Stephen Ambrose

Start Free Trial

Eisenhower and the German POWs

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: A review of Eisenhower and the German POWs, in Journal of American History, Vol. 80, No. 4, March, 1994, p. 1526.

[In the following review, Ziemke concludes that Eisenhower and the German POWs does not adequately explain the deaths of German POWs in Allied prison camps.]

World War II as specialty has an occupational hazard: It attracts the attention of persons who create sensational hypotheses for which they lack validating evidence. In 1987, I received a call from a James Bacque, who said he believed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly a million, German POWs in American hands after the German surrender. Had I come across information that would substantiate such a charge? If not, did I know where it was to be found? I told him I had none and most seriously doubted that any existed.

In 1989, a book appeared bearing the title Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II. The author, James Bacque, accused Eisenhower of having surreptitiously—by means of “winks and nods”—created a “lethal” DEF (disarmed enemy forces) status that denied the Germans their POW rights and subjected a million of them to death by starvation and neglect. To prove his case, Bacque assumed that “other losses,” a term military personnel officers routinely used in their bookkeeping, was a euphemism invented to conceal the deaths. Other Losses drew little attention in the United States, some in Canada and England, and more in Germany, where it was simultaneously published in German.

On February 24, 1991, in an article in the New York Times Book Review, Stephen E. Ambrose, director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, summarized Bacque's most egregious falsifications and distortions and announced that the Eisenhower Center had assembled an international committee of historians “to get at the full truth.” The present volume is the result: eight essays by two German, one Austrian, one Canadian, and four American scholars.

To let the “facts,” as the subtitle indicates, confute Bacque, the committee assembled a mass of German and American evidence against his contention that a million prisoners died—or could have died—because they were denied adequate rations even though no actual food shortage existed. Regrettably, in doing so it has all but lost sight of the alleged perpetrator, Eisenhower. Bacque's sole objective, despite his protestations of sympathy for the POWs, was to enroll Eisenhower in the ranks of mass murderers alongside Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. The DEF category was his “smoking gun,” and to it the committee has given a bare nine pages.

Bacque understandably does not look beyond Eisenhower for the origins of the DEF category. The committee rightly ascribes it to the London-based, American-British-Soviet European Advisory Committee (EAC) but draws an astounding conclusion: “the decisions that fated hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to languish for months and even years in Allied camps were not Eisenhower's but Allied occupation policy forged in a spirit of severity toward those who had plunged Europe into unfathomable misery.” In short, the DEFs were victims, not of Eisenhower, but of his superiors’ vengeful policy.

Had the committee given the EAC decision somewhat closer attention it could have ascertained that the Americans in the EAC harbored no desire to see German soldiers “languishing” in camps (as those whom the Soviet Union declared POWs in fact did) but regarded the DEF category as a means of assuring an early and rapid disbandment of the German forces. Having made that observation, the committee might have been able as well to deal more coherently with events after the surrender and to achieve a decisive judgment on the Bacque volume. As the matter stands, however, the prospective reader will find this search for “truth” as much perplexing as enlightening.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Eisenhower and the German POWs

Next

D-Day: New Book Pays Tribute to the Heroism of Individual Soldiers