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Crimes and Mercies: New Hope
For Germany, the end of World War II occurred officially on 8th May 1945; but the end of suffering did not. Using recently released documents from the USA and detailed research in the Moscow archives, the author shows how millions of Germans died unnecessarily - from starvation, disease and forced homelessness. The Red Army in the east took revenge for the crimes of the Nazis, as did the French and Americans in the west. The governments responsible have never acknowledged any mass deaths. Bacque argues that the Allies came not as liberators and rescuers, but as judges and avengers.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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496 people want to read
About the author
James Bacque
16 books24 followersCanadian novelist, publisher and writer of historic non-fiction.
Bacque studied philosophy and history and the University of Toronto, where he also holds an bachelor of arts.
Bacque was considered to be an mainstream writer until he began to write about allied war crimes against Germany and the fate of German prisoners of war.
Bacque studied philosophy and history and the University of Toronto, where he also holds an bachelor of arts.
Bacque was considered to be an mainstream writer until he began to write about allied war crimes against Germany and the fate of German prisoners of war.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 7, 2016
When I was stationed in Germany many years ago we rented an apartment in a small village as military housing was in short supply. I recall that our old landlord, a veteran of the Eastern front, would hide eggs and goodies in the garden and then come for my children. The three of them would toddle off into the garden to fill Easter baskets...he was a kindly old gent and a fine human being. Over the course of my service there I met a number of German veterans; some were interpreters, having learned English in POW camps in Canada; others were gate guards...one, at least, had been an officer in the SS. All were polite and friendly and most showed more class and breeding than their North American counterparts. The point being, I guess, that they were just people, decent people, and in spite of knowing that they had served in military units, I could never make the mental connection between them and the atrocities we all know happened during WWII.
There was considerable opposition in Germany to Nazi excesses before the war and during the war...careful and guarded opposition, necessarily, but still there. One of the reasons that Hitler situated death camps in Poland was to avoid the criticism the extermination policies received at home. There was even a German resistance movement. Not all Germans agreed with what Hitler was doing, but little could be done about it. When senior Nazi leaders tried to negotiate, they were rebuffed...look at the reward Hess got for his defection! So we know that many Germans, including much of the soldiery, were in opposition to the politics of extermination.
Mr Bacque has thoroughly investigated the treatment of the Germans by the Allies after the end of the war. He has found that German soldiers and civilians were atrociously abused, resulting in a death rate that rivalled or exceeded that of the death camp victims. Some examples:
1) mass rapes and murders of German nationals by Russians in their zones;
2)removal of millions of military and civilians to Russia to be used as slave labor;
3)soldiers of all allied nations beat and murdered German POWs and deliberately kept them on starvation diets in camps with no overhead shelter. American troops shot civilian women who tried to feed the POWs; they also seized food and burned it; and
4) Germans were kept on starvation rations of less than 1000 calories per day (cpd) as part of deliberate policy (Morgentau plan). Civilian agencies were denied permission to deliver trainloads of food to Germans; Roosevelt declared "...I am not willing at this time to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation."(p. 137).
I was really stunned by the hypocrisy shown by the Allies, and I no longer believe in WWII as being a "good war". When a democracy breaks its own rules, is it really a democracy anymore? Germans generally kept to the Geneva Convention in their treatment of Allied POWs, but certainly did not get the same treatment in return. I'm not talking of random atrocities (of which both sides were guilty) but of deliberate national policy. Both the British and Americans were guilty of this. Russia generally treated the POWs better than the Americans did. In fact, the American camps might even have been worse than the Japanese camps: here's what LCol Henry Allard (in charge of US camps in France) had to say: "The standards of PW camps in the ComZ in Europe compare as only slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and unfavourably with the Germans." Why were there no American POW camp commanders on the docket in Nuremburg alongside their Nazi counterparts? I'm sure they had lots of rope.
Another point I had to ponder: Britain declared war on Germany largely because of a pact Britain had with Poland. After the war, Russia retained half of Poland...where was the bloody pact then? If they wanted to be consistent, should they not have attacked Russia next? Also, it's worthy of note that the US continued to starve Germans until it dawned on them that they might need a strong Germany to help them tackle Russia...then the goodies flowed in!
