by James Bacque – Serendipity
In 1989, I published the first in a series of books about the Second World War and its aftermath. The first,
Other Losses, showed the tremendous atrocities committed against enemy prisoners in the prison camps of the US and France after 1945. The next,
Just Raoul, was a biography of a hero of the French Resistance who saved many refugees from Nazi death camps. The next,
Crimes and Mercies, described the full extent of all allied crimes against Germans, plus the wonderful charity work of Canada and the USA in saving 800 million people, including Germans, Japanese and Italians, from starving to death in the hungry years after 1945. The next,
Dear Enemy, illuminated the attitudes of the western allies to Germany from 1945 to now.
Wikipedia reviews and criticizes only
Other Losses, and in such a biased way, that I finally tried to correct their many errors. Starting in March, 2006, I tried repeatedly over many weeks to correct the errors, but found that within a day at first, then within hours, and finally within minutes, some Wikipedian editor had expunged my corrections, replacing them with ever more hostile and denigrating allegations. Friends of mine tried also to correct the flawed Wikipedia article, but found the same situation. Finally we decided that Wikipedia was deliberately censoring my contributions, and that it was pointless to continue trying to present the facts on Wikipedia. After Serendipity (already acquainted with censorship at Wikipedia) heard of this situation I was offered the chance to publish the real story, which appears below.
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Wikipedia quotes Stephen E. Ambrose as saying that <>Other Losses<> is "... spectacularly flawed ..." without saying that Ambrose also wrote that "You have made a major historical discovery which will ... span the oceans and have reverberations for decades, yea centuries to come. You have the goods on these guys ..."
Wikipedia does not say that Ambrose changed his mind only after he was retained by the US Army to lecture at the War College in Pennsylvania. Nor does Wikipedia mention that in his attack on me in the New York Times, he admitted that he had not done the necessary research to reach the conclusions that he published in that same article. Wikipedia fails to mention that the Ambrose it cites as an authority admitted that he had plagiarized several other authors. Wikipedia does not concern itself with the accusations that Ambrose stole work from a graduate student which he published as his own.
Wikipedia ignores my book,
Crimes and Mercies, which goes far towards balancing the record of western actions after World War Two. The book shows the great charity extended by the western allies, chiefly Canada and the USA, towards the starving around the world after WW2, including the Japanese and Germans. Saying that the overwhelming majority of professional historians reject my work, and citing as an authority one historian who has never worked in this field, Wikipedia ignores the support given me by the eminent US Army military historian Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, a former Senior Historian of the US Army Center for Military History, Washington. Fisher, a professional historian for decades, wrote the official US Army history of the campaign in Italy. He assisted me for months in researching documents in the US National Archives, wrote the Introduction to my book
Other Losses, and has supported me with public statements for the seventeen years since its first publication. He helped me for many months researching in the archives.
Wikipedia does not mention the expert editing, research help and public support given me by the eminent epidemiologist and biostatistician, Dr Anthony B. Miller, former head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Toronto.
Wikipedia also casts aside the support given my work by Richard Overy, King's College, University of London; Otto Kimminich, University of Regensburg; Dr Alfred De Zayas, author of many books on postwar German history; Prof. Dr. Peter Hoffmann, McGill University, author of the most expert books on the German resistance; Prof. J. K. Johnson, Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor Ralph Raico, University of Buffalo; Prof. Ed Peterson, University of Wisconsin; Prof Ralph Scott, University of Iowa; Prof. Pierre Van Den Berghe, University of Seattle; Prof. Dr Richard Mueller, former head, Department of English, University of Aachen; Prof. Hans Koch, University of York and many others.
Among writers who have approved my work and supported me are Julian Barnes; Nikolai Tolstoy; John Fraser, Master of Massey College, Toronto; John Bemrose of Toronto; Robert Kroetsch, Winnipeg; and many others. My work has been published around in the world in ten languages by Macmillan, Little, Brown, Prima, Ullstein, Editions Sand, McClelland and Stewart, New Press, and many many others.
Finally, the most glaring omission is that the massive and detailed KGB Archives in Moscow have millions of documents whose evidence completely confirms the statistical work in
Other Losses. The math is simple: about 1.5 million German prisoners alive in allied prison camps at the end of the war never came home, nor were their deaths reported to the German government, their families, the International Red Cross or the UN. The figure was determined by the Adenauer government in Germany, submitted to the UN, and has never been disputed by anyone. Thus when
Other Losses came out in 1989, alleging deaths of about one million in French and American camps, that left about 500,000 to be accounted for. They could have died only in the KGB camps, because there were not half a million prisoners in any other camps in the world. Thus, in effect
Other Losses was predicting that when the communists opened the KGB archives, they would show deaths of about 500,000. And lo and behold, when Gorbachev brought down the communist rule, and the archives were opened, I went there, and found the Bulanov Report which showed that 356,687 Germans died in Soviet captivity, plus another 93,900 civilians taken as substitutes for dead or escaped prisoners for a total of 450,587
This astonishing discovery is not mentioned in Wikipedia, nor by any other of the "professional historians." Except one, Stefan Karner, who went to the KGB archives, saw the evidence piled up in enormous quantities, and said he did not believe it. Instead, he preferred to publish his own "estimates," which confirm the conventional view.
Information about books written by James Bacque may be found on his
website World War 2 Books.
Mass Starvation of Germans 1945-1950
Censorship at Wikipedia
http://serendipity.li/hr/bacque_on_wikipedia.htm
Comment
This is not the first time that Wikipedia has been caught trying to distort information or discredit others. It recently did much the same thing with a regular contributor to this website, Israel Shamir.
Despite Shamir’s best efforts to correct the matter, Wikipedia repeatedly implied that he was not who he claimed to be. By questioning if Shamir – a former Israeli paratrooper who is descended from a long line of prominent Russian Jews – was who he said, Wikipedia implied that Shamir might even be a “Swedish anti-Semite”.
Of course, he is not but Wikipedia’s distortions help pave the way for such disinformation and in the end analysis it seems to be following its own Zionist agenda.
Last updated 21/12/2007
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