Controversy
In his 1989 book Other Losses, James Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower deliberately caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. Bacque charges that some of these deaths were DEF designated soldiers that could receive harsh treatment because they did not fall within the Geneva Convention protections. Stephen Ambrose, at the time director of the Eisenhower center at the University of Orleans, also organized a conference of eight British, American, and German historians. The result of this conference was a group of papers by these eight historians published in 1992 as the book Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood which strongly disputes virtually every claim in James Bacque's book, including his categorization of "other losses", their purported origination, Bacque's description of the DEF designation decision, Bacque's oral histories, Bacque's methodologies and Bacque's analysis of World War II documents. Even with regard to the poor conditions of prisoner camps highlighted by Bacque which the panel members agree existed, the New Orleans panel concluded that Bacque raised no new or novel issues that had not been raised since the Maschke Commission findings of the 1960s and 1970s, and studies thereafter that had also chronicled those conditions in far more specific detail.
Current academic consensus regarding the post-war death rate in Allied hands can—mainly based on work such as Ambrose's Eisenhower and the German POWs—be summed up in historian Niall Ferguson's words that Bacque's "calculations grossly exaggerate both the number of Germans the Americans captured and their mortality", although he also notes that "the mortality rate for German POWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for those who surrendered to the British", but that the United States total mortality rate was under 1% and better than every other country in World War II except for the British. Ambrose did concede: "we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable".
Read more about this topic: Disarmed Enemy Forces
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