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From: "Geoffrey Sinclair" 
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Subject: Re: Jew Protest Messerschmitt Plaque
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 16:10:34 +1000
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"John Falstaff"  wrote in message 
news:6PmdnfUiS_s4_8LZ4p2dnA@comcast.com...
>
> "Dan"  wrote in message 
> news:8FI7g.22164$fG3.14022@dukeread09...
>> John Falstaff wrote:
>>> "Geoffrey Sinclair"  wrote in message 
>>> news:445f0628$0$3297$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au...
>>  
>>>>
>>>> Try reading the refutation of the book,
>>>>
>>>> Title:  Eisenhower and the German POWs : facts against falsehood /
>>>> edited by Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose.
>>>> Publisher:  Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1992.
>>>> Description:  xvii, 258 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
>>>
>>> No such book appears in the catalog of my local library, which includes 
>>> not only the books it owns but all the titles their computer system is 
>>> aware of.
>>>
>>> How about supplying a source that anyone has actually heard of?
>>>
>>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807117587/103-6942245-5831869?v=glance&n=283155
>
> Thanks for the link. Here's a review from that site:
> ____________
>
>      Reviewer: Donauschwab (West-By-God-Virginia) - See all my reviews
>
> My ancestors left Germany in the mid 1700's to settle in eastern parts of 
> the Austro-Hungarian empire. Through wars, Mongol and Turkish attacks we 
> hung on.
> In 1945 we were fleeing ahead of the Russian armies as they destroyed 
> everything in their path, until meeting the American armies heading east. 
> Many in our village were shot or hauled off to Siberia as slave labor. As 
> a youngster, I experienced the poverty and lack of food millions of 
> refugees suffered.
> Readers should be aware of the inherent bias of both Ambrose and Bischof 
> as they are employees of the Eisenhower Center. In a subsequent book, 
> CRIMES AND MERCIES, Drawing on newly released secret Soviet 
> documents,Bacque refutes many of Bishop and Ambrose's objections.This is a 
> must read as it completes the picture of the destruction and rebuild of 
> Germany.
> ____________
>
> So much for Bishop and Ambrose, eh?

Title:  Eisenhower and the German POWs : facts against falsehood /
edited by Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose.
Publisher:  Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1992.
Description:  xvii, 258 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Other details:  Papers presented at a symposium held Nov. 1990 at
the Eisenhower Center, University of New Orleans.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [245]-249) and index.
ISBN:  0807117587 (cloth : alk. paper)

There are 8 papers in the book, by surname the authors are
Ambrose, Villa, Cowdrey, Trent, Overmans, Steininger, Barker
and Bischof

> Funny that you neglected to mention that they are employees of the 
> Eisenhower Center.

Amazing that someone does not know Ambrose's career.

No go look at the book, it is the proceedings of a conference called
to discuss Bacque's book.  Editor in this case means the person charged
with collecting the papers presented and then publishing them, no text
changes.  No go look up the other authors.

http://www.cbmh.ca/archive/00000202/01/cbmhbchm_v7n2cowdrey.pdf

For example.

> Or that in his later book, Bacque refutes their objections.

Ah I see, having found 1 person who says Bacque refutes their objections
you decide that is enough.  So all we need to do is find 1 person that says
the Nazis did mass murder and you are happy as well?

Know what the later book tries to do?  Claim a major famine occurred in
post war Germany, that no one noticed until the lone researcher (trademark)
came along.  Bacque had to go double or nothing and came up with nothing.

After all Bacque is trying to say between 1 in 10 Germans as a whole
to 1 in 4 Germans under US jurisdiction died just after WWII and no
one noticed.

Here are the civilian death tolls per thousand people for
east and west Germany, the eastern figures are from the
East German 1955 yearbook.

Year / West / East
1946 / 12.3 / 22.9
1947 / 11.6 / 19.0
1948 / 10.3 / 15.2
1949 / 10.2 / 13.4
1950 / 10.3 / 11.7

In numerical terms this meant the West German death toll was
around 550,000 in 1945 including military deaths, and it declined
to 479,373 in 1948 before beginning to rise.  See Eisenhower
and the PoWs.

