germany and all over Canada to wish me happy birthday. That was really nice and I want to say to them, and to you Bonnie, with your permission, my grandsons and I are putting together a crowd-funding campaign under my name, James Bacque, and you can crowd-fund my next books. Because I can’t publish them with a regular house I’ve got to publish them myself on the ‘Net and that takes a lot of money. So please crowdfund and go to my website, which is, jamesbacque.com. I can promise you a merry ride when you read my books.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, now, James, when I first asked you about the real-life consequences of your work, you mentioned that you’re not allowed to publish. Is that correct?
James Bacque: Well, that’s the way it’s happened. The critics and the publishers and editors and so on throughout Canada, Germany, the States, and France have all ganged up to hate me and hate my work because they hate Germans so much and they think I’m sympathetic with the Germans. I’m only sympathetic with the Germans insofar as they’re suffering human beings, like all of us. I do not sympathize with their Nazi regime or their own Gestapo and all of that, but I see that they have been suffering, too, and that they need help and understanding and truth, just as we all do. So that’s what I’m trying to bring them in my books.
Bonnie Faulkner: Do you have an opinion as to what generated originally this hatred of Germany?
James Bacque: Yes, you can find that out quite easily actually. The British were afraid of the Germans because by 1895 the Germans were producing as much steel every year as the French and the British put together. They were having just as many babies. And so on. They were organized and they were threatening the British Empire. And the British, instead of cooperating with the Germans and so forth and doing business with them, which they were very good at, the British decided to take the route of hostility and to fight the Germans and so they fomented the First World War. All of this is written up in a book called Hidden History by Docherty and MacGregor, but that book, a marvelous piece of research and understanding, does a wonderful job of exposing the fact that the two German wars were not only not necessary, they were disastrous failures for the British as well as for the Germans, because the British lost their empire and look at them now. They’re confused; they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re as bad as Washington and Ottawa right now.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, James, I didn’t realize initially, but you have a film about Other Losses. Is that correct?
James Bacque: Yes, it’s a DVD and it’s available via my website and if anybody wants a book or a DVD, you’re very welcome to write in and get it and we’ll send you a copy of whatever you order.
Bonnie Faulkner: James Bacque, thank you so very much.
James Bacque: Thank you, Bonnie Faulkner. You’re very welcome.
Bonnie Faulkner: I’ve been speaking with James Bacque. Today’s show has been: Let’s Stop Torturing Germany. James Bacque is a writer and researcher, a former journalist, book editor and publisher. His most famous books, Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies, have revealed atrocities committed by the Allies against German POWs and civilians after World War II. His most famous book, Other Losses, the subject of today’s program, is also available as a one-hour documentary on DVD directed by James Bacque, which includes unique archival footage and new interviews with survivors of Allied vengeance in conquered Germany. His many books and film are available through his website at jamesbacque.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at faulkner@gunsandbutter.org. Follow us on Twitter at gandbradio.
Eisenhower issued an order on May the 7th or 8th of 1945 in German from his headquarters in Frankfurt and sent it by courier to every province of Germany. The order in that courier message was that if anybody gathers food together with the intention of taking it to the camps or takes food to the camps, he or she may well be shot. And some people were shot.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, James Bacque. Today’s show: Let’s Stop Torturing Germany. James Bacque is a former journalist, book editor and publisher. He has written novels, essays, short stories, a biography, a play, and books on the history of post-war Germany. His best sellers, Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies, have revealed atrocities committed by the Allies against German POWs and civilians after World War II. Today, we have an in-depth discussion of his most famous book, Other Losses: An Investigation Into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the Americans and the French After World War Two. We also touch on the real-life consequences of overstepping the bounds of orthodox history.
Bonnie Faulkner: James Bacque, welcome.
James Bacque: Thank you very much.
Bonnie Faulkner: I’ve just read your astonishing book, Other Losses, published in 1989, An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the Americans and the French After World War Two. The treatment of surrendered German soldiers was so horrifying it was hard to read. Why did you title your book Other Losses?
James Bacque: Because in the American prison camp systems starting in 1944, there were boxes showing week by week the total of prisoners on hand, sick, transferred, discharged, and so on. There was no category for death, none. It was really hard to believe that the total captured being over 7 million people, many of them wounded, that there were no deaths for years. In fact, it was impossible.
