Bordeaux region: James
Bacque searching about French resistance - finding
testimonies about French prisoner of war camps with German
prisoners of war in Buglose
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James Bacque was researching
the saga of a French Resistance hero when he
stumbled on evidence of the Allied death camps.
It took three years for him to believe it
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<He was not looking forward to
meeting Herr Goertz, or, for that matter, even setting
foot on German soil. His father had been gassed, not
fatally, at Ypres during the Great War, and that was
probably the beginning of Jim Bacque's hatred of all
things German — a hatred reconfirmed as he grew from child
to young adult during World War II. As a liberal
intellectual of fifty-some years, he knew that this hatred
was irrational, but he could have kept on living with his
flaw. And would have, had sheer professionalism not driven
hint to meet Hans Goertz in his suburban Bonn town house
in March, 1986.
Just a month before, Bacque, an acclaimed Toronto novelist
(Big Lonely, The Queen Comes to Minnicog, A Man of
talent! ), had set up shop (so to speak) in a
small town in the Bordeaux region of France. His intention
was to produce his first "big international book" on the
wartime resistance exploits of a man named Raoul
Laporterie, who had single-handedly saved more than 1,500
French Jews. Bacque was accompanied by his research
assistant, Jessica Daniel, daughter of his wife's first
cousin and a (then)out-of-work young filmmaker. Daniel
spoke perfect French, and could manage in German. They
rented a villa in Grenade‑sur-l'Adour, a town next door to
Laporterie's and home of his personal archives. It was in
those archives that they came across letters from Hans
Görtz, about half
a dozen in all, part of a large correspondence from people
Laporterie had saved. But Görtz was not aim. Görtz was —
or had been — a foot soldier in the Wehrmacht.
They conscientiously contacted Görtz, and he agreed
to see them. Speaking in French, with Daniel translating,
Goertz told the story of how he had been captured by the
Americans near Bonn, in the spring of 1945, and handed
over to the French — shipped first to Rennes, a notorious
(as Bacque and Daniel would discover) camp in Brittany,
and then south to Buglose, in the Bordeaux
region. Then he told of how Laporterie plucked him and
another prisoner out of Buglose in the spring of 1946 and
put them to work in his tailoring operation. The French,
in the process of rebuilding their ravaged nation, were
encouraged to use defeated German troops any way they saw
fit; the camps, then, were set up as slave- labor pools —
just as the infamous German camps had been. But
Laporterie was not shopping for slaves. "As soon as I saw
that man's face," Goertz said, "1 knew I was saved."
Bacque thought Goertz was exaggerating. But after the
tape recorder was turned off and the white wine was
poured, Goertz leaned forward anxiously.
Camp of prisoners of war Buglose in the region
of Bordeaux, the entrance gate [1]
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Map with South of France with the prisoner of war
camps from Bordeaux Region down to Marseille [2]
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"Monsieur
Laporterie is my friend," he said. "I am saying that
because he saved my life."
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THAT'S ALL THEY REALLY NEEDED
TO SUPPRESS: THE SCALE OF ATROCITY, THE TOTAL OF
DEATHS, THE BIG NUMBER" |
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"What did he save you from?" asked
Bacque, imagining a near-drowning or something similar.
"Twenty-five per cent of the men in that
camp died in one month," Görtz replied.
"What did
they die of Daniel asked, and Goertz answered,
"Starvation, dysentery, and disease." Bacque
automatically translated the percentage: at that rate,
every prisoner in Buglose would have been dead in four
months.
Görtz's
words had conjured an indelible image in Bacque's mind —
sick, hopeless men slumped on benches behind barbed wire —
though surely, Bacque thought, it pertained only to one
small camp in one small French village. Within weeks of
the interview, however, Bacque had begun to think of the
camp story as a possible chapter in his Laporterie book.
His motives were not entirely pure: he'd been a publisher
before becoming a novelist, he knew that "scandalous
revelations" sold books.
As soon as Bacque started to ask questions, he started to
get ugly answers. A Buglose man named Jean Marc, for
example, a boy when the camps were established, recalled
prisoners tumbling dead out of boxcars when a train
brought than from another camp, and others dropping and
dying on the two-kilometer march between train station and
barbed-wire enclosure. Buglose, then, had not been the
only French camp where prisoners were maltreated.
Spreading his net wider, Bacque collected more eyewitness
accounts, from villagers, former camp guards, and any
survivors he could trace.
Bacque always pressed his informants for the numbers: "The
thing the Western mind loves, and uses to pull things
together, is statistics." Under his cross-examination,
survivors (sonie from burial crews) and guards would
estimate how many men had been in a given camp, and how
many died there over, say, a month. Out came Bacque's
calculator. Uncannily, the annual death rate kept falling
within a few points of thirty per cent. But harder
statistics seemed impossible to come by. Despite intensive
local searches, Bacque couldn't discover how many
prisoners Buglose — or any of the other five camps in the
area — had officially held, or how many actual deaths had
been reported. Files that should have held camp records
were empty.
