Free Crimes and Mercies by James Bacque Page B

arose in our western democracies, raged for years, and was denied to history, is the theme and intended value of this book.

    * See Other Losses , Little, Brown edition, 2004, p. xxv.
    * See Chapter 8, p. 172.

F OREWORD
    Injustice has been with us since time immemorial, and will persist for as long as mankind exists. Two thousand years ago the Romans noted a thought that even then was a platitude: homo homini lupus. Man is indeed a wolf to other men.
    The seventeenth century experienced the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ (1618–48) with its incredible massacres of the civilian population. In Germany alone, one-third of the population perished in the name of religion. But Europe had seen many other genocides, fratricidal wars and natural disasters. We remember the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, launched by Pope Innocent III in 1209 against the Manichaean heretics of southern France, during which entire cities were exterminated in the name of the ‘true faith’ (over 20,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in Beziers alone), accompanied by the establishment of the Inquisition, the widespread practice of torture to obtain confessions and/or recantations, and culminating in innumerable butcheries of recalcitrant heretics and the ‘ Bûcher de Montségur ’ in 1248, where more than 200 leaders of the Cathar hierarchy were burned at the stake.
    War, famine and pestilence have also punished the twentieth century. Indeed, the two so-called World Wars of the first half of the century could very well be called our ‘thirty years’ war’, beginning in 1914 with the murder of the Austrian heir to the throne in Sarajevo and ending with the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
    James Bacque gives us an account of crimes and mercies in the twentieth century. How have we lived up to our democratic principles, to our Judeo-Christian values of love, solidarity and forgiveness? Bacque shows us that, in war as in peace, suffering is personal , not collective. He shows us the dreadful statistics of the calamities inflicted by the victors on the Germans after the Second World War, but he asks us to personalize that pain, to see that behind statistics there is flesh and blood, lest we too become as indifferent as statistics.
    The facts are so horrifying that they are hard to comprehend. The work I have done myself in The German Expellees and Nemesis at Potsdam revealed the horrifying statistics behind the mass expulsions of fifteen million Germans from the Eastern Provinces and the Sudetenland into the Occupied Zones in 1945–50. At least 2.1 million are known to have died. Chancellor Adenauer himself wrote in his memoirs that six million of them died. And the (West) German government under Adenauer in 1950 determined that 1.4 million prisoners of war had never returned to their homes. 1 They are missing to this day. Bacque revealed what had happened to them in his book Other Losses (1989). And now he uncovers evidence that as many as five million Germans may have starved to death while under Allied government after the war. These figures are so shocking that he has sent the whole manuscript to a world-famous epidemiologist, whom I met when he was working in Geneva as a special consultant to the World Health Organization. He is Dr Anthony B. Miller, Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto. Miller has read the whole work, including the documents, and checked the statistics, which, he says, ‘confirm the validity of [Bacque’s] calculations and show that slightly more than five million deaths of German civilians occurred in Germany as a whole during the post-war period through to the census of 1950, over and above the reported deaths. These deaths appear to have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the semi-starvation food rations that were all that were available to the majority of the German population during this time period.’
    After the fall of the