So there was one category that said “other losses.” It had enormous numbers, millions, in the category and I thought, well, that’s where they’ve hidden deaths and they’ve just called it “other losses”. I then found, from one of the guys who ran that prison system, Colonel Philip S. Lauben, that that was indeed true, that that was where they hid the deaths, statistically, and so that’s why I called it Other Losses.
Bonnie Faulkner: In Colonel Ernest Fisher’s foreword to Other Losses, he states that, “Eisenhower’s hatred produced the horror of death camps unequaled by anything in American military history. Some idea of the magnitude of this horror can be gained when it is realized that these deaths exceed by far all those incurred by the German army in the west between June 1941 and April 1945.” Eisenhower's hatred of Germans was apparently not shared by General Patton, Lee or Bradley. Can you account for the brutality of Dwight Eisenhower toward defenseless prisoners of war?
James Bacque: I speculated on that once in the process of writing the manuscript. I sent the typescript before publication to a great expert on Eisenhower. His name was Stephan E. Ambrose. Steve read it over for me, very kindly, and then I went out to his place in Lilly Lake, Wisconsin. We talked about Eisenhower and why he was like this, and Steve advised me not to speculate, “Don’t guess. You’ve got an amazing story here; stick to it.” And so I did. I did not speculate, and I hardly want to know. It happened, and it was horrifying, and why it happened is really hard to say. That’s between him and God.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well now, when you said that the records that you examined hid all of the deaths under an innocuous category called “other losses”, why do you think that was done?
James Bacque: Because they were ashamed of what they were doing, and they knew it was a war crime and they didn’t want to get caught.
Bonnie Faulkner: The content of Other Losses is extensively documented. How did you conduct your research for Other Losses, and what kinds of different evidence did you include?
James Bacque: Oh, Bonnie, have you got a couple of years?
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, that’s what it took, right?
James Bacque: Yeah, that’s right. Well, it really began when I read War and Peace, and I thought at the end of reading that book, when I was in boarding school in Canada, when I was 16, this man Tolstoy has made me understand people who are completely alien to me - Russian nobility of 1812 and I was just enchanted. I grew up. He became a hero of mine, and Gandhi. I went to live in France for a while, because my wife and I wanted to live in France with the kids, and we did. And we there encountered a man name Raoul Laporterie, who had been the Mayor of a small town called Bascons, near Bordeaux in the South West, and he, during the war, had saved hundreds and hundreds and maybe 2,000 people, mainly Jews in the rag trade from Nazi persecution during the war.
So I said, “Can I write your story?” He said, “Yes.” I got a friend to come and help me, and I settled down in his village and began reading his correspondence from the year 1942-43 and ‘44. This was now in the year 1986, so I was reading his correspondence about 40 years later.
And in the correspondence there were letters from people with German names like, Hans Goertz and Adam Heil, and they said to Laporterie in these letters, which they wrote to him after the war—thus in 1946 or ’47—remember, the war was over in May, 1945. They kept thanking him and writing to him as a friend saying, “You’re a wonderful man. How is your wife? How are the kids?” and so forth.
So I went to Laporterie and said, “Look, you fought these Germans in the First World War. You could have been killed by them in the Second World War. How come you’re friends?” And he said, “Well, after the war, in 1946, the French government had a whole lot of prisoners, many of them turned over by the British and the Americans and the Canadians to French hands, and they were being used as slave labor to help rebuild France after the war. Mr. Laporterie had treated these 70 slaves very well, and they made friends.
So here I am, in 1986, talking to Germans later on who had been friends of Mr. Laporterie. And when I went to see one of them he said, “Mr. Laporterie saved my life.” I said, “How did he do that?” “Well, he took me out of the prison camp.” “Well, what was wrong with the prison camp?” “Well, monsieur, you’ve got to understand, we were starving to death.” “What? In 1946?” I said. “Of course,” he said. “Twenty-five percent of the men in that camp died in one month.”
Bonnie Faulkner: Wow.
James Bacque: And that was because the French hated the Germans so much that they were murdering them by starvation. The Americans were doing the same in their camps, I later found, murdering them by starvation and exposure.
