Date: Thu, 18 May 1995 12:59:09 -0500 Reply-To: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: Re: Victimization Submitted by: Douglas Peifer Regarding James Bacque's comments and Alfred de Zayas' Nemesis at Potsdam. 1. James Bacque's comments regarding German victimization should be evaluated in light of his book Other Losses which charged that Eisenhower intentionally starved millions of German POWs to death after the close of the Second World War, and then successfully covered up this gigantic crime. I highly recommend that German historians unfamiliar with Bacque's work glance at the rebuttal by Stephen Ambrose and Guenter Bischof, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood. Ambrose and Bischof offer not only a careful point by point rebuttal of Bacque's thesis, but charge him with intentional misinterpretation of documents, interviews, etc. 2. de Zayas is certainly more careful with his facts and interpretation, but in a similar manner manages to convert the Germans from perpetrators to victims. While I have found some of the views expressed in the forum concerning Dresden (that the Germans deserved this fate) utterly lacking in human compassion and of a mindset not far removed from the Nazis themselves, one must not forget who started the war. As Field Marshal Montgomery remarked to the Germans during the surrender negotiations in May 1945, the Germans would have been better served if they had thought about the consequences of war before initiating it. In short, de Zayas presents an unbalanced view of the post-war transfer of people, ignoring the fact that the Germans had long advocated shifting people to suit borders, and had opposed the Versailles settlement which attempted to suit borders to people. .