James Bacque

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James Bacque (born May 19, 1929 in Toronto ; † September 13, 2019 ) was a Canadian publicist and novelist who became known for his work on German prisoners of war in Allied hands. Critics see him as a representative of historical revisionism .

Live and act

Bacque studied history and philosophy at Upper Canada College in Toronto and graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Art degree . Bacque's political books on the fate of German soldiers as Allied prisoners of war after World War II have been published since 1989 .

Bacque tried to prove that the Americans were systematically and deliberately trying to permanently destroy the livelihoods of Germans and that they were responsible for genocide against Germans. In his book, Bacque speaks of more than five million German soldiers who were interned in American and French POW camps (especially Rhine meadow camps ) under allegedly inhumane circumstances .

According to James Bacque, the general and later US President Dwight D. Eisenhower tolerated that 800,000 to one million German prisoners of war had starved to death in mostly US camps and that this was planned. The Berlin professor Peter Steinbach points out that Bacque's historical-political intentions became clear at the latest when Bacque put the number of victims of the American occupation policy at exactly 6 million, which roughly corresponds to the number of victims of the Holocaust .

A number of historians, especially in the context of a conference and publication of the University of New Orleans , contradicted Bacque's thesis as early as the early 1990s and accused Bacque of a large number of serious errors. Bacque is accused of the selective reception of sources and specialist literature , the manipulation of quotations, methodological deficiencies with regard to the testimony of contemporary witnesses, serious errors in the interpretation of sources as well as the ignoring of historical connections and causalities. Above all, Bacque completely misinterpreted the statistics of the prison camps:

"All those who were released early as Home Guard members who were released without formal procedure, transferred to other camps put prisoners or Escaped, were in these statistics under the catch-all category other losses ( other losses ) are summarized. Bacque bases his work on the (deliberate?) Misinterpretation of this category as an alleged concealment of deaths, which - among other errors - leads him to the assumption of around one million hushed up deaths. " 

The historian Brigitte Bailer-Galanda sums up Bacque's status as follows: “With his book, the Canadian was probably the first revisionist to be recognized by public opinion, at least in the short term. (...) Bacque's thesis of the deliberately caused mass deaths of German soldiers (has been) long since unmasked as unscientific and untenable. "

The greatly expanded new edition of Secret Guilt , published in 2002 . The Allied occupation policy in Germany after 1945 is also based on the archives of the Red Army and the Soviet secret service NKVD , which are now accessible , material that was not yet available at the time of the first edition. In the new edition, Bacque also takes a detailed position on Ambrose / Bischof: Eisenhower and the German POWs: facts against falsehood .

Works

English

  • The Lonely Ones. (Novel). McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 1969. (Paperback entitled Big lonely. New Canadian Library, Volume 148. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto 1978, ISBN 0-7710-9258-X ).
  • A man of talent. (Novel). New Press, Toronto 1972, ISBN 0-88770-154-X .
  • The Queen comes to Minnicog. (Stories). Gage Publications, Toronto 1979, ISBN 0-7715-9488-7 .
  • Other losses. An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II. Stoddart, Toronto 1989, ISBN 0-7737-2269-6 .
  • -, Matthias Müller: Dear Enemy. Germany Then and Now. Fenn Publishing, Bolton 2000, ISBN 1-55168-246-X .
  • Just Raoul. Adventures in the French Resistance. (Biography). Prima Lifestyles, Rocklin 2000, ISBN 1-55958-142-5 .
  • Our Fathers' War. (Novel). Exile Editions, Toronto 2006.
  • Crimes and Mercies. The Fate of German civilians under Allied Occupation 1944 - 1950. Talonbooks, Vancouver 2007, ISBN 978-0-88922-567-1 .

German

  • -, Hans-Ulrich Seebohm (transl.): Secret guilt. Allied occupation policy in Germany after 1945. Special edition. Pour-le-Merite-Verlag , Selent 2002, ISBN 3-932381-24-6 .
  • -, Sophie and Erwin Dunker (transl.): The planned death. German prisoners of war in American and French camps 1945 - 1946. Pour le Mérite, Selent 2008, ISBN 978-3-932381-46-1 .

literature

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b James Bacque ( Memento of the original from October 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: sccs.swarthmore.edu , accessed August 8, 2011.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sccs.swarthmore.edu
  2. ^ A b Brigitte Bailer-Galanda : Eisenhower and the German prisoners of war. Serious historiography against the myths of the Canadian "revisionist" James Bacque - a book review ( memento of the original from January 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . From: Yearbook. Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance. Vienna 1997, ZDB -ID 620800-9 , pp. 111-117. ( Review of the now outdated first edition, 1992). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / doewweb01.doew.at
  3. ↑ Bacque: The Planned Death .
  4. ↑ Peter Steinbach: "The bridge has been built". In: Rolf-Dieter Müller (Ed.), Hans-Erich Volkmann : The Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality. Published on behalf of the MGFA . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , p. 1006. - Table of contents online (PDF) .
  5. ^ Bishop, Ambrose: Eisenhower.
  6. ^ Permalink The Library of Congress .
personal data
SURNAME Bacque, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian publicist, novelist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto
DATE OF DEATH 13th September 2019