Bonnie Faulkner: Was American record-keeping of German prisoners of war adequate for your research?
James Bacque: Yes, it was. Once I understood the code. Some of the records were destroyed by Eisenhower himself when he became President after the war. He destroyed some of those records. I was told this by the chief archivist of modern military records in the United States, a man named Eddy Reece. He said that all the known record material was destroyed. But there was enough left that with the help of Colonel Fisher and Colonel Lauben, I was able to piece together the actual week-by-week deaths and illnesses and so on.
Bonnie Faulkner: Could you describe the American enclosures, as opposed to Soviet camps, that German prisoners were kept in?
James Bacque: Much worse than the Soviet camps. The Soviets at least gave their prisoners, after the war, a roof and primitive clothing. In the American camps the prisoners, some of whom were wounded and had been dragged to the hospital half-alive at the end of the war, were flung into these enclosures, which were just fields surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun towers. That was it. That was it. They were left to die there. There was no food. There was not even water. the Americans killed off three-quarters of a million healthy young men in the first year or less than a year.
Bonnie Faulkner: How were surrendered German soldiers treated then by the American Army?
James Bacque: It was deadly. There were about 7 million total in the capture of whom maybe 6 million were German, and in the period of the first year after the war, about three-quarters of a million died and a quarter of a million were turned over to the French, really to die.
Bonnie Faulkner: In Other Losses there are descriptions of death by disease, starvation, exposure, gunfire, even the bulldozing of live German prisoners within the enclosure. Many of these descriptions were made by eyewitnesses, both survivors and U.S. Army personnel, isn’t that right?
James Bacque: Yes. They were confirmed by civilians outside the camps who could see what was happening inside the camps through the barbed wire. The death policy against Germans was extended quite soon after the end of the war to include the whole population. So there were some 60 million Germans penned up in what was really just one prison camp, extending from the North Sea to the Alps and east to west from France to Poland. Those people were starved, too. So, far more German civilians were starved to death in that vast enclosure than died during the war. Somewhere between 7 and 14 million German civilians died as a result of Allied action after the war, which is way more than died during the war.
Bonnie Faulkner: What is the evidence that Dwight Eisenhower re-designated or reclassified prisoners of war, POWs, as Disarmed Enemy Forces, or DEFs? Why was this done, and what were the consequences?
James Bacque: It was done partly to make a statistical camouflage. Remember, he was a general and a soldier; he loved camouflage. And the camouflage helped to divert attention away from the deaths. I talked to the senior war correspondent of The New York Times who was named Drew Middleton and who was there in the war in 1945 and he was still alive when I was doing research in 1986. I went to New York and I showed him my evidence for the crime. He said, “I’m not surprised that you found something bad in that period.” I said, “Well, you wrote in The New York Times that you visited the camps, and everything was all right. There were no deaths at all, and there was nothing wrong, and you published that. You wrote three stories like that in The New York Times.” He had nothing to say, except, “Well, it was a bad time.” That was part of the camouflage. The New York Times lied about that in those days and they’ve lied about me and my books ever since, many times.
Bonnie Faulkner: So with regard to Eisenhower’s reclassification of prisoners of war to call them disarmed enemy forces, why did he do this and what were the consequences?
James Bacque: He was able to keep the Red Cross out of the camps that way. He was able to draw a fictional cloak over it all. And you see how in Washington today—and all over the world, really—people tell lies at the highest levels, and they can get away with them partly because they’ve given the people, deceived people, at least something to believe. It’s not true, but it’s something they can believe in instead of the truth.
Bonnie Faulkner: In what ways were the rules of the Geneva Convention broken by the U.S. Army Command that was in control of German prisoners?
James Bacque: Just about every way you can think of, but one of the chief ways was to deny food that was readily available. The Red Cross sent three trainloads of food into Germany for the prisoners and the army refused to allow them to unload and the Red Cross had to take the food by the trainload out of the country. That was in the spring of 1945.
Eisenhower issued an order on May the 7th or 8th of 1945 in German from his headquarters in Frankford and sent it by courier to every province of Germany—which is like a state in the United States—and sent those. The order in that couriered message was that if anybody gathers food together with the intention of taking it to the camps or takes food to the camps, he or she may well be shot and some people were shot.
