CRIMES AND
MERCIES
The Fate of German Civilians
Under Allied Occupation,
1944–1950
JAMES BACQUE
To Herbert Hoover
and
Reverend John F. Davidson
C
ONTENTS
L
IST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
P
REFACE
F
OREWORD
BY
D
R.
A
LFRED DE
Z
AYAS
I
NTRODUCTION
I: A P
IRATICAL
S
TATE
II: T
HE
B
EGINNING OF
W
ISDOM
?
III: ‘F
ROM
T
HERE
N
O
P
RISONER
R
ETURNED
’
IV: A H
OLIDAY IN
H
ELL
V: A
ND THE
C
HURCHES
F
LEW
B
LACK
F
LAGS
VI: D
EATH AND
T
RANSFIGURATION
VII: T
HE
V
ICTORY OF THE
M
ERCIFUL
VIII: H
ISTORY AND
F
ORGETTING
A
PPENDICES
N
OTES
S
ELECT
B
IBLIOGRAPHY
I
NDEX
L
IST OF
I
LLUSTRATIONS
p. xxx Map showing the division and control of Germany immediately after the Second World War. Source:
The Oder–Neisse
Problem
by Friedrich von Wilpert (Bonn, Atlantic-Forum, 1962).
p. xxxi Map showing the expulsion of Germans from their eastern homelands. Source:
The Oder–Neisse Problem
by Friedrich von Wilpert (Bonn, Atlantic-Forum, 1962).
p. 42–3 German local governments were ordered by the US Army to warn citizens that feeding prisoners was a crime punishable by death. This order was found in the 1980s in the archives of the village of Langenlonsheim by Jakob Zacher.
p. 96–7 Printed notice for Germans to be expelled from Kraslice, in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. Source: Sudetendeutsches Bild-archiv, Munich.
p. 127 This memorandum by Robert Murphy, Chief Political adviser to US Military Governor of Germany from 1945, was kept secret until the 1990s. Murphy predicts an excess of deaths over births of at least 2,000,000. Source: Hoover Institution, Stanford.
Plate section (following p.128)
1 . Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury. His Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of German industry led to the deaths of millions of Germans years after the war’s end. (US Army)
2. The Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, where the transfers of millions of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were approved. Truman is in the foreground, with his back to camera; Stalin is seated further to the right and Churchill is across the table on the left. (US Army) 3.
US President Harry Truman (left) greets Herbert Hoover on 28 May 1945, before a 45-minute meeting during which they discussed world food relief. (Acme International/Bettman Archive)
4. In September 1945, US Secretary of War Robert Patterson and President Harry Truman controlled the most powerful military machine in human history. They soon used it for a huge food-relief campaign. (US Library of Congress)
5. Norman Robertson, Under-Secretary of External Affairs for Canada, led the Canadian food aid programme from 1945. Later he became Ambassador to the United States. (Herb Nott/Ontario Archive)
6. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada. He worked with Norman Robertson and Herbert Hoover to bring Canadian wheat to starving people around the world. (Gilbert Milne/Ontario Archive)
7. Painting by prisoner Kurt Spillman of the French camp at Thorée-les-Pins, near La Flèche, in early spring 1945. ‘We arrived about 6 a.m. in a snowstorm. The dead lying on the right are comrades who suffocated during the journey. US soldiers look on as we are beaten by the French support troops.’ (Kurt Spillman)
8. US soldier guarding camp at Sinzig, on the Rhine near Remagen, spring 1945. Millions of Axis prisoners were herded into open fields and kept for months without sufficient food, water or shelter. (US National Archive 111-SC-204919)
9. Aerial view of the infamous Russian camp at Vorkuta, two thousand miles north-east of Moscow, between the Barents Sea and the northern peaks of the Urals. (Hoover Institution)
10. On these tiny pages (shown actual size) the names of dead Austrian prisoners were written. Rudolf Haberfellner (now of Toronto) risked his life to smuggle this notebook out of his camp at Novo Troitsk, USSR. (Rudolf Haberfellner)
11. The Allies deprived Germany of chemical fertilizers, so this farmer near Bamburg uses liquid manure. The cows drawing the wooden tanks also provided milk and, when too old to work, meat for the hungry. (US Army)
12. April 1946: German engineers are forced to dismantle a powerplant at Gendorf for shipment to Russia as reparations. (US Army)
13. January 1946: civilians in Kiel clean up rubble in front of the Empire Building used by the British for their Army Welfare Service. (Gerhard Garms)
14. Demonstration in Kiel against the excessive Allied regulations, which helped cause food shortages in 1947. Signs read: ‘We demand control over food distribution’; ‘Severe punishment for black marketeers’; ‘We demand sufficient food for all’; and ‘End dismantling. We want to work’. (Gerhard Garms)
15. Hamburg, 1946: a barefoot German boy scavenges for food. (Gollancz Archive, University of Warwick)
16. The British philanthropist and publisher Victor Gollancz denounced Allied crimes in passionate prose. He is seen here during his 1946 visit to Düsseldorf, in the British zone. (Gollancz Archive, University of Warwick)
17. A British nurse in Berlin helps three German refugee children expelled from an orphanage in Danzig, Poland. The boy on the left, aged nine, weighs 40lbs and is too weak to stand. The boy in the centre, aged twelve, weighs just 46lbs, and his eight-year-old sister, right, weighs 37lbs. This picture was first published in Time magazine on 12 November 1945. (Black Star/Time magazine)
18. Seven starving babies in the Catholic children’s hospital in Berlin, October 1947. The infant on the right is near death. (US Army)
19. Canadian poster asking for contributions to help save the lives of children in Germany, undated but probably from 1947. (National Archives of Canada)
20. In 1946 Mrs Hugh Champion de Crespigny, centre, wife of the British Regional Commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein, helps with the Christmas celebrations of refugee children in the convalescent home established in a wing of their official residence in Kiel. (Gerhard Garms)
