Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II," written by James Bacque, and published in 1989.

This highly controversial book argued that General Dwight D. Eisenhower deliberately caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war (POWs) in Allied-run camps in the aftermath of World War II. Bacque claimed that these deaths resulted from a combination of deliberate policies of deprivation, inadequate food rations, exposure and mistreatment. Bacque essentially alleged a shocking war crime, one that historians had for decades resolutely overlooked.

Bacque based much of his work on declassified Allied documents and German sources, arguing that these records had been misinterpreted or ignored by mainstream historians. His central claim was that approximately 800,000 to over 1 million German POWs died due to starvation, disease and exposure, and that Eisenhower’s policies were largely responsible.

Bacque’s argument was based on several claims:

First, Bacque alleged that Eisenhower had reclassified German POWs as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" (DEFs), not as prisoners of war. This enabled the Americans to get around the requirements of the Geneva Conventions that they provide their prisoners adequate food, shelter and medical care.

Second, Bacque claimed that food supplies to these camps were deliberately restricted by Allied authorities, leading to widespread malnutrition and starvation. He cited sources claiming that ration levels for German prisoners were significantly lower than those given to prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

Bacque also alleged that official death tolls were manipulated or understated by Western historians. He claimed that documents were classified or deliberately altered to minimize the scale of the deaths.

The title of Bacque's book, "Other Losses," refers to a category in Allied records listing prisoner statistics. Bacque claimed that many of the deaths were not recorded, but were instead disguised as falling under this bureaucratic rubric.

Needless to say, Bacque's book came under ferocious attack. Historians disputed his claim that more than 800,000 German POWs died in Allied captivity. They estimated the German POW deaths as falling between 56,000 and 100,000, primarily due to disease and shortages. Historians also disputed Bacque's interpretation of the term "Other Losses" in the official records. According to the historians, in U.S. Army records, “Other Losses” did not refer to deaths, but rather to prisoners transferred or released or to prisoners who had escaped.

Above all, Bacque's critics rejected his claim that Eisenhower or Allied leadership intentionally sought to exterminate German POWs. While conditions in the camps were undoubtedly harsh, critics argued that logistical challenges, food shortages and the devastation of war-torn Europe played a much larger role in German deaths in captivity than any deliberate policy of starvation.

One commentator who defended Bacque's work was Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, who served as the first U.N. Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order from 2012 to 2018. De Zayas has written extensively on the post-war expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and on Allied war crimes.

While not fully endorsing Bacque’s numbers, de Zayas acknowledged that conditions in the camps were very harsh and that there was neglect by the Allies. He argued moreover that mainstream historians had been too dismissive of the idea that the Western Allies engaged in serious mistreatment of German POWs or in war crimes in general.

However, de Zayas did not go so far as to support Bacque’s claim that this mistreatment was a deliberate act of extermination ordered by Eisenhower.

Whatever one thinks of Bacque's claims, "Other Losses" is an important work highlighting events that few had pain any attention to, namely, the treatment of a defeated people whose fate no one cared very much about. If only some of Bacque's claims are true, then the Allied powers had perpetrated a massive war crime.