Bonnie Faulkner: Was there a world food shortage in 1943 to 1945?
James Bacque: I consulted the records of the Department of Agriculture, I read a magazine report written by the UN in 1946, and I talked to some Canadian people who fed Germans after the war, and my conclusion was that there was no world food shortage, that there was a food distribution shortage, just the way there is now. Some people in the world are starving and because of such bad distribution they don’t get food that’s readily available. You and I eat all the time and yet in our very cities there are people on the edge of starvation. It’s the same then.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now according to the Geneva Convention you’re required to feed prisoners of war, aren’t you?
James Bacque: Yeah. You’re required to feed prisoners of war the same nourishment that your own peacetime soldiers get in base camp, In other words, plenty.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, another provision of the Geneva Convention, aren’t you then, by international law required to provide shelter to POW’s?
James Bacque: Oh yes. There was no shortage of tents.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, then, was there any shelter provided to these POWs?
James Bacque: No, basically no. The British and Canadians were not so bad. They let their prisoners live in hotels and so on and just told their commanding officers at the end of the war, “If you guys behave, you’ll go home soon,” and that’s pretty well what happened. There were some deaths, but not a huge number. There was no mass atrocity. Part of the reason was that Winston Churchill wanted to make war against Russia, and he thought he could hire the Germans as mercenaries and he needed them alive for that, of course. So he made sure there was enough food for the Germans in the Canadian and British sections—not so in the French, American, and Russian sections.
Bonnie Faulkner: In another provision of the Geneva Convention, aren’t prisoners required to be able to send and receive mail?
James Bacque: Yes, and they didn’t. They didn’t get that privilege at all in the American camps.
Bonnie Faulkner: And as well, visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross. That’s also a provision of the Geneva Convention, isn’t it?
James Bacque: Yes, that’s right, but they were in on it. In 1986, with most of this story in hand, I went to the headquarters of the ICRC in Geneva and they refused to allow me to look at their records. And yet an Israeli writer, a Swiss writer, and Alfred De Zayas, my friend in the UN, they were all permitted to go into the archives, but they kept me out because they knew what I was up to.
Bonnie Faulkner: Are you saying that you think the ICRC then was complicit in this?
James Bacque: After the war they certainly were. During the war, I don’t think so, maybe in Germany in 1945 through 1950 perhaps. I couldn’t say. But they certainly were complicit in the cover-up when I was snooping around.
Bonnie Faulkner: Exactly. I mean, obviously they’re complicit in the cover-up, but then again, if the U.S. Army Command was not allowing the Red Cross to go into the camps or to provide food, there probably wasn’t much of anything the Red Cross could have done about that, do you think?
James Bacque: They could have turned up at the UN. There were meetings of the UN beginning in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, during the immediate weeks after the war, and they could have raised that right there, but they didn’t do it. They’re all bureaucrats. They don’t care much.
Bonnie Faulkner: I see. So then, in general, how do provisions of the Geneva Convention protect prisoners of war?
James Bacque: They don’t.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, provisions of the Geneva Convention do.
James Bacque: Yeah, but they don’t work. People don’t pay any attention to them. They will work so long as there’s a hostage system in place. While the war was on and there were Americans, 100,000 of them, being held in German prison camps that worked, because it meant that the Germans could starve Americans if the Americans starved Germans. That happened with the Canadians. They shackled some German prisoners and when the Red Cross found out about it, they told on the Canadians and the Germans said, okay, we’re going to shackle your boys. And that worked. Both sides then took the shackles off.
Bonnie Faulkner: I understand from your book that only prisoners in American custody were denied prisoner of war status and that the British refused to go along with this.
James Bacque: That’s largely true, yeah.
Bonnie Faulkner: According to your research, Eisenhower’s denial of prisoner of war status to surrendered German soldiers was kept secret and that Eisenhower lied to the public about the treatment of German prisoners. Is that right?
