Holocaust - NOT! - Msg Number: 460887
   From:  Roman Korol 102752,2537
     To:  Mike Curtis 76711,3360
  Forum:  MILFORUM   Sec: 14-Coffee Shop
   Date:  25-Feb-96  11:16:36

 ------------In Reply To---------
 Oh, my, citing James Bacque, are we? His premise was
 thoroughly shot to pieces, as the documents here attest. See
 URL http://www.almanac.bc.ca/cgi-bin/ftp.pl?people/b/bacques.j ames
 for specifics.
 --------------------------------

 PMFJI. I suspect this naively hopeful judgment of yours is rather premature.
 See Bacque on this, at site

 "http://www.kaiwan.com/~ihrgreg/misc/bacque_letter.html".


 For ease of reference, I cite the relevant text below.

 ------------------Text of J. Bacque Letter----------------

    James Bacque Answers a Critic


 James Bacque Answers a Critic
 This is a letter by James Bacque, author of Othe Losses. It appeared in
 The Times Literary Supplement of August 20, 1993.

 Sir,-It is every writer's delight to be attacked in a famous journal
 by a confused critic, so my thanks go to John Keegan for airing his views
 on my work in the TLS on July 23.

 Mr Keegan has been misled by the editors of the book, "Eisenhower and
 the German POWs: Facts against falsehood," which he cites to refute
 me. The principal editor, Stephen E. Ambrose, clearly does not know what
 he thinks from day to day, because he has varied wildly from strong approval
 of my book, "Other Losses," to snarling slanders of me personally, together
 with buffoonish misrepresentations of American army policies. Having kindly
 read my manuscript, he wrote to me as follows: "I am not arguing with the
 basic truth of your discovery...you have the goods on these guys, you have
the
 quotes from those who were present and saw with their own eyes, you have the
 broad outline of a truth so terrible I really can't bear it...you really have
 made a major historical discovery..." It appears from the latest Ambrose
 writings that, indeed, the truth was something he could not bear.

 The same might be said for his co-editor, Gunter Bischof, an Austrian.
 Keegan admires the "scholarship" of Bischof, but Bischof does not know
 a displaced persons camp from a prison camp. He chastises me for
 stating that there was a US Army prison camp at Ebensee in Austria: he
 says that the camp was for DPs. In fact, I have photocopies of General
 Mark Clark's secret report about the condition of prisoners of war in
 the camp, plus US Army medical reports of prisoners in the camp, plus
 eyewitness accounts of the catastrophe among dozens of thousands of
 prisoners, including the manuscript of a diary kept by the priest
 Franz Loidl who ministered to the dying. This manuscript is on deposit
 in the Church History Institute of the Catholic Theological Faculty,
 University of Vienna.

 In the same book so admired by Keegan is a gross error made by Rudiger
 Overmanns, who does not even know the number of prisoners taken by the
 Americans. This was not 3.8 million as he says, but over 6 million,
 according to US Army records in Suitland, Maryland. Of course, this
 error, conveniently for Ambrose and Keegan, apparently diminishes the
 number of lives for which the Americans were responsible.

 Underlying the Ambrose-Bischof book is a series on German prisoners
 edited by Erich Maschke. Underlying that series is no important
 documentation from the US Army archives in Washington. The author of
 the book on the American camps casually omits all the significant
 records that survived the paper purges of the late 1940s. However, for
 an expert judgment on the condition of American camps Mr Keegan may
 rely on the words of an American Lieutenant-Colonel who was in charge
 of the camps in France in 1945. In a report preserved at Fort
 Leavenworth, Kansas, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry W. Allard wrote that
 "the standards of PW camps in the Com Z in Europe compare as only
 slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW
 camps our men tell us about, and unfavourably with those of the
 Germans". Let us remember that after the war, the Americans executed
 Japanese for precisely the crimes referred to by Allard.

