Crimes and Mercies by James Bacque Read Free Book Online Page B

due to the fact that the Red Army was not ready to receive such a huge surrender.
    After the initial disorganization at Stalingrad, the NKVD and army co-operated very closely, and prisoner care improved radically. As the army entered Germany, if prisoners died or escaped, German civilians were rounded up to replace them. The count arriving at the NKVD camps was always the same as those leaving the front.
The West German Survey of Missing Prisoners
    See Appendix 7 below.

    7: G ERMAN P OST-WAR S URVEYS OF THE M ISSING
    Some Western historians who have never consulted the Soviet archives contend that nearly all of the missing Germans have been shown, by diligent research, to have been taken prisoner by the Soviets. One of the Germans most knowledgeable on this subject is Dr Margarethe Bitter, who was a founder of the first committee to investigate the fate of the missing, the Ausschuß für Kriegsgefangenenfragen. The results of the Ausschuß were based on a partial survey begun in 1947 of living Germans only. The Ausschuß could not survey the whole country door-to-door, so they put up notices in public places asking families and friends of missing persons to tell the committee the date and place where that person had last been known. The committee covered the US zone of Germany thoroughly, the British zone probably adequately but not thoroughly, the French zone inadequately and the Russian zone scarcely at all. It is not known what percentage of the expellees was covered. (In this book, it is assumed that all were covered, which reduces the number of the missing.)
    Left completely uncovered were the citizens of such countries as Italy, Hungary, Austria and Rumania, which had supplied over 2 million soldiers to the Axis, and about 1.9 million prisoners to Allied cages. In one Red Cross survey of an American camp for Germans near Marseille in 1945, over 12 per cent of the 25,000 prisoners were Yugoslav, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian and Swiss. 18
    In all, the Ausschuß covered only some 58–68 per cent of the potential recruiting sources of the German army. Thus the Adenauer government’s final estimate of 1,400,000 missing Germans was too low by scores of thousands. Adding in the losses among German allies, we see that the true total of missing Axis prisoners must have been above 1,600,000.* 19
    The American professor Arthur L. Smith Jr. has said that the Ausschuß found that 90 per cent of the addresses of the missing showed they had last been seen in the east, and were therefore presumed to be in the hands of the Soviets. He wrote: ‘It is very important to note that this German committee under the very able direction of Frau Doctor Margarethe Bitter, arrived at its conclusions totally independent of the influence of the American Military Government.’ 20 Yes, indeed, so free was it of that influence that the Ausschuß was not permitted to see the only records that might have revealed the truth. These were the records kept by the Americans of the conditions and deaths in the US camps. If, as Smith says, there was no disaster in the western camps, and nothing to hide, why were all the records hidden from the Ausschuß? If there was nothing to hide, why were so many of the records destroyed? Why were the rest classified for twenty-five years? Sixteen miles of paper, viewed edge-on, came home from Europe in the army’s files after the war, but these few feet of prisoner records were so dangerous they had to be extracted specially and burned. Many of these were being destroyed by the Americans at the time Dr Bitter and Dr Adenauer were working on the fate of the missing prisoners. 21
    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