Research in French military
archive in Vincennes - detection of French reports about
Eisenhower's death camps in Dietersheim in Germany
Vincennes near Paris at Seine River with the castle, and
with an important military archive [3]
In April,
Bacque and Daniel spent three days in the French
Military Archives at Vincennes, a Paris
suburb. They still had no luck in finding prisoner tallies
but they did come upon some contemporary descriptions by
horrified French officers and civilian leaders. The most
shocking — "like Buchenwald," "peopled with living
skeletons" — concerned not camps in the Bordeaux region,
or anywhere else in France, but a group clustered around
Dietersheim, in West Germany, that in late July of 1945
had only just been turned over to the French. Before that,
and from their inception, the Dietersheim camps, like 200
other camps in Germany, had been run by the Americans.
As it turned out, there had been reports in the Paris
press (which Bacque eventually tracked down) about the
desperate state of prisoners handed over to the French by
the Americans.
May 1986: Federal Archives in
Koblenz: Eisenhower telegrams - also copies from
Washington - anthology of Böhme about prisoners of wars
- but indicating only 2% death rate per year
German National Archives in Koblenz [4]
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Mass murderer Eisenhower with "U.S." flag and with
a globe [5]
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Ironically,
Bacque first learned of these in a denial — a message from
General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the
Allied forces — that he came across in May at the West German
National Archives (Bundesarchiv) at Koblenz.
He and Daniel also discovered here that most oldie
"official story" of what took place in occupied Germany
immediately after the surrender had been written for the
Germans by the American military. When they asked for
prisoner-of-war material, they were given photocopies of
army documents sent over from Washington. "There was,"
Bacque remarks, "a great deal to show what bastards the
French were."
Book by Kurt W. Böhme: "German prisoners of war in
American hands"
(orig. German: "Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in amerikanischer
Hand"), cover [6]
Then Daniel
came across a series of histories, commissioned in the
1960s by the West German government, that chronicled the
fortunes of German prisoners in the two world wars. Four
volumes dealt with Second World War prisoners and, from
what she could decipher, said specifically of those taken
by the western Allies that conditions were often
difficult, but that the death rate was under two per cent
[per year] — not much greater than that of the average
town in peacetime. "My heart fell," Bacque says. "I looked
at these books, all done with Teutonic thoroughness, and
I said to myself, you've been wasting your time."
But because his German was nonexistent and Daniel's merely
adequate, and because the mortality rate flew in the face
of his own findings, Bacque photocopied the relevant
sections and sent them off to a friend in Frankfurt who
was truly German-English bilingual. A few weeks later,
when he [Bacque] got the translations, his suspicions were
confirmed. According to Bacque, the author, Kurt
W. Böhme, "quite plainly
described, in anecdote and in narrative, all the
conditions of an atrocity." But then he stated baldly
that no mass deaths had occurred, and supplied —
unsupported by statistics — a death rate of under two per
cent. Böhme had got his stories, of course, in pretty much
the same way Bacque was getting his — by asking the people
who'd been there. But where had he got his number?
Paris: report about German
prisoners of war by General Buisson indicating 2% death
rate and many enigmas and lies - 9 million German
prisoners of war - and 1.7 million are missing
The answer to that came a few weeks later in Paris, when
Daniel went out and made "one of our most important
discoveries," a typed report on the French handling of
prisoners written by a French general named Buisson. As
Bacque pored over the photocopy two things became obvious:
first, Buisson's manuscript had been Böhme's source for
the death rate; and second, the manuscript, which was
apparently an internal government document, was not only
self-serving but riddled with inconsistencies and worse.
Paris with Eiffel tower in 1937 [7]
|
Charles de Gaulle at a radio speech on December 4,
1945 [8]
There is not
known any protest of De Gaulle that German
prisoners of war should get a better treatment
from 1945 to 1948.
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From this
point on, Bacque was convinced that there had been a
deliberate cover-up, achieved in part by manipulation of
the statistics so that no-one could put together a
coherent picture of total deaths in relation to total POW
populations. The scale of the die-off in the camps:
"That's the only thing they needed to suppress," he points
out. In fact, until he shifted his investigations to
archives and libraries in the United States, half a year
after the Goertz revelation, Bacque was not even sure how
many camps had been created in the French and American
zones of Germany, plus France itself: the answer was about
1,800. Nor was he sure how many German prisoners had been
rounded up: he was astounded to learn that the Western
Allies had captured more than 9- million, of whom 5.25-
million had been taken by the Americans in north-western
Europe. It was later still that he came upon another fact:
about 1.7-million German soldiers were never accounted for
after the war. In the West, it had been convenient to
blame the Russians. (The Iron Curtain foreclosed on any
particular need to furnish proof.) But by the time he
discovered the number, Bacque was already certain of a
different fate for at least a million of the missing men.
