James Bacque - Crimes and Mercies

In a subsequent book, Crimes And Mercies (1997), Bacque claimed that Allied policies (particularly Soviet policies) led to the premature deaths of 5.7 million German civilians, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German P.O.W.s due to Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the five years following World War II. The book also details the charity work conducted by the Allies, primarily Canada and the United States, crediting it with saving or improving the lives of up to 500 million people around the world in the post war period. This work was led by Herbert Hoover at the behest of President Truman, and by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, together with Norman Robertson and Mitchell Sharp. This was the largest relief program ever organized, and expressed the ideals of many of the allied combatants.

Crimes and Mercies met with far less hostility from historians, who acknowledge the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians held in Soviet captivity, and possibly up to two million civilians who died in the mass expulsions of Germans from East Prussia, eastern Brandenburg, Pomerania, western Poland, Silesia, the Sudetenland and Romania.