Usual Crimes and Mercies refutation follows,

http://www.ghi-dc.org/bulletinF98/bulletin_f98

"Fact or Fiction? The Historical Profession and James Bacque"

Roundtable discussion at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies
Association, Salt Lake City, October 8-11, 1998. Sponsored by the
GHI. Participants: Günter Bischof (University of New Orleans),
Dewey A. Browder (Austin Peay State University), Wilfried
Mausbach (GHI), Hans-Jürgen Schröder (University of Giessen),
Christof Strauß (University of Heidelberg), Richard D. Wiggers
(Georgetown University).

The topic of discussion for this panel centered around James
Bacque's allegation, made in his recent, controversial book
Crimes and Mercies, that American authorities deliberately
starved to death as many as nine million German civilians
after World War II.

Wilfried Mausbach (GHI) challenged Bacque's contention that
the infamous Morgenthau Plan informed American actions. He
demonstrated first that the notion of turning Germany into a
huge "farm" was never part of American postwar planning;
second, that the United States's occupation directive (JCS 1067)
was not cast in Morgenthau's mold; and third, that the negative
elements of JCS 1067 were deliberately postponed, and
thereby in effect dismissed, by Military Government officers in
the field. Instead of evaluating the available evidence, James
Bacque's dramaturgy pits villains against heroes and surrenders
scholarly differentiation to populism.

Günter Bischof (University of New Orleans) viewed Bacque's
thesis as part of the trend toward a "paranoid style" in writing
recent history. This style is characterized by five elements: the
image of a huge conspiracy, a self-bestowed duty to save
civilization from apocalypse, a manichean worldview of absolute
good versus absolute evil, the conviction that traitors make history,
and the amassing of evidence to prove a preconceived thesis.
Bischof found traces of all these elements in Bacque's writing,
and he bemoaned the publishing industry's zest for "conspiracy history."

Christof Strauß (University of Heidelberg) examined Bacque's
thesis that approximately one million German POWs perished in
American and French camps by taking a close look at two
Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTEs) in Heilbronn.
Strauß found that conditions in these camps indeed did not meet
the requirements of the Geneva Convention of 1929. However, to
interpret this as evidence of a centrally planned and implemented
policy of starvation neglects overall conditions in Germany and
Europe in the wake of the war and overestimates to a considerable
extent the occupation authorities' scope of action. Strauß proved
that, contrary to Bacque's assertion, the Americans did allow aid to
be delivered to the inmates by representatives of the German
churches, and the International Red Cross also was allowed to visit
the camps. Moreover, between May and December 1945 some
300,000 POWs passed through the Heilbronn PWTEs, and death
lists show that only 283 of them died. This seems to indicate not
only that Bacque's research was poor but also that his overall
estimates of deaths are way too high.

Dewey A. Browder (Austin Peay State University) corroborated this
information. He showed that Bacque manipulated statistics by
adding expellees and repatriated POWs to an early 1946 census
that actually already included more than 1.5 million expellees and
repatriates in addition to the unrepatriated POWs. In counting these
people twice, Bacque finds that there should have been nearly 74
million people in Germany in 1950 and cries mass murder when
that year's census falls short by 6 million. Professor Browder
explained that he personally pointed out this mistake to Bacque
while the Canadian author was revising his manuscript for
publication in English. Bacque, however, failed to correct his information.

Finally, Richard D. Wiggers (Georgetown University) provided an
analysis of eyewitness accounts by authors who were neither
Germans nor U.S. Military Government employees. He found that
these third-party observers reported and often criticized a stern
allied policy toward the German people. Thus, if there was, as
Bacque alleges, a conspiracy to hide the truth, it must have failed
miserably. Moreover, a close, comprehensive, and unbiased
reading of independent eyewitness accounts suggests that a
mass death of millions of Germans by starvation did not occur in
postwar Germany.

The lively discussion, moderated by Hans-Jürgen Schröder
(University of Giessen), addressed James Bacque's motivation
for writing fiction disguised as fact. It was pointed out that Bacque
obviously really believes he has discovered something real and is
encouraged by people in Germany who suffered after 1945 and
who feel that their experience of victimization has gotten short
shrift in the history of this period. However, his neglect of evidence
suggests either that he is unable to acknowledge criticism or that
he willfully ignores information in an effort to cash in on a
sensationalist thesis. The latter supposition led participants to
discuss the quixotic nature of efforts by professional historians to
challenge populist histories promoted by a sensation-driven
publishing industry. Some also wondered whether even the most
ludicrous claims merit consideration. There seemed to be an
overall agreement, however, that historians have a duty to correct
gross distortions and refute wild allegations."

Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email. 

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