German prisoners of war getting soup in a Russian
prisoner of war camp after 1945 [9]
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Rhine meadow camp, 10 hours queue in form of an
"U" for getting one cup of water in the sun in
summer 1945 [10] - there was no soup
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It was later still that he came upon
another fact: about 1.7-million German soldiers were never
accounted for after the war. In the West, it had been
convenient to blame the Russians. (The Iron Curtain
foreclosed on any particular need to furnish proof.) But by
the time he [Bacque] discovered the number, Bacque was
already certain of a different fate for at least a million
of the missing men.
Washington:
weekly reports about German prisoners of war under the
terrorist regime of Eisenhower - real death rate of 33%
per year
As August
switched into September of 1986, Bacque and Daniel (her
final appearance in the drama) drove down to Washington
on what Bacque thought of as a fool's errand: perhaps he
could find American confirmation of the atrocity he still
thought of as mainly French. On the very first day of
research in Washington, Bacque discovered "other losses."
"National
Archives" of criminal "U.S.A." in Washington
D.C. [11] where Bacque found the weekly reports
about "other losses"
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An emaciated
German prisoner of war sitting topless on the
ground searching gray clothes of died German
POWs in a Rhine meadow camp [12] - NO striped
clothes for detainees of German concentration
camps can be seen
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At the United States National Archives on
Pennsylvania Avenue, Bacque opened a file of reports titled
HEADQUARTERS/ UNITED STATES FORCES/EUROPEAN THEATER/GI
DIVISION which proved to be the U.S. Army's official weekly
Prisoner of War and Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF)
ledgers for a short period in the autumn of 1945. They laid
out, by military district, the number of prisoners on hand
at the start of the week, the number acquired or
transferred, the number discharged, and — before giving
the closing balance — the number in one other category:
OTHER LOSSES. Bacque had seen a similar expression in French
documents: "Perdus pour Raisons Diverses." There wasn't much
doubt in his mind that both phrases meant deaths.
And the death rates? "I could do the numbers in my head.
Roughly 5,000 POWs (OTHER LOSSES) in a week, that's about a
quarter- million a year, and you look over to the other side
(PREVIOUS ON HAND) and you see there were about 700,000 on
hand so life expectancy was under three years." Or an annual
death rate of over thirty-three per cent. "And the line of
totals above, the DEF’s: 13,000 'other losses' in a week.
The 370,000 guys in those camps would all be dead in less
than eight months."
Bacque had accumulated evidence against the U.S. camps along
the way, but had neglected it on the assumption that no
scandal could possibly have been concealed, and that his
evidence would he explained away somewhere in the record.
With the discovery of OTHER LOSSES, however, his suspicions
shifted and refocused on the Americans. The phrase itself
became the title of his book.
Criminal "American" soldiers piling German dead
bodies on a trailer in a Rhine meadow camp [13]
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Headline: Ernest Hemingway shot 122 German
prisoners of war in summer 1945 [14]
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Toronto: classifying data -
military historian Fisher - documents from Eisenhower with
the new DEF status - Supreme Commander Philip S. Lauben
confirming Bacque's research
Back in Toronto, Bacque started on the Laporterie manuscript
(today completed and awaiting publication). At the same
time, though, he began to follow through on an idea that had
come to him in Washington. He had made a list of American
officers who had been involved with post-war German
prisoners. Now he began to write letters, sixty, eighty, a
hundred letters. He shipped them in bundles to the U.S.
Army's locater service. They brought only a handful of
replies, but two would turn out to be of inestimable
significance. The first led Bacque by a roundabout route to
Colonel Ernest Fisher, a former senior historian at the
United States Army Center for Military History who, as a
young lieutenant, had served under the supreme commander of
the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower.
Toronto with islands with sunshine [15] |
Military historian Colonel Ernest F. Fisher,
portrait, he died on March 21, 2013 [16]
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Bacque and
Fisher first met in February of 1987, and, once presented
with Bacque's evidence, the historian admitted that he
wasn't surprised: no, he had never witnessed atrocities in
the post-war camps, but he had always harbored
suspicions. Calling up all his expertise, Fisher plunged
into the project.
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Bacque assumed not only that
the U.S. Army had behaved well in victory but
that the Geneva Convention protected all
Wehrmacht troops who surrendered.