 Mr Keegan does not accept the definition of the term "Other Losses"
 given me by Colonel Philip S. Lauben. He is unaware of the US Army
 report discovered by Richard Boylan, a senior archivist at the US
 National Archives, which confirms Lauben. The report plainly states
 that the "Other Loses" category of prisoners meant deaths and escapes.
 And finally, of course, 1,700,000 Germans, plus hundreds of thousands
 of other Europeans, are still missing from their families. This
 astounding fact is normally neglected by the Western apologists,
 unless they can also use it to hammer the Soviets, saying they all
 died in the Gulag. But now that the Soviets are gone, their archives
 are open and the truth at last emerges.

 That truth is simple. The Soviets took some 4.1 million prisoners of
 war east and west, of whom some 600,000 died in slavery. Of the total
 take, some 2.4 million were Germans. Of these, some 450,600 died, the
 rest were sent home. Subtracting the 450,600 dead Germans from the
 missing 1.7 million, we see that some 1.25 million are still not
 accounted for. Of these, probably 100,000 - 200,000 died in Polish,
 Yugoslavian and other camps. The number remaining is very nearly the
 number I said in "Other Losses" of those who died among all
 Europeans taken prisoner in the West.

 I wonder if Mr Keegan will consult the Soviet records before attacking
 them? The surprising thing about the Soviet records is that they are
 extensive, detailed, accurate and incriminating. For instance, on the
 subject of prisoners of war, these archives display a dossier for each
 prisoner, complete with capture records, biographical information,
 legal,labour and medical history, including X-ray photographs, and so
 on. The average is about fifteen pages per person. The dossier of
 Nobel prize winner Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian zoologist contains two
 hundred pages about him and his work. No such records exist anywhere
 in the West. In months of work in the archives of the West, I was
 never able to find the dossier for a single one of the 9 or so million
 prisoners held. Not one. But in the first hour in the NKVD/KGB
 archives, I found the archival boxes containing over 4 million
 personal dossiers. I was allowed to walk up and down the aisles, and
 take down and photocopy any box I chose at random, and did so. I have
 scores of photocopies of those records here in Toronto, and Mr Keegan
 is welcome to consult them. Or he may wish to visit Moscow. He will
 find interesting information beginning with the story of the Japanese
 prisoners. The Japanese authorities have long since determined that
 some 62,000 of their prisoners, chiefly in the Kwantung Army, died in
 the Gulag. The Soviets lied to the Japanese government for years about
 the number of deaths, first saying 3,800 had died, then about 4,000,
 then around 35,000. Finally, the Soviet archives were opened, and
 mirabile dictu, the death certificates were all there, totalling very
 nearly 62,000.

 Do I hear Keegan protesting that Japan is not Germany? On his visit to
 Moscow, he may see for himself the Soviet records showing that the
 prisoners of various nationalities were often mixed together in the
 same camp, so that Japanese were enslaved beside Germans, were all
 treated the same way, and died in approximately the same ratio of much
 the same causes. Letters to me from individual prisoners and records
 at the Hoover Institution in Stanford all show independently of the
 Soviet archives that this was the case in more than thirty major
 camps.

 Let me also remind Keegan that the Poles long accused the Soviets of
 massacring some 14,000 officers at Katyn, but that the Soviet archives
 reveal that the true total was around 21,000. If John Keegan and his
 friends wish to attack the authenticity of the Soviet archives, they
 are going to have to show that the fragmentary documents in the
 Western archives, airy with lacunae and poxed with evasions, are
 superior to these tremendous archives which incriminate its masters
 for a horrifying crime against humanity. What will they say then? That
 the Soviets are hiding something?

 JAMES BACQUE 422 Heath St. E.
 Toronto, Ontario Send all questions and comments to ihrgreg@kaiwan.com

 --------------------------end of Bacque text-----------------------

 Mr. Curtis, what is it in the vapourings at the Nizkor site on the subject of
 the book _Other_Losses_  that so convinces you James Bacque has been "shot to
 pieces"?

Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor