Originally Posted by Darcia

If War crimes were not done then war would be a very boring thing

That's one of the most stupid things I've read. War isn't meant to be "fun" or "exciting".

Jack wrote

This was debated over on Compuserves Military Forum when it was the big dog on the block in the 1990s. One gentleman came and brought the same facts and quotes and dates you have. Only he did not know there was an expert historical researcher on the forum at that time. CS Military Forum is nothing but a shell now (ie mainly for right wing Christians) and a lot of the forums and libraries were deleted. But I wish that one file of saved debates in certain year in around 1995-95 was available. It has everything you have listed and the relative facts.

Dear Jack,
I would love if you could give me some info conerning POWs in Germany. The fact that one man said in a forum 10 years ago that it was false is not a strong arguement, at least for me.

Originally Posted by vargsriket

War crimes are terrible in nature, and I know it's hardly an excuse, but what the Soviet soldiers have done in Germany or to the German prisoners, to that I can only say; eye for an eye. What was done to my native country, Ukraine, or Russia, Belorussia, etc, (most of USSR basically) by the Third Reich is an indescribable horror. If I, by some sick twist of fate, would find myself in a similar situation, knowing that my motherland has been raped, pillaged, millions murdered, starved and mutilated and that my family is quite likely has been killed by the Germans, it would be an understatement saying that I'd be pretty angry, and I would not take any prisoners. And, well, winners are rarely judged. If the Nazis had won, their war crimes and genocide would probably be feats of heroism in history books today.
A beaten cliche phrase, yet very true, history is written by the winners. There were a lot of rapes when Russians took Berlin, and a lot of treasures were stolen, etc, and yet the Berlin campaign is regarded as a highly successful battle, etc. Most of allied soldiers took 'souvenirs' home. Not all war crimes were commited by the Germans or Soviets, there were a lot of other allied crimes in fact, on every side. It's never black and white.

Yes, that is true. But there is a big diference, the germans were already conquered ( I was talking about the POWs in Germany once the war was finished, I did not mention Berlin`s battle). By the way, many of this camps were in british & US hands, not in russian`s.

Who si to define a war crime though, in war there is no good or bad, so tio think a war crime can simply be decided by a piece of paper is a little absurd.

I love it, in are AP history class they where talking about that we put the japanes in concentraion camps just as the jews/ homosexuals where. They ACTULLY compaired us to Hittler yes we had those camps in nevada but no we didnt randomly torcher people for stuff like Hittler did...i was mad

We didn't with Government concent, however we all know that they were probably tortured a little,not to the extent of the Jews but they were most likely tortured to some extent.

the bombing of dresden was a big war crime too, atomic bombing of hiroshima also, the atrocities of red army soldiers against civil german populations! but who spoke about that? they show germans always as the typical war ciminals

the winner decides who is war criminal

have u ever seen a winner saying he is guilty of anything??


always the loser is convicted

if Hitler won WW2, Churchill would probably been arrested and convicted for some war crime (they can make it up)

Corocotta, I was wondering if you have read James Bacque's book ''Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II.'' or is your info from a web site such as one from Lt. Col. Gordon "Jack" Mohr?

Bacque's writings, is on a par with Viktor Suvorov's thieses that Russia was on the verge of invading Germany before Barbarossa, and David Irvines theory that no Jews were gassed in WW2.

James Bacque's worst charges were rebutted by Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose in their book.
In 1989, a Canadian publisher issued James Bacque, ''Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II.'' Bacque, a Canadian novelist, charged that US General Dwight Eisenhower, motivated by personal hatred of Germans and partly abetted by the French, caused the death (by neglect or worse) of between 800,000 and 1 and a half million German PoWs in 1945-48. Bacque's theme sold well among certain anti-American groups in Canada, and even more among German Holocaust-deniers: if Americans killed a million helpless German PoWs from idle spite, then Nazi atrocities against Jews (which the deniers claim were exaggerated anyways) don't look so uniquely horrible.
Bischof and Ambrose (and the contributors to their book) shredded Bacque's "one million" claim, highlighting crude mathematical errors and distortion of sources. Among points brought out:


1 year after the last acknowledged German PoW was released by the Soviets (1956), the West German government set up the "Scientific Commission for the History of German Prisoners of War," (sometimes called the "Maschke Commission") . They spent the next 16 years tracking the fate of German PoWs in various countries, publishing their results in 22 books. They noted Western mistreatment of German PoWs in 1945, but, studying the 6 worst camps that held 560,000 PoWs, estimated deaths from 3,000-9000, in the range of 1%.

Bacque was aware of the Maschke studies, and dismissed them as a cover-up arranged between Cold War allies. He also claimed they were not released to the public at large. A limited edition (431 copies) was sold primarily to universities and research libraries.

The German Red Cross in 1974 reported 41,000 missing who were last known on the Western Front. Even if one assumes they all died in US PoW camps, [which is unlikely] and adds the 15,000 PoW dead listed by the US provost marshal , that yields a maximum of 56,000, 1.1% of the peak number of over 5,500,000 PoWs held by the US.

So where were the 1,000,000 plus bodies?


Eisenhower was under careful supervision by both the US and British governments, and could not have carried out a murderous conspiracy without their knowledge. His staff included many British officers, yet Bacque, for whatever personal motives, chose to claim the British were innocent.

Nevertheless, setting aside Bacque's inflated numbers and apparent vendetta against Eisenhower, there were enough truthful individual horror stories about the "Rheinwiesenlager" (USA) and French captivity to give his work some plausibility, especially to those coming across such information for the first time.


Ambrose also said..............

''I also noticed that while the number of German post-war victims started at "about a million", it subsequently rose to 1.7 million and then further up to 9.3 to 13.7 million deaths. This reproductive capacity of the dead, unprecedented among the living, is typical of urban legends disguised as history.
And....
More dramatic [than the story of the fake Hitler diary] was the publication by a Canadian novelist of a book alleging that Eisenhower arranged for the murder of about a million German prisoners of war in 1945. This was one of those conspiracy fabrications which, once believed, could not be shaken. If there was no evidence, that proved how diabolically clever the conspiracy to commit this crime was; when evidence turned up that the alleged dead were mostly German militia (Volkssturm), boys and old men who had been released without formal processing as POWs, the true believers took it as proof that evidence had been fabricated at Eisenhower's orders in 1945 to cover up the crime if it ever came to light in the future. The hundreds of thousands who vanished by the Canadian fiction writer's calculations had neither relatives who would subsequently claim widows' or orphans' benefits or need death certificates to inherit or to remarry; they also failed to leave their bodies behind. These German soldiers evidently came from the moon; and their corpses must have been shipped back there by a process of levitation in the age before the Apollo landings."

I've been reading this thread with some interest (and a grain or six of salt), and I must say, accuracy of any of the "facts" notwithstanding,

Ashes, you are an excellent writer, witty, concise, and entertaining. Keep it up.