Bacque is a good writer and has done a lot of research where possible. It was not always possible in the USA or Britain, where many files and photos have "disappeared" from the shelves. He was surprised to Find that the Russian archives were complete and accessible and surprisingly detailed. The Soviets have accepted and admitted their guilt in the matter, as have the Germans who continue to make reparations and apologies to this day. Fat chance getting the other principals involved to do likewise!
This is an important book, easy to read until the halfway point, when Bacque starts numbing your brain with numbers too large to be comprehensible. All sources are listed and he explains how he comes by the estimates of dead Germans, too complicated a process for me to replicate here. I did come away with a deep respect for Herbert Hoover, who attempted to feed the masses in the face of opposition from his own country. Churchill and Eisenhower, you suck!
There was considerable opposition in Germany to Nazi excesses before the war and during the war...careful and guarded opposition, necessarily, but still there. One of the reasons that Hitler situated death camps in Poland was to avoid the criticism the extermination policies received at home. There was even a German resistance movement. Not all Germans agreed with what Hitler was doing, but little could be done about it. When senior Nazi leaders tried to negotiate, they were rebuffed...look at the reward Hess got for his defection! So we know that many Germans, including much of the soldiery, were in opposition to the politics of extermination.
Mr Bacque has thoroughly investigated the treatment of the Germans by the Allies after the end of the war. He has found that German soldiers and civilians were atrociously abused, resulting in a death rate that rivalled or exceeded that of the death camp victims. Some examples:
1) mass rapes and murders of German nationals by Russians in their zones;
2)removal of millions of military and civilians to Russia to be used as slave labor;
3)soldiers of all allied nations beat and murdered German POWs and deliberately kept them on starvation diets in camps with no overhead shelter. American troops shot civilian women who tried to feed the POWs; they also seized food and burned it; and
4) Germans were kept on starvation rations of less than 1000 calories per day (cpd) as part of deliberate policy (Morgentau plan). Civilian agencies were denied permission to deliver trainloads of food to Germans; Roosevelt declared "...I am not willing at this time to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation."(p. 137).
I was really stunned by the hypocrisy shown by the Allies, and I no longer believe in WWII as being a "good war". When a democracy breaks its own rules, is it really a democracy anymore? Germans generally kept to the Geneva Convention in their treatment of Allied POWs, but certainly did not get the same treatment in return. I'm not talking of random atrocities (of which both sides were guilty) but of deliberate national policy. Both the British and Americans were guilty of this. Russia generally treated the POWs better than the Americans did. In fact, the American camps might even have been worse than the Japanese camps: here's what LCol Henry Allard (in charge of US camps in France) had to say: "The standards of PW camps in the ComZ in Europe compare as only slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and unfavourably with the Germans." Why were there no American POW camp commanders on the docket in Nuremburg alongside their Nazi counterparts? I'm sure they had lots of rope.
Another point I had to ponder: Britain declared war on Germany largely because of a pact Britain had with Poland. After the war, Russia retained half of Poland...where was the bloody pact then? If they wanted to be consistent, should they not have attacked Russia next? Also, it's worthy of note that the US continued to starve Germans until it dawned on them that they might need a strong Germany to help them tackle Russia...then the goodies flowed in!
Bacque is a good writer and has done a lot of research where possible. It was not always possible in the USA or Britain, where many files and photos have "disappeared" from the shelves. He was surprised to Find that the Russian archives were complete and accessible and surprisingly detailed. The Soviets have accepted and admitted their guilt in the matter, as have the Germans who continue to make reparations and apologies to this day. Fat chance getting the other principals involved to do likewise!
This is an important book, easy to read until the halfway point, when Bacque starts numbing your brain with numbers too large to be comprehensible. All sources are listed and he explains how he comes by the estimates of dead Germans, too complicated a process for me to replicate here. I did come away with a deep respect for Herbert Hoover, who attempted to feed the masses in the face of opposition from his own country. Churchill and Eisenhower, you suck!