James Bacque: Oh yes, frequently, lied frequently, caused others to lie, hid evidence, and presided over a vast murder machine—not just the army during the war, but after the war as well. But the funny thing is that there was a man named Robert Patterson, who was the Secretary of War under Truman. He and some Canadians got together and sent food over, entirely against army policy, and they sent food over, by the millions of tons, to feed starving people in Europe—at first excluding Germans but within a few months including the Germans. And that was a mercy put on by the North Americans, where there was plenty of food. That’s the only really happy part of this whole dismal story, that the Canadians and the Americans said no to Eisenhower, no to vengeance, yes to Christian charity, compassion, and sympathy.
Bonnie Faulkner: So then, this food that you’re referring to, sent basically by the public, did this actually reach starving people in Europe?
James Bacque: Oh, yeah.
Bonnie Faulkner: And what year was that?
James Bacque: It started in 1946 when the starvation was getting near the worst and it went on for a couple more years. There was one very funny story there, that some Mennonites in Canada and the States, rounded up wheat in sacks, thousands of sacks of wheat, and because they were sending them over to Mennonites to be distributed in Mennonite churches, they put some Bibles in. So the Mennonites at the other end who were throwing the wheat in big bags off the ships, then took the bags and dumped them into macerators to start the process of turning them into flour. And when they got the flour they looked in and they saw these bits of paper floating around and they realized that they’d chopped up—they didn’t know the Bibles were in with the wheat—so they chopped up the Bibles and they sent a message over to the Mennonites in Canada saying, “What’s going on here? What’s happened?” And the Mennonites wrote back to them saying, “Read your Bible. Man does not live by bread alone. You’ve got to eat your bible, too.” How do you like that one?
Bonnie Faulkner: In your book speaking of Dwight Eisenhower, “He was talking about reducing rations for prisoners of war who were already dying of starvation under the eyes of U.S. Army doctors.” Did German soldiers ever get much food, and was food readily available?
James Bacque: I tried to tell you this already, Bonnie, but you don’t want to believe it and I don’t blame you, it’s so ugly. No, they never got any food to speak of. When they got a little bit of food, the guards might take it away from them or they were already too sick to digest and they just vomited up the little food they got or whatever. It was just a ghastly scene.
Bonnie Faulkner: According to your book, thousands of women, children and the elderly were also imprisoned in these horrible American death camps.
James Bacque: Yeah, that’s right. Not very many, I don’t think, but nearly every man in Germany, nearly every male over the age of 14 or so was imprisoned and I don’t know where they stopped short, maybe if they had arthritis and they couldn’t walk, I don’t know, but quite a few woman. All I know is that there were some.
Bonnie Faulkner: Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was Secretary of the Treasury and worked very closely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt on plans to deal with a defeated post-World War II Germany. First of all, why would the Secretary of the Treasury be working on these plans rather than the Secretary of State?
James Bacque: Because he hated Germans and he wanted to be there in Germany making things hard for the German people. There was incredible hatred of Germans then, and it’s still there. There are lots of Americans and Canadians who hate Germans to this day, to the extent that they cannot believe that in the war the Germans did anything but murder and rape and torture people.
Bonnie Faulkner: Can you describe what came to be known as The Morgenthau Plan for post-World War II Europe to destroy German industry and turn Germany into an agricultural country?
James Bacque: Yes, that was part of it, but the main purpose was to kill Germans and they did. And it was a success in the sense that Henry Morgenthau, who got fired by Truman, who didn’t like him partly because he was so vengeful and stupid—he was a very stupid person. He went over for The New York Post in 1946 or ‘47, I’ve forgotten the year, to write a series of articles about how Germany was doing under American and British and Soviet and French occupation. He wrote a series of articles in which he confirmed that the Morgenthau Plan had been implemented as part of overall Allied policy in Germany, and Germans were dying as a result. That’s quoted in the book.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, who was it that was writing these news stories?
James Bacque: Morgenthau.
Bonnie Faulkner: Oh, he wrote them himself?
James Bacque: Yeah, they were published over his byline in The New York Post.
Bonnie Faulkner: How was he presenting his own Morgenthau Plan?
James Bacque: He worked it out with a guy called Harry Dexter White who was a communist, and he and White worked up this plan. They gave it to Roosevelt and Churchill at their meeting in Quebec in 1944 and they both signed it. This was their policy to starve and beat down the Germans as much as they could, so it became an official policy. And then when the newspapers got ahold of it, they said, “You can’t do that. That’s terrible. That’s not what we’re fighting the war for, this vengeance. We want the war to be over.” So Roosevelt covered up and hid it all and pretended that it was not going to be implemented. But it turned up again in the spring of 1945 as JCS 1067, which means “Joint Chiefs of Staff Policy Directive 1067, How to Treat the German People.”
