Editing Other Losses (section)

=== Documentary evidence of deaths ===
''Other Losses'' asserts that roughly a million German prisoners—the "Missing Million"—disappeared between two reports issued on June 2, 1945, with one (the last of the daily reports) totaling prisoners in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in U.S. custody at 2,870,400, while the other (the first of the weekly reports) gives the figure as 1,836,000 prisoners in the Communication Zone (COM Z).<ref name="bacque52"/><ref name="cowdrey79">{{Harvnb|Cowdrey|1992|p=79}}</ref> As a consequence of this, according to Quartermaster Reports the number of rations issued to the camps was reduced by 900,000.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, 1991&nbsp;&mdash; p55</ref> Historian Albert Cowdrey states that the reason for this is simply that COM Z is a subordinate of the ETO, and its figures omit prisoners held by other armies.<ref name="cowdrey79"/> In fact, Cowdrey states that the two documents further both cite exactly the same number of total prisoners in the ETO: 3,193,747.<ref name="cowdrey79"/> Cowdrey concludes "[t]o judge by these documents, there was no Missing Million. There was not even a missing one."<ref name="cowdrey79"/><ref name="bischamb22"/>

The title of "''Other Losses''" derives from the heading of a column in weekly reports of the U.S. Army's theater provost marshal, which ''Other Losses'' states is actually a "body count" of dead prisoners.<ref name="cowdrey79"/> Cowdrey states that, in many cases, as explained by the footnotes in the very documents themselves, the "other losses" were transfers between zones and camps, which were regularly done for a variety of reasons, none of them sinister and all properly noted in the accompanying documents.<ref name="bischamb23">{{Harvnb|Bischof|Ambrose|1992|p=23}}</ref><ref name="cowdrey80"/> Cowdrey further states that, not only are these figures many times mentioned in the footnotes, but they are also reflected in the actual increase and decrease in numbers of each camp in the individual army reports.<ref name="cowdrey80"/> Cowdrey concludes "it is unclear how Bacque could have failed either to see these documents or, if he saw them, to understand their significance to the book he was writing."<ref name="cowdrey84">{{Harvnb|Cowdrey|1992|p=84}}</ref> In addition, while ''Other Losses'' asserts that these prisoners died of diseases or slow starvation, Cowdrey states that even a cursory glance at the figures shows that this would have been impossible, with figures varying between zero and over 189,000 from week to week.<ref name="cowdrey80">{{Harvnb|Cowdrey|1992|p=80}}</ref>

The introduction to the book publishing many of the New Orleans panel papers also noted that Bacque ignored the greatest source of for the "other losses" column, an August 1945 Report of the Military Governor that states "An additional group of 664,576 are lists as '' 'other losses' '', consisting largely of members of the [[Volkssturm]] [People's Militia] released without a formal charge."<ref name="bischamb23"/> It stated that Bacque ignored this document despite its presence in the National Archives, the Eisenhower Library and elsewhere.<ref name="bischamb23"/> It further stated the dismissal of the Volkssturm (mostly old men and boys) "accounts for most, quite probably all, of Bacque's 'Missing Million'".<ref name="bischamb23"/> Bischof notes that, in his later American edition of ''Other Losses'', Bacque discredits the document as a fake "with a further fantastic twist in his convoluted cycle of conspiracy theories, he claims that Eisenhower and the army 'camouflaged' dead POWs/DEFs by listing them as 'discharged Volkssturm.'"<ref name="Bischof200">{{Harvnb|Bischof|1992|p=200}}</ref> Even though Eisenhower himself did not write the document, Bacque concludes that it must have been "doctored".<ref name="Bischof200"/>

Of prisoners in French custody, the historian Rudiger Overmans wrote that, while the total number of prisoners dying in French custody might have exceeded the official statistic of 21,000, no evidence exists that it was hundreds of thousands of deaths higher than that figure, as Bacque claims.<ref name="overmans1151">{{Harvnb|Overmans|1992|p=151}}</ref> Overmans states that, in addition to the various problems with the Bacque's "death rate" calculations regarding the [[Rheinwiesenlager]] transit camps, he ignores that these camps were managed almost entirely by Germans and falsely claimed that no record existed of the handover of the camps to the French in June and July 1945, when detailed records of the handover exist.<ref name="overmans165">{{Harvnb|Overmans|1992|p=165}}</ref> Overmans also said that Bacque incorrectly claimed that the United States did nothing to help with the French Rheinwiesenlager camps, when the United States engaged in a large operation to raise the caloric intake of those prisoners.<ref name="overmans165"/> Bacque's claims that the 167,000 in French camps that were ''dus pour des raisons divers'' (other losses) actually died in the winter of 1945–46 not only are not supported by the evidence, but they ignore French documents stating that that figure reflects the release of [[Volkssturm]], women and the sick from those camps.<ref name="overmans166">{{Harvnb|Overmans|1992|p=166}}</ref>

Overmans states that Bacque's claim that the 800,000 to 1,000,000 missing prisoners were originally German soldiers that fled from the east into western hands contradicts Soviet POW evidence "well established that we can exclude the idea of an extra million hiding somewhere in the figures."<ref name="overmans166"/> Overmans states that Bacque's claim that one million fewer prisoners were taken by the Soviet Union than thought produces absurd results, such as that only 100,000 total prisoners could have died in Soviet hands when it is well documented that this amount was exceeded by the dead prisoners from Stalingrad alone.<ref name="overmans168"/> Bacque claimed that up to 500,000 of the missing prisoners were in Soviet camps. Postwar Soviet POW evidence was discredited when the KGB opened its archives in the 1990s and an additional 356,687 German soldiers and 93,900 civilians, previously recorded as missing, were found to be listed as dying in the Soviet camps. Overmans also states that, did they as Bacque claims, flee to the American Rheinwiesenlager camps, they could have easily had contact with their relatives and that it is "quite inconceivable that these prisoners would not have been reported as missing by their relatives."<ref name="overmans166"/> Overmans states that the vast majority of this extra million would have been recorded in registrations that occurred in 1947–1948 and 1950, "but the registrations showed nothing of the kind."<ref name="overmans166"/> Overmans further states that, as evidence that Germans believed that missing veterans were mostly in the west, Bacque relies on a statement by Konrad Adenauer that turns out in the minutes of the purported meeting to be a "statement related to a [[Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union|TASS]] report concerning the POWs in the Soviet Union. So much for Bacque's careful use of sources."<ref name="overmans168">{{Harvnb|Overmans|1992|p=168}}</ref>