January 1, 2019
Growing up, we all heard frequently about the 6 million Jews killed by Germans during WWII, but never about the more than “9.3 million Germans (who) died needlessly after war” by the Allies (our side). “Among the infants alone, the toll would be well over one million, perhaps as high as a million and a half dead. The Allies, thus “did not end the killing at the end of the war, but increased it. Far more civilian Germans died in the five years of ‘peace’ than soldiers in six years of war.” “In the woods around Berlin, countless dead are hanging from the trees.” “A whole nation (Germany) was converted into a starvation prison.” “Never had so many people been put in prison.” One army officer at the time summed it up: “the intention of the Army command” was “to exterminate as many POW’s as the traffic could bear without international scrutiny”. The army’s intentional policy was “to starve prisoners”, according to several American soldiers who were there. The British also used 400,000 Germans as personal underpaid workers, while the US, not wishing to be outdone, used 600,000 Germans worldwide as their lowballed laborers.
Eisenhower made it punishable by death for German civilians to feed a prisoner or even pool food in prep to take to prisoners. Then Eisenhower personally ordered all food brought to prisoners to be destroyed. “Although the prisoners were getting only 800 calories a day (adults need 2-3K per day), the Americans were destroying food outside the camp gate.” “They began dying when the world food production was 97 percent of normal.” Concerned he wasn’t being vindictive enough as a Christian, Eisenhower then forbade “the North American Quakers to come to Germany to help orphans who were wandering the streets ‘unaccompanied’”. Knowing how that might look in the press, or to people with morals, he then told the state department to keep this secret. Thus, the Allies deliberately not feeding Germans post-war was not an economic decision, but one of simple vengeance in violation of the Geneva Convention. “Germany for nearly all of 1945-50 was one great prison.” “Thousands of truckloads of supplies were refused entry in 1945 and 1946.” A German’s past moral behavior meant nothing because when the Allies emptied Hitler’s prisons of all who dared actively had resisted Hitler and Nazism, and knowing the prisoners’ service in ending the war, the Allies starved them with all the rest. To increase the German suffering, the Allies kept them from “manufacturing goods to pay for food.” In calm contrast, on the Eastern Front, McArthur in charge of Japan, “demanded enough food from Washington to keep civilians alive.” Also in contrast, even Stalin fed his German prisoners adequately because he wanted useful work from the prisoners more than choosing the less remunerative lingering vengeance so enjoyed by the Allies.
“Millions of people disappear under the Allies’ rule and no one notices.” Only in Germany were these people mourned. They say the first victim of war is the truth; that was certainly true for World War Two. James shows how the plan to deeply punish Germans existed long before the discovery of the Nazi Concentration Camps. FDR forbade the press to discuss the German resistance during the war and that “keep ‘em in the dark” mindset continued after his death. Amazing book - the author’s 1st book on this subject was recommended by Noam. Other books on this subject (which no talks about) actually exist – I found them for my Facebook site Books for Activists: 1. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, 2. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, 3. Gruesome Harvest: The Allied Attempt to Exterminate Germany after 1945, and 4. James Bacque’s 1st book, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners.
Eisenhower made it punishable by death for German civilians to feed a prisoner or even pool food in prep to take to prisoners. Then Eisenhower personally ordered all food brought to prisoners to be destroyed. “Although the prisoners were getting only 800 calories a day (adults need 2-3K per day), the Americans were destroying food outside the camp gate.” “They began dying when the world food production was 97 percent of normal.” Concerned he wasn’t being vindictive enough as a Christian, Eisenhower then forbade “the North American Quakers to come to Germany to help orphans who were wandering the streets ‘unaccompanied’”. Knowing how that might look in the press, or to people with morals, he then told the state department to keep this secret. Thus, the Allies deliberately not feeding Germans post-war was not an economic decision, but one of simple vengeance in violation of the Geneva Convention. “Germany for nearly all of 1945-50 was one great prison.” “Thousands of truckloads of supplies were refused entry in 1945 and 1946.” A German’s past moral behavior meant nothing because when the Allies emptied Hitler’s prisons of all who dared actively had resisted Hitler and Nazism, and knowing the prisoners’ service in ending the war, the Allies starved them with all the rest. To increase the German suffering, the Allies kept them from “manufacturing goods to pay for food.” In calm contrast, on the Eastern Front, McArthur in charge of Japan, “demanded enough food from Washington to keep civilians alive.” Also in contrast, even Stalin fed his German prisoners adequately because he wanted useful work from the prisoners more than choosing the less remunerative lingering vengeance so enjoyed by the Allies.