Bonnie Faulkner: Right. And the Morgenthau Plan was then incorporated into this official U.S. government directive. Isn’t that right?
James Bacque: That’s right.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, how is it that Morgenthau and Roosevelt—they were close weren’t they?
James Bacque: Very close friends.
Bonnie Faulkner: Does that seem somewhat strange to you?
James Bacque: Well, they were political allies. Morgenthau sucked up to Roosevelt, flattered him. Who knows? Maybe he bribed him, although Roosevelt was rich. Maybe he thought he had political or newspaper influence. It’s hard to say what constitutes a friendship.
Bonnie Faulkner: And then Roosevelt completely approved of this Morgenthau Plan and even in your book it says that Roosevelt reiterated his enthusiasm and support for the Morgenthau Plan the day before he died.
James Bacque: Yes. He was kind of an extremist then, and he was probably just hoping to get rid of Morgenthau who was a pest, and Roosevelt was feeling terrible, of course. He had a brain tumor, I think it was. And he was probably saying, “There, there, Henry. We’re going to beat up the Germans, don’t worry.” Something like that probably. I’m only guessing there.
Bonnie Faulkner: I understand from your book that Winston Churchill was initially horrified and refused to go along with the Morgenthau Plan, but was eventually persuaded by the argument that British industry would benefit.
James Bacque: Yeah, well he said he was. It’s hard to say. The funny thing is, what’s funny about this, if the idea was to beat down the Germans so they wouldn’t be rich again, then by 1965, just a few years after the war, the Germans were once again the richest people in Europe. He couldn’t stop them, he still can’t, and the reason is, of course, they work hard, they’re smart, they’re well educated, and they’re organized.
Bonnie Faulkner: Yes, it is quite amazing.
James Bacque: Yeah. It just shows how stupid war is—that war, especially, but both the First and the Second World War were conducted, fomented by the British to beat down the Germans, do them in, and kill them all if they could, and it failed. They won the war and lost their empire, and after the war they couldn’t extinguish German strength.
Bonnie Faulkner: Yes, it’s interesting. Both World Wars were pretty much a contest between the British and the Germans, right, in that the wars were basically brought on by Britain, not Germany?
James Bacque: That’s right, and the Canadians played a terrible part of it too. We in Canada did our very best to push you guys in the States into the war. Most of you didn’t want to go to war, you didn’t care about it one way or the other, and we sent people down to bribe your newspaper columnists. And your government said to tell them that the Germans were committing atrocities, which wasn’t true, and to bribe your writers and so on into saying that Germans were evil and torturing people and all of that has endured and then the Americans finally came into the war. A Gallop poll in August of 1942, after Pearl Harbor, said that 67% of American people had no idea why you were in the war.
Bonnie Faulkner: Wow. Now, what is Canada’s angle in all of this? Why did Canada want this war?
James Bacque: Well, because Canada just did whatever the British said to do. Not only that, but that was a large part of it. But you guys did the same. You were completely independent of Great Britain, but you came along finally. Roosevelt got persuaded by Churchill to get into the war, and he did all he could to foment Pearl Harbor and so did Churchill. Anyway, we won’t get into that, but the Americans under Roosevelt had already said, “We won’t go into this war. We don’t have a dog in that fight,” but they went in anyway.
Bonnie Faulkner: According to your research, 73% of all German prisoners were taken by the West. The death rate of German prisoners under American control was calculated at one point to be 43% per year. According to then German Chancellor Adenauer, over 1.4 million to 1.7 million German soldiers that were alive after the war remain unaccounted for. What is the “dead in the East” theory?
James Bacque: The dead in the East theory is that most of the Germans who died after the war were in Russian prison camps and there was a huge death rate. That’s partly true, but it did not account for all of the missing prisoners.
Bonnie Faulkner: It actually covered up missing prisoners in the West, isn’t that right?
James Bacque: That’s what it was intended to do. Yeah, that’s right.