21. Children emerge from ruins. Many families in wrecked German cities lived in damp, unheated basements for years after the war. (Alfred de Zayas)
22. Expellees from the east, who left home with few supplies and little or no transport, pass US Army vehicles. (International News)
23. Displaced women and children move slowly in horse-drawn carts and on foot along the road near Wurzen. (US Army)
24. Bunk-beds and makeshift furniture in a crowded barracks for refugees, Germany, 1946. (International Committee of the Red Cross)
25. The first food parcel allowed to be sent from the USA arrived in Berlin at the home of Heinz Lietz on 14 August 1946. Many Germans starved to death when such readily available help was denied. (US Army)
26. The original handwritten caption to this photograph reads: ‘Bread, the “staff of life” in Berlin. – Thanks to the providence of God and the Dutch Red Cross which brought MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] flour and other nice food to the Mennonite refugees in Berlin.’ (Peter Dyck)
27. An old refugee woman gathers sticks to help cook meagre meals supplied in part by Mennonites from Canada and the USA. (Peter Dyck)
28. Mennonite Peter Dyck, from North America, helps a young expellee boy from the east. (Peter Dyck)
29. American Cornelius Dyck, the first member of the Mennonite Central Committee to enter the British zone in late 1946. The Committee provided invaluable help distributing food packages in Schleswig-Holstein, where the population increased by over 70 per cent after the arrival of expellees and refugees. (Gerhard Garms)
30. A German child’s picture of the world, drawn in about 1948, shows the route of ‘Hoover food’ by train from Canada, the US and Mexico and then across the Atlantic to Hamburg. (Hoover Institution)
P
REFACE
In 1945, the United States of America had billions of friends around the world, and her enemies were powerless to hurt her. Today, she has billions of enemies around the world and her friends seem powerless to help her. That historical change is rooted in the conflict expressed by the title of this book.
Intense international interest was aroused by the first edition of
Crimes and Mercies
and by my earlier book,
Other Losses
, both of which revealed that the German people were treated so harshly by the Allies after the Second World War that millions died of starvation, exposure and preventable disease.
The criticisms of both books offered by conventional professional historians to date have contained no new information of any historical significance. That fierce and famous critic of my work, Stephen E. Ambrose (author and chief of the Eisenhower Center) read the final MS of
Other Losses
in 1988 and wrote to me “… you have a sensational if appalling story and it can no longer be suppressed, and I suppose (in truth, I know) it must be published …” But three years later he pirouetted into the
New
York Times
with a review of the published book contradicting his earlier observation. Having convened an historical conference on the book so fast that there was no time to research the book’s findings, he announced a major discovery: historians do not need to do research – prediction suffices: “When scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque’s work to be worse than worthless,” said Ambrose in the review. Why he reversed his initial position on
Other Losses
may be explained by a statement he made to Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher Jr, a senior historian at the US Army Center for Military History who had given the pageproofs to Ambrose for comment. In the spring of 1989 as he returned these page proofs of
Other Losses
, Ambrose told Fisher, “This book destroys my life’s work.”
Ambrose’s labor-saving ability to render a verdict without the bother of a trial is shared by other professional historians of postwar Germany. Professor Stefan Karner of the University of Graz has looked at the same documents in the KGB archives I cite which support this book. Taken with the German postwar documents, these show that the French and Americans were responsible for the deaths of about 1,000,000 German prisoners and the Soviets for about 500,000. Karner rejects those KGB documents not because he has found more accurate sources, but because he prefers estimates. His own estimates. These of course defend the conventional view that the Germans were not mistreated by the Western Allies after the war. By this evasion of the documentary sources, he ostensibly exculpates the Western Allies by shifting the blame onto the Soviets.
Similarly, Sir Michael Howard, writing in the
Times Literary
Supplement
, confessed himself “an innumerate historian” incompetent to judge statistics. Nevertheless, he immediately issued a judgment on
Other Losses
based on the “criterion” of “inherent probability.” He said, “Which is in fact the more probable explanation; that a million German prisoners quietly died in American hands in 1945 without anyone noticing, or that the American authorities … made mistakes in their initial figures?” Sir Michael’s form of reasoning – it was not likely therefore it did not happen – would be judged as fatuous by his fellow historians, beknighted or not, were it not for the fact that, like him, most of his audience want to believe that the Americans and the French did not commit such atrocities. It is equally clear that Sir Michael does not know, or perhaps does not care, that many of these prisoners did not ‘die quietly.’ The survivors have been trying to tell the world about what happened in the American camps for sixty years, but their stories have been rigorously suppressed.
Among the suppressed are thousands of Germans around the world who have written to me and my publishers, thankful that their story has at last been told. Not a single ex-prisoner has written to say that he was well-treated in the Russian, American or French camps, though many have written to me to say that they were lucky to have been captured by the British and Canadians.
