Date: Tue, 23 May 1995 11:16:57 -0500 Reply-To: H-NET List on German History Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: German POW Deaths Submitted by: James Bacque It is every writer's delight to be attacked in a public forum by a confused critic, so my thanks go to Mr Douglas Peifer for erring his views on my work on the H-German net. My book *Other Losses* has been completely vindicated by a sensational event which Mr Peifer does not mention, the opening of the KGB CSSA archives in Moscow (Central State Special Archive). When my book was published in 1989, no-one in the west had ever seen the vast and complete CSSA archives, millions of individual dossiers on nothing but prisoners of war. In 1992 and 1993, in Moscow, I found in the CSSA the documents proving the accuracy of my charge that almost one million prisoners died in American and French prison camps after World War Two. The Soviets recorded in meticulous detail that 421,000 German prisoners died in their hands 1941-1955. Since Dr Margarethe Bitter of Munich and her committee (Ausschuss fuer Kriegsgefangenenfragen) had already demonstrated that at least 1.4 million German prisoners had never come home from Allied captivity, the Soviet records showed that *Other Losses* was correct. If Mr Peifer will kindly subtract 421,000 from 1,400,000 million, he will see that the remainder more than covers the total that I specified in *Other Losses*. And of course, no-one else but the western allies had any German prisoners. But even this revelation leaves still not accounted for at least 200,000 other German soldiers recruited from regions of Germany not covered by Dr Bitter's survey. And it leaves out hundreds of thousands of dead prisoners from Italy, Rumania, Hungary and so on, plus about 62,000 Japanese. There is no mention of the KGB archives in the Ambrose-Bischof book. They and their authors have all remained silent on the topic of the astounding finds in the CSSA archives. This and the many mistakes in the Ambrose-Bischof book raise questions about their scholarship. In future postings, I shall if anyone asks, describe some of these very distressing errors in their book. In the meantime, the more interesting question turns on the accuracy and extent of the Soviet archives. Here are the chief points: the archives record a death total for the Japanese prisoners that is the same as the total determined by the Japanese government; the archives show that more Poles died in the Katyn- related massacres than the Poles themselves had thought; the archives record more deaths among captured German civilians (internyrovannye) than the Adenauer government had estimated in the 1950s. These facts are doubly significant, demonstrating not only the accuracy of the archives, but also providing a second test of the accuracy of the German death totals, since all these prisoners were kept in the same camp system, many of them in the same camps at the same time. By every test, these are by far the most complete, coherent and accurate archives on World War Two prisoners in the whole world. And they record an appalling atrocity by the Soviets: to the 421,000 Germans must be added all the others to a total of well over 600,000. I have yet to encounter anyone of the Ambrose-Bischof persuasion who, when confronted with this research, replied to it. .