“Millions of people disappear under the Allies’ rule and no one notices.” Only in Germany were these people mourned. They say the first victim of war is the truth; that was certainly true for World War Two. James shows how the plan to deeply punish Germans existed long before the discovery of the Nazi Concentration Camps. FDR forbade the press to discuss the German resistance during the war and that “keep ‘em in the dark” mindset continued after his death. Amazing book - the author’s 1st book on this subject was recommended by Noam. Other books on this subject (which no talks about) actually exist – I found them for my Facebook site Books for Activists: 1. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, 2. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, 3. Gruesome Harvest: The Allied Attempt to Exterminate Germany after 1945, and 4. James Bacque’s 1st book, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners.
January 9, 2022
That certain parties would like the world to believe they're always under any circumstances "the good guys" and thus like to sweep their misdeeds, frequently expressed as staggering numbers of civilian deaths caused through negligence, indifference or quite simply brutal calculation, under the carpets should come as no surprise to anyone. Consequently, Bacque's claims regarding high and generally unacknowledged numbers of German POWs and civilians under Allied administration in the late stages of and after WWII, backed by various statistics as well as documents and eyewitness testimony from both sides, are also not hard to believe unless one happens to be a subscriber to the good old "but the Allies were the heroes and would neeeever have done anything morally reprehensible" fantasy.
August 5, 2010
There are two types of history in my view- history as the status quo would wish you to know and history as it was, pure and simple. This book is one of the most important and evocative works of the twentieth century, not as a witness to the aftermath of war but as the work of an agile mind that is prepared to look beyond the drab statistics of the drab functionaries who were tasked with a dirty clean up and see what was being covered up by those same functionaries at the behest of the leaders of the victorious allies and their minions, people like Morgenthau and his ilk. History has now shone a light on their grubby work; it will never be the same again.
September 30, 2008
We often look back on WWII as a time of justified war: a time hat the world was ripped apart because of the activity of one man, who tainted a culture and a country. I have always respected the "kultur Deutsch" (and mean no disrepect if I misspelled that). I did not know that our reaction to that culture and country was so ugly and cruel. It would be like us reacting with hatred and antagonism toward all Muslims because of what happened on September 11th. And we're beyond that... or are we?
September 27, 2016
Because both my German parents were in Soviet work camps after the war and I'm fascinated with books that look at these years. I know my dad struggled to avoid Soviet captivity and was deliberately misled by American flyers that floated down from their planes. He ended up spending almost 5 years in Soviet camps.
This book boggles the mind with all the number-crunching. I'm glad I read it, but must continue to read more about these confusing years before I understand them better. The author makes some incredible statements and I'm not sure what I should believe. Controversial? Definitely. One thing is for certain: war is ugly.
This book boggles the mind with all the number-crunching. I'm glad I read it, but must continue to read more about these confusing years before I understand them better. The author makes some incredible statements and I'm not sure what I should believe. Controversial? Definitely. One thing is for certain: war is ugly.
June 2, 2021
"Crimes and Mercies" is one of the worst pieces of a-historical hagiography I have read.
This applies especially to Bacque’s phantom figure of ca. 5.7 million unrecorded civilian deaths in the four occupation zones/two Germanys between 1946 and 1950, the calculation of which is provided on pp. 121-122.
Bacque did not deny the crimes of Nazi Germany, but his writing makes it look like they were qualitatively and quantitatively no worse than what the Allied powers occupying Germany are supposed to have done. Unless he was so divorced from reality as to believe in what he wrote, Bacque purposely invented a deliberately caused man-made catastrophe that never happened. While it is at least arguable that about 2 - 2.5 million expellees and refugees from the eastern territories of the German Reich in its 1937 borders and from ethnic German minorities outside 1937 Germany perished on their way to the four occupation zones that later became the two Germanys (such order of magnitude was first estimated by a commission set up by the German Federal Republic in the 1950s to investigate the fate of German refugee and expellee populations), there is no evidence to support the claim of ca. 5.7 million unrecorded deaths among the indigenous population (i.e. the population other than refugees/expellees) of the four occupation zones. Bacque arrived at this figure through the following fallacies:
a) He compared an October 1946 census figure of ca. 65 million that included the Saarland, a region with a population of ca. 1 million, with 1950 census figures adding up to a population of 68,230,796 that did not include the Saarland. He should have added the Saarland's estimated population of 1 million for a proper comparison with the 1946 census, yielding a 1950 population of 69,230,796.
