Free Crimes and Mercies by James Bacque

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