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It was Fisher's research, in fact, that
first began to implicate Eisenhower himself: a discovery
of Eisenhower's initials on a cable dated March 10, 1945,
proving he had probably drafted — certainly had full
knowledge of — the proposal to redesignate German
prisoners of war (protected by the Geneva Convention) as
"disarmed enemy forces" (not protected). From this point,
Bacque and Fisher found more and more evidence — initialed
memoranda, cablegrams, minutes of meetings — that put the
supreme commander (who openly despised Germans) in a
position of knowing responsibility for the camps.
The second vital response to Bacque's inquiry letters
arrived in Toronto while he was in Washington connecting
with Fisher. It came from a retired colonel, Philip
S. Lauben, who had actually been chief of the
German Affairs Branch for SHAH' — Supreme Headquarters,
Allied Expeditionary Force - in charge of repatriation of
prisoners and transfers to the French. In March, Bacque
met Lauben and unfurled his documents. "What does 'other
losses' mean?" Bacque asked as they reached that
subheading. It was a crucial question. The ledgers were
hard evidence — but only if his assumption could be
verified.
“It means deaths and escapes," Lauben said.
"How many escapes? Bacque. asked.
Very, very minor," replied. Less than one in 1,000 Basque
would eventually learn.
Lauben went on to confirm as much of Bacque's research as
he had direct knowledge of, and that was a great deal. At
the end of the day, he said wearily, “The shit is really
going to hit the fan now”
Further proofs: medical table
in National Archives in Maryland - invented death rates
are much too low
In fact,
though, the quest was not over. A challenge from a
doubting historian whose imprimatur Bacque had sought
forced him to Admit that he needed more than a single
“smoking gun.” And he found one.
In a of depot the National Archives in
Suitland, Maryland, in a room so packed that
his shoulders brushed shelves on each side as he eased
down the aisles, Bacque found two tables reprinted from a
medical survey of 80,583 German prisoners held in US camps
along along the Rhine in the period May June 1945
Suitland, Maryland, National Archives of criminal
"U.S.A." [17]
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Suitland, Maryland, National Archives with narrow
racks with documents [18]
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One table,
incomplete and lacking a total, ranked the chief causes of
death from disease, by actual fatalities in the camps; the
other extrapolated an annual death rate from all causes
for the camps population as a whole. Something was wrong:
the medical survey had been done over a six-week period,
but this second table, too, gave no actual total of deaths
for the six weeks — just the projection for the year in
each category. The projection for deaths from disease, for
example, was 2,754. Overall, the table yielded a death
rate in the 3.5-percent-per annum range.
That night, and for at least a fortnight thereafter,
Bacque puzzled and pored over his photocopy of the report,
suspecting the numbers had been fiddled to lower the death
rate, but not certain how to prove it. His inspiration,
when it Came, was to subject the projected annual deaths
to the most obvious form of backtracking: divide by
fifty-two and multiply by six, to arrive at the number the
doctors must originally have reported, that is, the actual
deaths in the six-week period. He discovered, quite
simply, that in no category could an authentic — whole —
number have been the basis for the projection. How could
the doctors have reported, for example, .317,76923 actual
deaths from disease: The annual projection of 2,754 seemed
to have been pulled out of the air.
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Official
DEF/POW balance sheet for the week ending
September 8, 1945, shows the DEFs totaled by
military district, the POWs appended as a
separate tally.
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In fact, it hadn't been. Bacque and
Fisher later found a complete version of the first table:
there had been 2,754 deaths from disease in the six weeks
of the original survey. The proper projection for the year
should have been just under 24,000 deaths — among just
over 50,000 prisoners.
The book "Other Losses" is
not edited in the "U.S.A." - Eisenhower is too popular
yet
Bacque's quest took three years of his life and something
like $100,000 of his own money, besides costing him the
old luxury of hating Germans — and some other illusions.
Even though he scaled down his indictment of Eisenhower
after Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose spent
two-and-a-half days On a critique of his manuscript, the
war hero and popular president still comes off badly.
Which, Bacque believes, is the major reason why there has
been no American sale of Other Losses . At this writing,
Other Losses has only two publishers, one German and one
Canadian.
Book by James Bacque "Other Losses" of 1989 [19]
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Book by James Bacque "Other Losses" with it's
German translation "Der geplante Tod" [20]
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James Bacque, portrait [21]
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As for Hans
Görtz: when he learned that the story he told on that late
winter night in 1986 had become more than an anecdote in
the life of his friend, Raoul Laporterie, Goertz
steadfastly refused to have anything more to say. Bacque's
letters went unanswered, his telephone calls were refused.
One March night, drinking white wine with Jim Bacque and
Jessica Daniel and thinking back forty years, Goertz had
called up his ugliest memory. For whatever reasons, he
would not do so again.>
