Check out the book Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II
More than 1 million disarmed German soldiers were killed in concentration camps, after WW2. There was one just outside of the town that my father was born in.
Here's a blurb from a review on Amazon.
Bacque shows us secret orders such as the one issued by Eisenhower on March 10, 1945 which created the new classification of DEF (Disarmed Enemy Forces). Unlike the POW (Prisoner Of War) classification Germans prisoners classified as DEFs would have no protection under the Geneva convention. The German government would be responsible for feeding German prisoners with the DEF classification even though Eisenhower knew full well that after May 8, 1945 there would be no German government. But the orders went even further. German civilians were forbidden to bring food or clothing to the camp inmates on pain of being shot and Bacque provides us the exact public notice which was posted for this.
Not only did Eisenhower and some of his subordinates (Hughes, etc.) carry out this atrocity but they made sure that it stayed secret for more than forty years. By using bland, euphemistic terms such as Other Losses in official Army reports they could cover up their war crimes. Very few people ever challenged them on it. Journalists were for the most part happy to go along with the party line and so the greatest war crime in American history lay undisturbed for James Bacque to find in the 1980's, more than 40 years later.
Reading these accounts is all so horrible. To think that we have been looking up to and honoring people like Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and Marshall all these years who now turn out to be war criminals just turns my stomach. And just like Uncle Joe Stalin, they all got away with these crimes. Not a single one of them was ever punished for what they did. What I cannot understand is why there was not an out-and-out revolt by the lower ranking American officers and enlisted men to protest this mass murder. This is certainly not the greatest generation of Americans, not if they participated in mass murder like this. Bacque's book should puncture any illusion you may have about World War II being the "Good War". All wars are nasty and total wars are even more nasty than usual. Our war "leaders" don't think twice about lying to us and misleading us in order to build up their own egos.
Check out the book Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II
More than 1 million disarmed German soldiers were killed in concentration camps, after WW2. There was one just outside of the town that my father was born in.
Here's a blurb from a review on Amazon.