b) He assumed that 6 million expellees entered Germany between the 1946 and 1950 censuses. Actually, according to a publication of the German Statistics Office that Bacque ignored (a collection of several articles under the overall heading "Deutsche Bevölkerungsbilanz des 2. Weltkrieges", in "Wirtschaft und Statistik", Herausgeber: Statistisches Bundesamt Heft 10, Oktober 1956, pp. 493 to 500), 5.76 million refugees/expellees from the eastern territories of the former German Reich plus 4.08 million refugees/expellees from ethnic German minorities outside the 1937 German borders, 9.84 million in total, were already included in the 1946 census figure of 65,310,000. The total number of refugees/expellees that arrived in the four occupation zones/two Germanys until September 1950 was 11.6 million, so only 11.6 minus 9.84 = 1.76 million (instead of the 6 million assumed by Bacque) arrived between the 1946 and 1950 censuses.
c) He claimed that 2.6 million German prisoners of war returned to Germany between 1946 and 1950. As there were still about 10,000 prisoners of war in Soviet captivity in 1955 (German chancellor Konrad Adenauer obtained their release in a famous trip to the Soviet Union that year), this would mean that 2.61 million prisoners were in camps outside Germany at the time of the 1946 census, and not 1.75 million as considered in the census. The difference of 0.86 million would increase the losses in the population balance yielding a population (1939 population plus gains minus losses) of 64,450,000 in October 1946 (i.e. the census figure of 65,310,000 minus 860,000 prisoners in excess of the census figure who were still in captivity abroad in 1946).
Applying these corrections to Bacque's calculation yields the following ("WiSt" stands for the aforementioned 1956 articles in the German Statistics Office's October 1946 issue of "Wirtschaft und Statistik"):
Population in October 1946: 64,450,000 (= 65,310,000 minus 860,000)
Births 1946-1950 (Bacque) 4,176,430
Returning PoWs 1946-1950 (Bacque) 2,600,000
Expellees 1946-1950 (WiSt) 1,760,000
(a) Total before losses 72,986,430
Officially recorded deaths 1946-1950 (Bacque) 3,235,539
Emigration 1946-1950 (WiSt) 500,000
(b) Total losses 3,735,539
(c) Expected population = (a) - (b) 69,250,891
(d) Population 1950 69,230,796
(e) = (c) - (d) 20,095
The same result is obtained by maintaining the 1946 census figure of 65,310,000 and assuming 1.74 million prisoner of war returnees between the 1946 and 1950 censuses (as per the German Statistics Office's above-mentioned publication) instead of the 2.6 million claimed by Bacque.
Population in October 1946 (WiSt) 65,310,000
Births 1946-1950 (Bacque) 4,176,430
Returning PoWs 1946-1950 (WiSt) 1,740,000
Expellees 1946-1950 (WiSt) 1,760,000
(a) Total before losses 72,986,430
Officially recorded deaths 1946-1950 (Bacque) 3,235,539
Emigration 1946-1950 (WiSt) 500,000
(b) Total losses 3,735,539
(c) Expected population = (a) - (b) 69,250,891
(d) Population 1950 69,230,796
(e) = (c) - (d) 20,095 (instead of Bacque's 5,710,095, a difference of -5,690,000)
Bacque thus exaggerated the number of unrecorded deaths by 5,690,000, or by a factor of 284.
