Crimes and Mercies by James Bacque Page A

my publishers, thankful that their story has at last been told. Not a single ex-prisoner has written to say that he was well-treated in the Russian, American or French camps, though many have written to me to say that they were lucky to have been captured by the British and Canadians.
    This is convincing enough, but they have been joined by many former officers and NCOs in the US army who have admitted that conditions in those years were lethal for the Germans.
    One of these was General Richard Steinbach who had been in charge of a US POW camp near Heilbronn in 1945; (See Other Losses , p. xxiii) another was Colonel Dr Ernest F. Fisher Jr, who had sat on a US army commission investigating allegations of war crimes committed by American soldiers in 1945. He has said the commission was ‘a whitewash’ [in conversation with the author]. Daniel McConnell, a corporal in 1945, was in 1998 awarded a 100% medical pension by the US government Veterans’ Administration for post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his experiences in a US army camp. In 1945, he had been ordered despite his ignorance of medicine, to take over a ‘hospital’ tent at Heilbronn, Germany, which had no medical facilities beyond bottles of aspirin. The mud-floored tent was simply a way to assemble moribund prisoners convenient to the trucks that would soon take away their corpses. * The Veterans’ Administration thus admitted that McConnell had been injured for life by the horrors he witnessed but could not prevent.
    What happened to the German population in the years 1945 to 1950 was concealed in many ways, especially by the destruction of US Army prisoner of war documents in the 1940s and by the suppression of photographs of prison camps taken by JeanPierre Pradervand of the International Red Cross, and given by him to Eisenhower in Frankfurt in August, 1945. This vital evidence is not listed in the Smith collection of many thousands of other photographs in the Eisenhower Library. The New York Times ’ star correspondent Drew Middleton has also admitted lying about the camps in three stories printed in that paper in 1945. *
    Why this suppression occurred was not just a matter of shame and guilt. Reporters and politicians during the war propagandized the populations of the Allied powers to demonize the enemy and glorify their leaders; historians credulously accepted most of this, converted it into myth, and have perpetuated that mythology for more than sixty years. This is part of a natural human process – we like to think of ourselves as good people, and we hate to admit that we often commit cruel and senseless acts. But the study of history is supposed to rise above that, and so far it has not, at least not with respect to ourselves as the Allied powers, and Germany.
    There is plenty of evidence in Crimes and Mercies for the view that Americans, British and Canadians do and have done much good in the world. The British, bankrupt and rationed in 1945–47, sacrificed a small part of their food to help others, including Germans. Canadians spent billions of dollars and continued rationing themselves long after the war so they could send some of their ample surplus to feed the former enemy (see map opposite page 129). Churches in North America rounded up food, clothing and money on a massive scale to help the destitute in Europe. Australians and Argentineans also helped with donations of wheat and meat. Herbert Hoover risked – and spent – much of his life and a good part of his fortune helping victims of war around the world, from 1914 through 1948. Together with the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, he led the greatest campaign of mercy the world has ever known, saving 800,000,000 lives from the famine that spread round the globe after the Second World War. Hoover was exemplary of the American mercies that finally ended but could not prevent the crimes of Eisenhower, Morgenthau and others.
    How this strange conflict between good and evil