Bonnie Faulkner: After the first publication of Other Losses in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1992 and 1993 you flew to Moscow to investigate the newly opened Central State Special Archive of the KGB containing millions of documents about prisoners of war. What is your assessment of the Soviet archives, and what did you find there?
James Bacque: I found a really big building, very well organized, with lots of documents, and the chief thing about it was that it was reliable. The documents which were stored by the Soviet people, before the Soviet regime collapsed, told the truth about the Soviet regime, because they felt no shame in murdering their own people, murdering the Kulaks, murdering the Finns, murdering the Germans. It didn’t matter. They proceeded by murder. Their gulag was vast death camps.
So you can see that the archives are reliable if they’re storing records of their own atrocities and they checked out with the figures produced later by the Germans and the Japanese and other people who had many prisoners in those gulags. I was able to get any paper I wanted and have it translated and bring it home in Xerox copies, and I did that—74 or 50, or maybe 100 papers all told that I brought home—that proved the real death rate in the Soviet camps was not enough to account for all of the missing in the West. So the real figures turned out to be about half a million dead in the Soviet Union, about a quarter of a million dead in the French camps, and about three-quarters of a million dead in the American camps, plus all the many, many, many millions of women and children who died as the result of starvation in Germany between 1945 and 1950.
Bonnie Faulkner: And this was forced starvation, right?
James Bacque: Oh, yes. The Allies forced the Germans to stop making fertilizer for the fields, stop making oil to run the tractors, they sank fishing boats in harbor, on and on and on like that.
Bonnie Faulkner: And this forced starvation of the German population, this continued right up until 1950, didn’t it?
James Bacque: Yes, that’s right. It was diminishing, but it was still bad. You wouldn’t take anybody out to dinner in Germany in 1949.
Bonnie Faulkner: How did Soviet work camps contrast with the American enclosures?
James Bacque: Oh, my God. What a huge question. The gulag was bad, but it wasn’t quite as bad as the American camps. On the other hand, the gulag would last for years and years; the American camps were all pretty well empty by two years after the war.
Bonnie Faulkner: But now how were POWs treated in the Soviet—I guess they were work camps, weren’t they?
James Bacque: Pretty much they were, yeah.
Bonnie Faulkner: But, then again, the Soviets provided shelter and food, etcetera, didn’t they?
James Bacque: Yes, they did. It wasn’t really enough to sustain life, but it wasn’t as bad as the American camps. People didn’t die directly right away of starvation. It was the diseases that killed them, really, and the Soviet camps not quite as fast as they died in the American camps.
Bonnie Faulkner: What about the British delivering Russian Revolution defectors back over to the Soviets after World War II? What did this entail and why was it done?
James Bacque: When the Germans attacked Russia, there were a whole lot of Ukrainian Russians who were dissidents, who did not like the regime, and they were willing to fight for the Germans. So they tried to join up. Hitler wouldn’t have them at first, as it diluted the racial purity of the Wehrmacht, but eventually he did. So there were a whole bunch of people under General Vlasov, who became called Vlasovites, who put on German uniforms and fought against the Russians on the German side.
These were Russian-speaking Ukrainians for the most part, and they were regarded with horror and hatred by Stalin, because, of course, they showed up the horror of the Soviet Regime. After the war, the Soviets demanded that Eisenhower and the British turn over all the ones they’d captured. The British had most of them, some 70,000 I think, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000, quite a sizable army. The British forced those people at gunpoint to get on the trains, to go back to Russia to be murdered.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, were these largely Ukrainians or were they Russian Revolution defectors from other European countries?
James Bacque: They were largely, as I understand it, Ukrainians. This was not my field of research, so I didn’t find out enough about them to answer your question for sure.
Bonnie Faulkner: You write that, “The evidence of these war crimes of mass deaths of German prisoners is still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the U.S., France and Britain.
James Bacque: And Canada.
Bonnie Faulkner: And Canada, okay. Why haven’t Germans countermanded the official Western propaganda about World War II and its aftermath?
