Crimes and Mercies - James Bacque
The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950
Publication Year : 2013
Language : English
More than nine million Germans died as a result of Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the first five years after the Second World War - a total far in excess of the figures actually reported. That these deaths occurred at all is still being concealed and denied, especially by Western governments.
Following the world-wide success of his earlier book, Other Losses, which documented the deaths of about one million Axis prisoners in Allied camps after the war, James Bacque flew to Moscow to work in the newly opened KGB archives. The first English-speaking writer to gain access to these files, he found new proof of the mass deaths of prisoners. He is also the first writer to publish recently declassified information from the renowned Hoover Institution in California. Some other important American papers were specially declassified for this book.
Under the Morgenthau Plan and its successors, Germans were prevented from growing sufficient food to feed themselves, goods were stolen from them at levels far beyond the war reparations agreed between the Allies, and private charity was forbidden. And in May 1945, US General Eisenhower – who had publicly promised to abide by the Geneva Convention – illegally forbade German civilians to take food to prisoners starving to death in American camps. He threatened the death penalty for anyone found feeding prisoners.
One quarter of the country was annexed, and about fifteen million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over two million of these people died either on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere, Children were enslaved for years in these camps, and the majority of them also died.
However, while this titanic revenge was taking place, Western leaders strongly opposed to the betrayal of Christian ideals were desperately seeking to bring help to the Germans, as part of a policy to aid starving people around the world, Herbert Hoover, US Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his assistant Norman Robertson together created the largest charity in history, a food-aid program that saved hundreds of millions of lives around the world during three years of struggle against famine. Never before had such revenge been known. Never before had such compassion been shown. Crimes and Mercies is the extraordinary story of what happened to these people and why: a book that rips the mask from a suppressed atrocity and exposes our breathtaking capacity for kindness and cruelty.
The author
James Bacque is a former book editor and reporter. He is now a successful novelist and lives in Toronto. It was in 1986, while researching a book on Raoul Laporierie, a French Resistance hero, that he stumbled on evidence of Allied death camps. Other Losses, his highly acclaimed investigation into the deaths of German prisoners of war after 1945, was the product of
that discovery. Crimes and Mercies, which expands upon this earlier book, is his third work of non-fiction.
