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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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100289
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10028900.020
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1990-09-18
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NATION, Page 19Ike's Revenge?A new book alleges deliberate U.S. mistreatment of POWs
Along the Rhine in 1945, barbed-wire fences enclosed tightly
packed masses of German prisoners of war. Without tents, they dug
crude foxholes and hoarded scraps of cardboard against the bitter
spring weather. Without food or water, some resorted to eating
grass and drinking their urine. Many died of dysentery, pneumonia,
exhaustion, brought on by the cruel neglect of their American
captors.
So alleges Toronto author James Bacque in Other Losses
(Stoddart Publishing), a controversial Canadian best seller that
claims at least 960,000 German soldiers died in U.S. and French
army camps in the final months of World War II and afterward. They
were victims of deliberate neglect, says Bacque, because Supreme
Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower withheld sustenance
from a despised enemy.
The U.S. Army Center of Military History has issued a terse
statement that it "does not accept" this interpretation, although
historians at the center have read only excerpts. The Army has not
commented.
Bacque, 60, whose past works have all been novels, points to
a March 10, 1945, message from Eisenhower proposing that German
prisoners be deemed "disarmed enemy forces" rather than prisoners
of war, since providing the level of rations assured for POWs by
the Geneva Convention "would prove far beyond the capacity of the
Allies." Ike's request was granted, and adequate food, water and
shelter were withheld from the prisoners. Alone among the Western
Allies, the U.S. refused to permit Red Cross inspections of its 200
camps.
Bacque's recounting of those policy decisions may hold up to
historical scrutiny better than his statistics. His evidence on
the death toll in American camps comes from fragmentary, often
contradictory Army records. Says historian Arthur L. Smith of
California State University, Los Angeles, who has written about
German soldiers in the postwar years: "How do you get rid of a
million bodies?" Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose also
disagrees with Bacque on several key points. Nevertheless, he says,
"we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened.
And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and
freedom, and they are not excusable."