James Bacque

James Bacque B.A.

James "Jim" Watson Bacque (b. 19 May 1929 in Toronto, Canada; d. 13 September 2019 in Midland, Ontario) was a Canadian author, editor, journalist, and publisher. Bacque was a mainstream writer and essayist before turning his attention, in 1989, to the fate of Germans after World War II. He was friends with Prof. Dr. phil. Alfred de Zayas for many years and they exchanged ideas regularly.

Life

Funeral notice from the family

In Other Losses (1989), Bacque stated mass deaths of Germans, for reasons such as disease, starvation and cold, among the Western Allies in particular criticizing Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies. In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies (1997), Bacque claimed that Allied policies (particularly Soviet) led to the premature deaths of 5.7 million German civilians, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German P.O.W.s due to Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the five years following World War II. The book also details the charity work conducted by the Allies, primarily Canada and the United States, crediting it with saving or improving the lives of up to 500 million people around the world in the postwar period.

This work was led by the former American President Herbert Hoover at the behest of President Truman, and by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, together with Norman Robertson and Mitchell Sharp. As for other controversial mass deaths and mass killings, the estimated numbers vary widely in different sources by different historians. (The exception to this being the Holocaust, where "Holocaust denial" laws prohibit stating significantly lower numbers than six million Jews.) Bacque also wrote a detailed critique of bias and censorship in Wikipedia regarding himself and his books.

Early life

Bacque was educated at Upper Canada College in Toronto and then the University of Toronto, where he studied history and philosophy graduating in 1952 with a Bachelor of Art degree. He was a member of Seaton's House, one of the school's boarding houses.

Mainstream writing

Bacque was a mainstream writer and essayist before turning his attention, in 1989, to the fate of German soldiers held as POWs by the Allies after World War II. His recent works include Dear Enemy (2000), with Richard Matthias Mueller, essays on Germany Then and Now. This was followed by a novel, Our Fathers' War (2006). Bacque had just completed a comic drama for the stage entitled Conrad, about a media mogul in prison, which was scheduled for production on October 2, 2009 at the George Ignatieff Theatre in Toronto. Bacque's latest book, Putting On Conrad, about the experiences of producers trying to put on his play in the face of libel chill, is an amusing satire on Canada's literary establishment.

Other Losses

In Other Losses (1989), Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more are said to have perished. The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "protecting power" and POWs were reclassified as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" in order to avoid recognition under the Geneva Convention. Bacque argued that this alleged mass murder was 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. He laid the blame on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying Germans were kept on starvation rations even though there was enough food in the world to avert the lethal shortage in Germany in 1945-1946.

Academic evaluation

Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who helped edit Other Losses, wrote I quarrel with many of your interpretations, [but] I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery and acknowledged that Bacque had made a "major historical discovery", in the sense that very little attention had hitherto been paid to the treatment of German POWs in Allied hands. He acknowledged he did not now support Bacque's conclusions, but said at the American Military Institute's Annual Meeting in March, 1990:

"Bacque has done some research and uncovered an important story that I, and other American historians, missed altogether in work on Eisenhower and the conclusion of the war. When those millions of Wehrmacht soldiers came into captivity at the end of the war, many of them were deliberately and brutally mistreated. There is no denying this. There are men in this audience who were victims of this mistreatment. It is a story that has been kept quiet."

A book-length disputation of Bacque's work, entitled Eisenhower and the German POWs, appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and German historians.

One of many historians in support of Bacque was 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 introduction to the book he states:

"Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated 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 history [...] an enormous war crime."

Despite the criticisms of Bacque's methodology, Stephen Ambrose and Brian Loring Villa, the authors of the chapter on German POW deaths, conceded the Allies were motivated in their treatment of captured Germans by disgust and revenge for alleged German atrocities. They did, however, argue Bacque's casualty figures are far too high, and that policy was set by Allied politicians, not by Eisenhower.

Nevertheless, Stephen Ambrose conceded, "we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable."

Jonathon Osmond, writing in the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said:

"Bacque...has published a corrective to the impression that the Western allies after the Second World War behaved in a civilised manner to the conquered Germans... The voices of those who suffered give harrowing accounts of cruelty and suffering... It is clear that he has opened up once more a serious subject dominated by the explanations of those in power. Even if two-thirds of the statistical discrepancies exposed by Bacque could be accounted for by the chaos of the situation, there would still be a case to answer."

Joan Beaumont, writing in the December, 1995 issue of The Journal of Modern History, discussed the reactions to the book and concluded "(T)he landscape of the history of the Second World War, and of prisoners of war, remains permanently changed by Bacques's work."

Crimes and Mercies

In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies (1997), Bacque claimed that Allied policies (particularly Soviet policies) led to the premature deaths of 5.7 million German civilians, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German P.O.W.s due to Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the five years following World War II. The book also details the charity work conducted by the Allies, primarily Canada and the United States, crediting it with saving or improving the lives of up to 500 million people around the world in the post war period. This work was led by Herbert Hoover at the behest of President Truman, and by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, together with Norman Robertson and Mitchell Sharp. This was the largest relief program ever organized, and expressed the ideals of many of the allied combatants.