James Bacque: Because right after the war, the German government was taken over by the Americans, the French, the Russians so on, and if anyone tried to protest against Allied policy of starvation and so forth, they were punished. They might be deprived of food, they might be shot, they might be taken to jail, who knows? So by force and by lies and deceit and by bribery, the Germans were gradually re-educated to believe that they were all criminals and all their ancestors were criminals and there was nothing worthy or respectable about Germany at all. And that situation continues today. Most Germans today are ashamed of their past and ashamed to be German and all they have to do in life, they think, is work hard and get rich.
Bonnie Faulkner: What happens to persons in Germany who seek to locate mass graves of World War II German prisoners or who question the official narrative of World War II itself?
James Bacque: They’re thrown in jail. Deprived of their job and thrown in jail and maybe tortured. It’s like the gulag, and it’s supported by Americans, French, Canadians and British.
Bonnie Faulkner: What about the real-life consequences of overstepping the bounds of orthodox history? What have been the effects of your discoveries on you and your family? For instance—
James Bacque: I’m bankrupt, and I can’t publish.
Bonnie Faulkner: What was the reaction in 1989 when the first edition of Other Losses was published?
James Bacque: Disbelief and incredulity and amazment, except in Germany where there were still millions of people in 1986, 1989 who knew that I was telling the truth.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, after the publication of Other Losses, weren’t you then contacted by many, many eyewitnesses and survivors of Eisenhower’s death camps?
James Bacque: Yes, many of them contacted me and they still are. I had my 90th birthday the other day and people were phoning me form Germany and all over Canada to wish me happy birthday. That was really nice and I want to say to them, and to you Bonnie, with your permission, my grandsons and I are putting together a crowd-funding campaign under my name, James Bacque, and you can crowd-fund my next books. Because I can’t publish them with a regular house I’ve got to publish them myself on the ‘Net and that takes a lot of money. So please crowdfund and go to my website, which is, jamesbacque.com. I can promise you a merry ride when you read my books.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, now, James, when I first asked you about the real-life consequences of your work, you mentioned that you’re not allowed to publish. Is that correct?
James Bacque: Well, that’s the way it’s happened. The critics and the publishers and editors and so on throughout Canada, Germany, the States, and France have all ganged up to hate me and hate my work because they hate Germans so much and they think I’m sympathetic with the Germans. I’m only sympathetic with the Germans insofar as they’re suffering human beings, like all of us. I do not sympathize with their Nazi regime or their own Gestapo and all of that, but I see that they have been suffering, too, and that they need help and understanding and truth, just as we all do. So that’s what I’m trying to bring them in my books.
Bonnie Faulkner: Do you have an opinion as to what generated originally this hatred of Germany?
James Bacque: Yes, you can find that out quite easily actually. The British were afraid of the Germans because by 1895 the Germans were producing as much steel every year as the French and the British put together. They were having just as many babies. And so on. They were organized and they were threatening the British Empire. And the British, instead of cooperating with the Germans and so forth and doing business with them, which they were very good at, the British decided to take the route of hostility and to fight the Germans and so they fomented the First World War. All of this is written up in a book called Hidden History by Docherty and MacGregor, but that book, a marvelous piece of research and understanding, does a wonderful job of exposing the fact that the two German wars were not only not necessary, they were disastrous failures for the British as well as for the Germans, because the British lost their empire and look at them now. They’re confused; they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re as bad as Washington and Ottawa right now.
Bonnie Faulkner: Now, James, I didn’t realize initially, but you have a film about Other Losses. Is that correct?
James Bacque: Yes, it’s a DVD and it’s available via my website and if anybody wants a book or a DVD, you’re very welcome to write in and get it and we’ll send you a copy of whatever you order.
Bonnie Faulkner: James Bacque, thank you so very much.
James Bacque: Thank you, Bonnie Faulkner. You’re very welcome.
Bonnie Faulkner: I’ve been speaking with James Bacque. Today’s show has been: Let’s Stop Torturing Germany. James Bacque is a writer and researcher, a former journalist, book editor and publisher. His most famous books, Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies, have revealed atrocities committed by the Allies against German POWs and civilians after World War II. His most famous book, Other Losses, the subject of today’s program, is also available as a one-hour documentary on DVD directed by James Bacque, which includes unique archival footage and new interviews with survivors of Allied vengeance in conquered Germany. His many books and film are available through his website at jamesbacque.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at faulkner@gunsandbutter.org. Follow us on Twitter at gandbradio.