Eisenhower and the German POWs

In 1989, a Canadian publisher released a book that has since become the subject of enormous international controversy. James Bacque's Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II asserts that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as head of the American occupation of Germany in 1945, deliberately starved to death German prisoners of war in staggering numbers. Bacque charges that quite likely up to a million prisoners died, their deaths knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep them alive. In 1990, the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans sponsored an international conference to examine Bacque's allegations. Participants included the six historians whose essays, along with those of Stephen E. Ambrose and Gunter Bischof, make up this volume, which systematically dismantles Bacque's argument. Eisenhower and the German POWs demonstrates numerous glaring errors in Bacque's research and conclusions. The authors show that Bacque misinterpreted documents accounting for the disposition of German POWs; neglected important evidence to the contrary of his theories; failed to take account of the acute disruption of Europe's economy and distribution networks; and ignored the competing needs of millions of refugees, displaced persons, and hungry civilians, as well as the deployment of Allied resources to the Pacific, where the war continued unabated. In addition to exposing Bacque's flawed methodology and illogical conclusions, these essays offer an extremely detailed and broad-ranging examination of European conditions immediately after the cessation of hostilities and of the difficult business of administering the newborn peace and the millions of newly disarmed military personnel.