"More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II--one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. That these deaths occurred at all is still being denied by Western governments. At the same time, Herbert Hoover and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King created the largest charity in history, a food-aid program that saved an estimated 800 million lives during three years of global struggle against post--World War II famine--a program they had to struggle for years to make accessible to the German people, who had been excluded from it as a matter of official Allied policy. Never before had such revenge been known. Never before had such compassion been shown." – James Bacque, in: Crimes and Mercies – The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944–1950

Crimes and Mercies met with far less hostility from historians, who acknowledge the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians held in Soviet captivity, and possibly up to two million civilians who died in the mass expulsions of Germans from East Prussia, eastern Brandenburg, Pomerania, western Poland, Silesia, the Sudetenland and Romania.

Bibliography

Other Losses

Rheinwiesenlager

Fiction

• The Lonely Ones (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969) London: Macmillan, 1970. First paperback edition published under the title: Big Lonely (Toronto: new press, 1971). Second paperback edition, #148 in the New Canadian Library series; foreword by D.M.R. Bentley. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978.
• A Man of Talent (Toronto, new press, 1972). Fiction.
• The Queen Comes to Minnicog (Toronto: Gage, 1979). 177 p. Short stories.
• Our Fathers' War; A Novel (Toronto: Exile Editions, 2006). 628 pp. A novel of World War II.

Contributions to books

• Kroetsch, Robert, James Bacque, and Pierre Gravel, creation. Toronto: new press, 1970. CONTENTS (James Bacque contributions): "The High Snow," pp. 67–72; "A small Film," 73–80; "Sun and Earth for a Dollar," 81–88; "the truth shall make you weird," 88–97; "On the morning of the death of Colonel Alexander Ramsay, O.B.E.," 98–114; "The Nancy Poems," 115–119; "A Conversation with Milton Wilson," 120–146.
• Litteljohn, Bruce M., and Jon Pearce. 1973. Marked by the Wild; An Anthology of Literature shaped by the Canadian Wilderness. [Toronto]: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Includes excerpt from James Bacque's The Lonely Ones on pp. 144–147.
• Bailey, Don, and Daile Unruh. 1991. Great Canadian Murder and Mystery Stories. Kingston, Ont: Quarry Press, 1991. Includes James Bacque's "Desire and Knowledge in Key West," pp. 150–158.
• Kick, Russell. 2003. Abuse your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies. New York: Disinformation Co., 2003. Includes James Bacque's "A Truth so Terrible: Atrocities against German POWs and civilians during and after WWII," on pp. 261–267.

History: books and selected articles

• James Bacque, "The Last Dirty Secret of World War Two," Saturday Night, v. 204, no. 9, whole no. 3714 (September 1989) 31–38.
• Other Losses – An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1989; London: MacDonald, 1989). Futura paperback (London: MacDonald, 1991); General Paperback (Don Mills: General, 1991).
• Just Raoul; Adventures in the French Resistance (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990). Also Just Raoul; The Private War Against the Nazis of Raoul Laporterie, Who Saved Over 1,600 Lives in France (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1992).
• Der geplante Tod – Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in amerikanischen und französischen Lagern 1945–1946. Aus dem Kanadischen übertragen von Sophie und Erwin Duncker Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1989. Translation of Other Losses. Expanded and revised paperback edition (9th printing), Berlin: Ullstein, 2002.
• Other Losses – The Shocking Truth behind the Mass Deaths of Disarmed German Soldiers and Civilians under General Eisenhower's Command (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1991). On cover: Foreword by Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, Jr. Col. A.U.S. (Ret.), formerly a Senior Historian, U.S. Army.
• Verschwiegene Schuld: die alliierte Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland nach 1945. Vorwort von Alfred de Zayas. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Hans-Ulrich Seebohm. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1995. Translation of: Crimes and Mercies. The first edition of Crimes and Mercies; the original English version was published two years later.
• Crimes and Mercies – The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944–1950 (Boston: Toronto; Little, Brown, 1997). Also published as paperback: London: Little Brown, 1997; London: Warner, 1998, reprinted 1999; Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2007.
• Other Losses; An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II. 2. rev. edition. Bolton, ON: Fenn, 1999. Includes "Foreword" by Col. Ernest F. Fisher, xix–xxi; also "Introduction to the second revised edition," by James Bacque, xxiii–lxx. Projected new edition: Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011.
• James Bacque and Richard Matthias Müller, Dear Enemy; Germany Then and Now (Bolton, ON: Fenn, 2000). The published correspondence of James Bacque of Canada and Richard Matthias Müller of Germany.
• Verschwiegene Schuld; Die alliierte Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland nach 1945. Vorwort von Alfred de Zayas. Überseztung aus dem Englischen: Hans-Ulrich Seebohm. Selent: Pour le Mérite, 2002. Translation of: Crimes and Mercies.
• Der geplante Tod; Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in amerikanischen und französischen Lagern, 1945–1946. Aus der englischen Sprache übersetzt von Sophie und Erwin Dunker, Anette [i.e., Annette] Roser. Selent: Pour le Mérite, 2008. Translation of: Other Losses.

See also

• Claimed mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies
• The World Wars and mass starvation
• Morgenthau plan
• Germany Must Perish!
• Western Holocaust camps: Reuse of the camps

External links

• Official website
• Herald of the Victors’ Shame: James Bacque, 1929-2019
• A Hidden Holocaust Revealed: Crimes and Mercies, by James Bacque
• Other Losses, Book Review
• Accounts of the American and French POW Camps after World War II
• Wikipédia censuring Bacque