Replies

CharlesOConnell wrote: “The New Orleans panel
After the publication of Bacque’s book, a panel of eight historians gathered for a symposium in the Eisenhower Center for American Studies[38] at the University of New Orleans from December 7–8, 1990 to review Bacque’s work.[39] In the introduction to a book later published containing each panellists’ papers, Steven E. Ambrose noted that Bacque is a Canadian novelist with no previous historical research or writing experience. His introduction concludes that “Other Losses is seriously—nay, spectacularly—flawed in its most fundamental aspects.”[39][40] Ambrose’s own work has also been criticized for longtime patterns of plagiarism and inaccuracies.[citation needed] The panel comments that, among its many problems, Other Losses:[39]

misuses documents
misreads documents
ignores contrary evidence
employs a statistical methodology that is hopelessly compromised
made no attempt to see the evidence he has gathered in relation to the broader situation
made no attempt to perform any comparative context
puts words into the mouths of the subjects of his oral history
ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively dealt with his central accusation
As a consequence of those and other shortcomings, the book “makes charges that are demonstrably absurd.”[39] Panel member Stephen Ambrose later wrote in the New York Times:

Mr Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the “disarmed enemy forces” designation or about the column “other losses.” Mr Bacque’s “missing million” were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People’s Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas. Maj. Ruediger Overmans of the German Office of Military History in Freiburg who wrote the final volume of the official German history of the war estimated that the total death by all causes of German prisoners in American hands could not have been greater than 56,000 approximately 1% of the over 5,000,000 German POWs in Allied hands exclusive of the Soviets. Eisenhower’s calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany in 1945-46 were too low and he had been asking for more food shipments since February 1945. He had badly underestimated the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies; more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million as German soldiers crossed the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians—about 13 million altogether crossing the Elbe to escape the Russians, and the number of slave laborers and displaced persons liberated was almost 8 million instead of the 5 million expected. In short, Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were at least 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected not to mention all of the other countries in war-ravaged Europe, the Philippines, Okinawa and Japan. All Europe went on rations for the next three years, including Britain, until the food crisis was over.[41]”

IOW, BS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses

Wikipedia co-founder says site is now ‘propaganda’ for left-leaning ‘establishment’

By Lee Brown

Published July 16, 2021, 4:55 p.m. ET

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has warned that the website can no longer be trusted — insisting it is now just “propaganda” for the left-leaning “establishment.”

Sanger told UnHerd’s Lockdown TV Wednesday that he started the “encyclopedia of opinion” in 2001 purely on the basis it would offer true neutrality and offer “multiple points of view” on “hot button issues.”

Now, he insisted, conservative voices are “sternly warned if not kicked out” if they try to add a different take on establishment views — which Sanger deemed “propaganda.”

“You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues. It’s just banned now,” he insisted of the apparent clampdown on respected conservative voices.

“It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream centre-left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia,” he said.

Now you can only rely on the site to “to give an establishment point of view,” rather than the diverse range of opinions it was set up to give, he insisted.

“If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power,” he said. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy WalesAlamy Stock Photo

“And they do that,” he continued. “There’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say.

Sanger said there are “all sorts of tricks people can play to win it,” including the use of dedicated PR companies to influence listings.

The Wikipedia co-founder cited the entry for President Biden, noting that it “has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him.”

“So if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you’re not going to get it from the article,” he said.

To DugwayDuke, a bibliography about American atrocities against the German people:

James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)

James Bacque, Other Losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989)

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Postsdam (Lincoln, Neb.: 1990)

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (New York: Algora, 2002)

Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947.

Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007)

John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust (2000)

Mark Weber, “New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two” (Summer 2007)