Crimes and Mercies (35 page)

Smith’s statement about Germans ‘missing in the east’ is not correct, according to Dr Bitter herself. She said recently that, ‘We didn’t know where they were. They could have been among those who were captured by the Americans … They put them in fields in very bad conditions and many died. I don’t think the Red Cross examined those camps.’
²²
Kurt W. Böhme, a German author who has taken the side of the Western Allies in this dispute, confidently asserts that 91.2

per cent of the missing were
Ostvermissten
, or missing in the east, because that was their last mailing address. However, his own statistics disprove this because of the long time lag between the last known address and the end of the war.
²³

Almost two-thirds of these addresses are from 1944 or earlier, anywhere from four and a half months to a year or more before the end of the war. This fact affects drastically the usefulness of
the addresses, because for more than a week at the end of the war, millions of Germans fled the eastern front to the Western Allies.
²⁴
The round-ups of these soldiers esca escaping to the west also continued for weeks after the end of the war on 8 May.

8: T
HE
P
RISONERS AND THE
C
ENSUS

Professor Dewey Browder of Austin Peay University in Tennessee disagrees with my conclusion that an unusually high number of deaths occurred in the US zone in 1945–50. According to German documents he obtained from the Statistisches Bundesamt which were published in 1952,
²⁵
the census results for 1946 included those Germans held abroad as prisoners.

If this were true, those prisoners who did return in 1946–50 should not be added to the population expected to be present in 1950. This would mean that the death toll as presented in this book would be reduced by the number of prisoners who were counted as part of the existing German population in 1946. However, the record referred to by Professor Browder does not state the total number of such prisoners, so no estimate can be made of the numbers affected. Professor Browder also cites the death rate of 12.1%% for Germany in 1947 frequently published by the Statistisches Bundesamt, and already discussed above.

The author believes that the documentation from the KGB archives, the US State Department and the Murphy Papers is comprehensive and fully reliable. Murphy states clearly that the prisoners are not included in the census figures, but are apart from them. Murphy’s words are:

Preliminary figures from the German census, taken on 29 October 1946 under direction of the Allied Control Council, show total population of 65,900,000. This includes about 700,000 displaced persons [DPs] (UNRRA Situation Report of 31 October). Assuming that all these DPs will eventually leave Germany, this will leave 65,200,000 inhabitants. German war prisoners still held
abroad are estimated by OMGUS Armed Forces Division at 4,000,000 (consisting chiefly of 3,000,000 estimated held by USSR). German expellees still to be returned to Germany are similarly estimated by OMGUS PW and DP Division at 2,000,000. This gives a total eventual population for Germany, once all DPs have left and German war prisoners and expellees returned, of 71,000,000. However, in order to be conservative, and in view of the present high death rate in Germany, a figure of 69,000,000 will be used.

The French delegate to the CFM conference of April 1947 also believed the prisoners were not counted in the census. He stated: ‘Lastly, according to data which the four Delegations have just exchanged, we may estimate at two million the number of prisoners who will have to be repatriated.’ He then adds them to the 66 million ‘inhabitants which Germany has today’ and adds as well the ‘two million people of German race … to be transferred to the interior of Germany’. He concludes that, ‘in sum … Germany would have about 70 million inhabitants’.

The delegate was speaking in March 1947, when he believed that the population of Germany stood at 66 million. Since he added the prisoners to the 66 million to arrive at the eventual population, it is clear that he did not think they were counted in the census.

And finally, the well-known expert on Germany Dr Gustav Stolper, who was on the Hoover Commission fact-finding team, wrote in
German Realities
that the 1946 census showed that, of the total population of 65,900,000 persons, ‘1,125,885 were prisoners of war, displaced persons and civilian internees’. He is in agreement with other contemporary authorities in saying this. Ambassador Murphy says that 700,000 of these 1,125,885 were displaced persons, leaving 65,200,000 Germans. The discrepancy of some 200,000 is discussed in detail in Note 29, Chapter VI. owever, it is clear that no prisoners of war being held outside Germany in 1946 are included in the population total used in this book. In the unlikely event that some prisoners being held inside Germany in 1946
were
included in Murphy’s 65,000,000
census total, they did not exceed 300,000 in number, or about 3 per cent of the total number of the dead.

* This does not take into account the men who were missing but never reported as such because their families had been wiped out. In the firestorm raid on Dresden, for example, probably more than 100,000 people, nearly all civilians and refugees, died in one night. Some whole families were undoubtably wiped out, and thus could not report a soldier gone missing in captivity after the war.

NOTES

Further publication details of works cited can be found in the 
Select Bibliography
.

Foreword (pp. xvi–xxii)

1
See Chapter III.

2
Dmitri Volkogonov,
Lenin
, p. 29.

3
Victor Gollancz,
Our Threatened Values
, p. 96.

Chapter I: A Piratical State (pp. 1–16)

1
Women in Quebec and Switzerland were enfranchised several decades later.

2
K. A. Jelenski (ed.),
History and Hope
, p. 29.

3
Herbert Hoover,
Memoirs
, p. 166.

4
George H. Nash,
The Life of Herbert Hoover
, p. 70.

5
Ibid., p. 162.

6
Nash, op. cit., p. 358.

7
The stance and manner are described by Nash in
The Life of
Herbert Hoover
, p. 84. The passage paraphrased here was, in Nash’s original, used to describe an earlier meeting also addressed by Hoover.