Bacque's fallacious calculations aside, there is also no evidence on the ground that would suggest a catastrophe of such proportions as Bacque suggested. 5.7 million deaths in excess of recorded mortality within 4 years would have implied a collapse of the healthcare system and mass burials or cremations on an enormous scale, which the population could not have failed to notice. It would also mean that each surviving inhabitant of the four occupation zones must have known one or more persons from among their relatives, friends or neighbors who perished due to privation between 1946 and 1950. However, while there is no doubt that the situation of perhaps the better part of the German population of the four occupation zones was very bad as concerns food and shelter, neither contemporary witnesses living in the Ruhr industrial region who I know personally (or knew, as some have since passed away), nor authors of the postwar "Trümmerliteratur" like Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Borchert, nor the accounts of witnesses cited by Bacque himself (namely British philanthropist Victor Gollancz, who toured Germany in 1946 and described what he saw in hospitals and squalid dwellings in graphic detail in his book "In Darkest Germany") suggest anything resembling such a massive die-off. Bacque's claim of 5.7 million unrecorded deaths thus fails on all counts. The actual number of deaths in excess of recorded mortality, as shown above, was in the order of about 20,000.
This is by no means the only fallacy in "Crimes and Mercies", but it is the one that best illustrates the book's abysmal quality as a piece of historical research and writing, if it can even be called that.
On the bright side, the book, written throughout in an emotional language bordering on hysteria, contains statements of Bacque's views and opinions that are quite amusing to read. For instance, on the first two pages of the main text he blamed all 20th-century disasters on Darwin, Marx and Freud:
"The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900 was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.
Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for mankind, which had in common the idea that people must forever struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class; in the natural world, individual must compete against individual; and within the individual mind ego must war with libido, or instinct with learned behaviour.
These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent
class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revolutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which
were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century."
The indictment of Darwin is particularly hilarious. Maybe Bacque was a creationist. In any case he expressed the conviction that Protestantism was better than Catholicism in that the latter was more likely to produce totalitarianism:
"What saved the democracies from the fate of the others were, largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state. The people had already freed their individual consciences from the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them
through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension, the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, reciprocal loyalties and violence.
Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia, where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in Germany."
As mostly Protestant Germany did not fit into the good Protestantism vs. bad Catholicism picture, the "curtailing" of the Protestant revolution by "older authoritarian traditions" had to help out.
Another passage on pp. 105-106, while not amusing, raises doubts about Bacque's state of mind at the time of his writing:
"At Neisse in Upper Silesia, the village priest wrote, 'During the first night of the Russian occupation, many of the nuns were raped as many as fifty times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any more resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until finally they collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in homes for the aged, hospitals, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were seventy and eighty years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-treated by these barbarians. And to make matters worse, these atocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares, and the victims were nuns, women and eight-year-old girls. Mothers
were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in front of their brothers, and nuns were raped in front of young boys.' The Russians even went so far as to fuck their victims
when they were already dead. 'Priests who tried to protect the nuns were brutally dragged away, the Russians threatening to shoot them.'35
The sentence "The Russians even went so far as to fuck their victims when they were already dead" is not part of a quote, as the placing of the quote marks shows. It is Bacque's own.
I could provide further examples, but I guess the above is sufficient to illustrate what "Crimes and Mercies" is all about. It is not a historical monograph but a manifesto meant to convey Bacque's somewhat bizarre views and convictions. As a source of historical writing, it is completely worthless. I would like to give it a rating of zero stars or below that, but unfortunately the scale calls for at least one star.
This applies especially to Bacque’s phantom figure of ca. 5.7 million unrecorded civilian deaths in the four occupation zones/two Germanys between 1946 and 1950, the calculation of which is provided on pp. 121-122.
Bacque did not deny the crimes of Nazi Germany, but his writing makes it look like they were qualitatively and quantitatively no worse than what the Allied powers occupying Germany are supposed to have done. Unless he was so divorced from reality as to believe in what he wrote, Bacque purposely invented a deliberately caused man-made catastrophe that never happened. While it is at least arguable that about 2 - 2.5 million expellees and refugees from the eastern territories of the German Reich in its 1937 borders and from ethnic German minorities outside 1937 Germany perished on their way to the four occupation zones that later became the two Germanys (such order of magnitude was first estimated by a commission set up by the German Federal Republic in the 1950s to investigate the fate of German refugee and expellee populations), there is no evidence to support the claim of ca. 5.7 million unrecorded deaths among the indigenous population (i.e. the population other than refugees/expellees) of the four occupation zones. Bacque arrived at this figure through the following fallacies:
a) He compared an October 1946 census figure of ca. 65 million that included the Saarland, a region with a population of ca. 1 million, with 1950 census figures adding up to a population of 68,230,796 that did not include the Saarland. He should have added the Saarland's estimated population of 1 million for a proper comparison with the 1946 census, yielding a 1950 population of 69,230,796.