8
Nash, op. cit., p. 85.

9
Hoover,
An American Epic
, Vol. IV, p. 17.

10
Hoover,
Memoirs
, p. 176.

11
Ibid., p. 168.

12
Ibid., p. 170.

13
Nash, op. cit., Chapter 4; Hoover,
Memoirs
, pp. 152ff.

14
Minutes of British War Cabinet Meeting No. 122, held on 18 April 1917, microfilm in National Archives of Canada.

15
Hoover to the Acting Secretary of State, Paris, 25 December 1918, in Paris Peace Conference, 1919, II, pp. 477–8; quoted in Edward F. Willis,
Herbert Hoover and the Russian Prisoners of
World War I
, p. 22.

16
Vernon Kellogg quoted in George J. Lerski,
Herbert Hoover and
Poland
, p. 20.

17
Hoover,
Memoirs
, p. 360.

18
Martin H. Glynn, ‘The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!’ in the
American Hebrew
, 13 October 1919, pp. 582–3. Glynn was the fortieth Governor of New York State, from 1913–14. In 1919, the year he wrote the article, he was a member of President Wilson’s industrial conference.

19
Francis William O’Brien (ed.),
Two Peacemakers in Paris
, pp.166–7; Hoover, op. cit., p. 358.

20
O’Brien, op. cit., p. 186.

21
Ibid., pp. 186–7.

22
Hoover to Wilson, March and April 1919, quoted in O’Brien, op. cit., p. 115.

23
O’Brien, op. cit., p. 129.

24
Ibid., p. xlii.

25
Ibid.

26
Balfour is quoted in Nigel Nicolson,
Portrait of a Marriage
, p. 143.

27
O’Brien, op. cit., p. 156.

28
Hoover,
Memoirs
, p. 345.

29
Ibid., p. 341.

30
Ibid.

31
Ibid., p. 342.

32
Ibid., p. 344.

Chapter II: The Beginning of Wisdom? (pp. 17–39)

1
Babinski to King, 18 July 1945: Mackenzie King,
Diaries
(microfiche, University of Toronto Library), p. 696.

2
Richard Overy,
The Road to War
, p. 188.

3
Winston Churchill,
The Grand Alliance
, p. 370.

4
‘An Analysis of American Public Opinion Regarding the War’, a confidential report by George Gallup, American Institute of Public Opinion, Princeton, September 1942 (NAC, W. L. M. King Papers, 1940–50), pp. C258805ff.

5
 
Life
and the
New York Times
, quoted in Paul Kennedy,
The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers
, p. 478.

6
Quoted in Gary Dean Best,
Herbert Hoover: The Post-Presidential
Years
, Vol. II, p. 321.

7
See Arthur L. Smith,
Churchill’s German Army
(Beverley Hills, CA: Sage Publications).

8
King,
Diaries
, p. 916.

9
Ibid., p. 75. Sir William Mulock was a Canadian Cabinet minister, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier Prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911.

10
The Americans sent more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 13,000 locomotives and freight cars; 90 cargo ships; 4,000 bombers; 10,000 fighters; and over 7,000 tanks (FEC Papers, HIA). The British and Canadians sent over 5,000 tanks; 7,000 aircraft; machinery, steel rails, wheat and much else.

11
W. Averell Harriman,
Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin
, p. 277.

12
So many thousands of miles of Canadian rails were sent to the USSR that prisoners of war were still building the BAM (Baikal–Amur) line in Siberia with them in 1949. Letters to the
author from Hans Wollenweber (1993), Fred Pichler (1992), and others.

13
State Department Memo (Division of Financial and Monetary Affairs), 19 February 1945 (E. E. Hunt Papers, Box 47, HIA).

14
John Charmley,
Churchill: The End of Glory
, pp. 804–5.

15
See Henry C. Morgenthau,
Germany is Our Problem
.

16
Fred Smith,
United Nations World
, March 1947 (UN Library, New York). See the Epilogue in Bacque,
Other Losses
, second edition, for a fuller account of this meeting.

17
Smith, op. cit.

18
Memorandum of conversation, Lord Keynes, 26 November 1944, NARS.

19
Alfred Grosser,
The Colossus Again: West Germany from Defeat to
Rearmament
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), p. 18.

20
Quoted in John Morton Blum,
Roosevelt and Morgenthau
, p. 591.

21
Cordell Hull,
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull
, p. 1614.

22
NARS, RG 226, Box 176, Folder 2327.

23
Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy,
On Active Service in
Peace and War
, p. 580.

24
Martin Gilbert,
The Road to Victory
, p. 995.

25
According to Jean-Pierre Pradervand, Chief Delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in France, the Americans never informed him that they had camps in France in 1945. However, at least one camp, near Marseille, was visited in 1945. The author has several times requested ICRC permission to visit their archives in Geneva to check on this and other matters, and has been repeatedly refused.

26
Memorandum, ‘Handling of Prisoners of War in the Communications Zone’, by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, June 1946 (Archives, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas).

27
For more, see Bacque,
Other Losses
.

28
Armando Boscolo,
Fame in America
(the words are in Italian, and mean ‘Hunger in America’), plus interviews with several ex-prisoners. Because the records have been destroyed, or are still withheld, it is impossible to determine the death rate. However, it certainly did not rise to the levels experienced in the camps in Europe.

29
See John Gimbel,
Science, Technology and Reparations
; also Balfour and Mair,
Four-power Control in Germany and Austria
.

30
 
Speeches of Senator Kenneth S. Wherry, CRS, January– March 1946. For other sources, see Chapter V.

31
Gilbert, op. cit., p. 965.

32
Senator William Langer, CRS, 29 March 1946.

33
CRS, Vol. 92, Pts 1–2 (29 January 1946), p. 509.

34
With thanks to Prof. Pierre van den Berghe.

35
Victor Gollancz,
In Darkest Germany
, p. 45.

36
Ibid., p. 78.

37
Ibid., p. 77.