b) He assumed that 6 million expellees entered Germany between the 1946 and 1950 censuses. Actually, according to a publication of the German Statistics Office that Bacque ignored (a collection of several articles under the overall heading "Deutsche Bevölkerungsbilanz des 2. Weltkrieges", in "Wirtschaft und Statistik", Herausgeber: Statistisches Bundesamt Heft 10, Oktober 1956, pp. 493 to 500), 5.76 million refugees/expellees from the eastern territories of the former German Reich plus 4.08 million refugees/expellees from ethnic German minorities outside the 1937 German borders, 9.84 million in total, were already included in the 1946 census figure of 65,310,000. The total number of refugees/expellees that arrived in the four occupation zones/two Germanys until September 1950 was 11.6 million, so only 11.6 minus 9.84 = 1.76 million (instead of the 6 million assumed by Bacque) arrived between the 1946 and 1950 censuses.
c) He claimed that 2.6 million German prisoners of war returned to Germany between 1946 and 1950. As there were still about 10,000 prisoners of war in Soviet captivity in 1955 (German chancellor Konrad Adenauer obtained their release in a famous trip to the Soviet Union that year), this would mean that 2.61 million prisoners were in camps outside Germany at the time of the 1946 census, and not 1.75 million as considered in the census. The difference of 0.86 million would increase the losses in the population balance yielding a population (1939 population plus gains minus losses) of 64,450,000 in October 1946 (i.e. the census figure of 65,310,000 minus 860,000 prisoners in excess of the census figure who were still in captivity abroad in 1946).
Applying these corrections to Bacque's calculation yields the following ("WiSt" stands for the aforementioned 1956 articles in the German Statistics Office's October 1946 issue of "Wirtschaft und Statistik"):
Population in October 1946: 64,450,000 (= 65,310,000 minus 860,000)
Births 1946-1950 (Bacque) 4,176,430
Returning PoWs 1946-1950 (Bacque) 2,600,000
Expellees 1946-1950 (WiSt) 1,760,000
(a) Total before losses 72,986,430
Officially recorded deaths 1946-1950 (Bacque) 3,235,539
Emigration 1946-1950 (WiSt) 500,000
(b) Total losses 3,735,539
(c) Expected population = (a) - (b) 69,250,891
(d) Population 1950 69,230,796
(e) = (c) - (d) 20,095
The same result is obtained by maintaining the 1946 census figure of 65,310,000 and assuming 1.74 million prisoner of war returnees between the 1946 and 1950 censuses (as per the German Statistics Office's above-mentioned publication) instead of the 2.6 million claimed by Bacque.
Population in October 1946 (WiSt) 65,310,000
Births 1946-1950 (Bacque) 4,176,430
Returning PoWs 1946-1950 (WiSt) 1,740,000
Expellees 1946-1950 (WiSt) 1,760,000
(a) Total before losses 72,986,430
Officially recorded deaths 1946-1950 (Bacque) 3,235,539
Emigration 1946-1950 (WiSt) 500,000
(b) Total losses 3,735,539
(c) Expected population = (a) - (b) 69,250,891
(d) Population 1950 69,230,796
(e) = (c) - (d) 20,095 (instead of Bacque's 5,710,095, a difference of -5,690,000)
Bacque thus exaggerated the number of unrecorded deaths by 5,690,000, or by a factor of 284.
Bacque's fallacious calculations aside, there is also no evidence on the ground that would suggest a catastrophe of such proportions as Bacque suggested. 5.7 million deaths in excess of recorded mortality within 4 years would have implied a collapse of the healthcare system and mass burials or cremations on an enormous scale, which the population could not have failed to notice. It would also mean that each surviving inhabitant of the four occupation zones must have known one or more persons from among their relatives, friends or neighbors who perished due to privation between 1946 and 1950. However, while there is no doubt that the situation of perhaps the better part of the German population of the four occupation zones was very bad as concerns food and shelter, neither contemporary witnesses living in the Ruhr industrial region who I know personally (or knew, as some have since passed away), nor authors of the postwar "Trümmerliteratur" like Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Borchert, nor the accounts of witnesses cited by Bacque himself (namely British philanthropist Victor Gollancz, who toured Germany in 1946 and described what he saw in hospitals and squalid dwellings in graphic detail in his book "In Darkest Germany") suggest anything resembling such a massive die-off. Bacque's claim of 5.7 million unrecorded deaths thus fails on all counts. The actual number of deaths in excess of recorded mortality, as shown above, was in the order of about 20,000.
This is by no means the only fallacy in "Crimes and Mercies", but it is the one that best illustrates the book's abysmal quality as a piece of historical research and writing, if it can even be called that.
On the bright side, the book, written throughout in an emotional language bordering on hysteria, contains statements of Bacque's views and opinions that are quite amusing to read. For instance, on the first two pages of the main text he blamed all 20th-century disasters on Darwin, Marx and Freud:
"The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900 was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.
Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for mankind, which had in common the idea that people must forever struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class; in the natural world, individual must compete against individual; and within the individual mind ego must war with libido, or instinct with learned behaviour.
These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent
class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revolutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which
were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century."
The indictment of Darwin is particularly hilarious. Maybe Bacque was a creationist. In any case he expressed the conviction that Protestantism was better than Catholicism in that the latter was more likely to produce totalitarianism:
"What saved the democracies from the fate of the others were, largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state. The people had already freed their individual consciences from the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them
through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension, the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, reciprocal loyalties and violence.
Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia, where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in Germany."
As mostly Protestant Germany did not fit into the good Protestantism vs. bad Catholicism picture, the "curtailing" of the Protestant revolution by "older authoritarian traditions" had to help out.
Another passage on pp. 105-106, while not amusing, raises doubts about Bacque's state of mind at the time of his writing:
"At Neisse in Upper Silesia, the village priest wrote, 'During the first night of the Russian occupation, many of the nuns were raped as many as fifty times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any more resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until finally they collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in homes for the aged, hospitals, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were seventy and eighty years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-treated by these barbarians. And to make matters worse, these atocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares, and the victims were nuns, women and eight-year-old girls. Mothers
were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in front of their brothers, and nuns were raped in front of young boys.' The Russians even went so far as to fuck their victims
when they were already dead. 'Priests who tried to protect the nuns were brutally dragged away, the Russians threatening to shoot them.'35
The sentence "The Russians even went so far as to fuck their victims when they were already dead" is not part of a quote, as the placing of the quote marks shows. It is Bacque's own.
I could provide further examples, but I guess the above is sufficient to illustrate what "Crimes and Mercies" is all about. It is not a historical monograph but a manifesto meant to convey Bacque's somewhat bizarre views and convictions. As a source of historical writing, it is completely worthless. I would like to give it a rating of zero stars or below that, but unfortunately the scale calls for at least one star.
December 8, 2016
Bacque paints what looks like a smart and aggressive criticism of American policy post World War Two; however, he blatantly ignores a wealth of evidence in order to create a conspiracy out of nothing. His efforts would have been more valuable in documenting the legitimate abuses of individual American soldiers. WWII created an unprecedented drop in world production, reflected in starvation and shortage around the world.
January 26, 2013
Interesting quote "the first victim of war is the truth"
Lots of numbers, some speculation but informative
Lots of numbers, some speculation but informative
September 16, 2020
I'd say it's important to know that millions of German civilians were starved to death by the U.S. after WWII. Because of policy, not a lack of food. Not much different from killing Jews (and others) in concentration camps. Just sayin'.
November 28, 2025
It seems that those who do the bad things are not the ones who suffer the most. Why is there so much collateral damage and why don't those who are purportedly the peacemakers try to make peace instead of retribution
May 10, 2023
A continuation of Bacque’s earlier book OTHER LOSSES. In this volume he concentrates on the losses among German civilians who were ethnically cleansed from the former eastern German territories – now mainly western Poland. As in his first book he makes a strong statistical case for large scale deaths. He makes much use of recently available (in the 1990s) Soviet records. Some may question their accuracy, but he also uses contemporary American and German data. The book also has a good summary of the relief efforts led by Herbert Hoover in both world wars.
not-to-read
March 31, 2016Highly controversial
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