Crimes and Mercies (32 page)

The rate consistent with the virtual completion of immigration in 1950 is certainly the most likely. That rate is 24%%. It lies to the conservative side (i.e. implying the fewest deaths) of the range from 22%% to 29.8%%.

Since we know from comparing the censuses that Murphy’s prediction was actually cautious in the sense of predicting fewer deaths than did occur, it is reasonable to conclude that he was cautious in selecting his time frame to determine the death rate, i.e., it is reasonable to assume that his death rate was on the
cautious side of the 20–30%% range. That also is consistent with the death rate of 24%%.

That is the death rate used as a benchmark to check the results of the census calculations.

SOURCES:

American – according to the Office of the Chief Historian, European Command, Frankfurt, 1947; in the Center for Military History, Washington. Also Patterson Papers, LC. Both courtesy of Dr Ernest F. Fisher, Arlington. Soviet – according to Maschke, Bulanov Report and Soviet delegate to CFM, 1947. Allow deaths and holdbacks of 131,000. French – according to Buisson, Appendix 4. Less deaths estimated by author of 57,000. British – according to UK delegate to CFM, 1947.
²
Yugoslavia, etc. – according to Maschke, Vol. XV, p. 296. Allow for deaths and holdbacks of 35,000.

2: O
THER
D
EATHS AMONG
G
ERMANS

Beyond the deaths totalled in the text, there were certainly other deaths among the Germans after May 1945. Those who died included some prisoners who had not been covered in the Adenauer–Bitter survey that showed 1.4 million missing soldiers, paramilitary personnel and civilians. Also, there were probably more than the reported 2.1 million deaths among the expellees.

And there were many Germans who died in Germany during the first year and a half of Allied occupation, from spring 1945 to October 1946.

The Murphy estimate of two million deaths to come soon after 1947 is based on his knowledge of ‘the present high death rate in Germany’.
Murphy knew the death rate for a considerable period leading
up to October 1946
. This rate was 24 per thousand per year.

The conclusion from this death rate is simple: at the very minimum, about 1,900,000 persons of the
c.
65 million German population in the Occupied Zones died in the period August 1945–October 1946.
³
But the official West German figures for deaths in the three western zones was 786,000.
⁴
No comparable statistical summaries have been published for the Soviet zone but conditions there, e.g. rations, were not greatly different from those in the west. The Soviet zone had about 39 per cent of the population of the western zones, so the estimate of deaths there is about 306,000. Thus, in the period August 1945–October 1946, when the death rate of 24%% derived from Murphy’s figures shows that the death toll must have been around 1,900,000, the official reports show only about 1,092,000. Once again, many people are probably missing/not accounted for. If Murphy was correct in these figures which were never disputed by any of the occupying powers, then between August 1945 and October 1946
about 800,000 Germans died but were not reported dead in the Allied statistics.

As we have seen, hundreds of thousands of other Europeans died in the camps. The Soviets alone reported the deaths of some 160,000.

The figure of 1.4 million missing was based by the Adenauer government on research work done by the Committee on prisoner of war questions (Ausschuß für Kriegsgefangenenfragen) headed by Dr Margarethe Bitter of Munich in the late 1940s. Dr Bitter told the author in 1991 that her survey covered some 94 per cent of all families in the three western zones, plus about 30 per cent of the 19 million people in the Soviet zone. Rüdiger Overmans has written that no one from the Soviet zone responded. Both agree that no one was surveyed in the seized territories, where at least 1 million and perhaps as many as 4.5 million Germans avoided expulsion. An unknown number of prisoners is therefore missing from those families.

The survey when completed
pro rata
should show between 1.7 and 1.9 million missing. The author has taken the lower figure as sufficient for his purpose.

3: T
HE
F
ATE OF THE
E
XPELLEES

NOTE:
This is a point-form summary of the evidence concerning deaths of Germans, mainly expellees, from August 1945 to October 1946, some of it from documents newly declassified in the US.

1) The French delegate at the Council of Foreign Ministers in April 1947 said that 4.5 million expellees had arrived (as at October 1946) and that 2 million were expected to come in the near future.
⁵

2) US Senator Homer E. Capehart said in the US Senate on 5 February 1946 that already 3 million expellees were Missing/ Not Accounted For.
⁶

3)
The members of the Committee Against Mass Expulsions in New York said that on the basis of the 1946 census, around 4.8 million expellees were Missing/Not Accounted For. This was published in their book
The Land of the Dead
, with an Introduction signed by nineteen prominent Americans, among them H. V. Kaltenborn, Dorothy Thompson and John Dewey. They estimated that 4.8 million had died by the end of 1947. (Infant mortality in Brandenburg province was estimated at 80–90 per cent in autumn 1945. Infant mortality throughout Germany for the year to the spring of 1946 was reported to Hoover to be 30 per cent.)
⁷

The Catholic bishops of the United States, meeting in Washington on 16 November 1946, said that, ‘We boast of our democracy, but in this transplantation of peoples we have perhaps unwittingly allowed ourselves to be influenced by the herd theory of heartless totalitarian political philosophy.’
⁸
The Catholic bishops were on strong ground, for accusations of this same crime of deportation of peoples had been levelled by the Allies themselves against the Nazis at Nuremberg. Count Three of Section J of the Indictment against Göring, Ribbentrop and others, reads: ‘In certain occupied territories purportedly annexed to Germany, the defendants methodically and pursuant to plan endeavored to assimilate those territories politically, culturally, socially and economically into the German Reich, and the defendants endeavored to obliterate the former national character of these territories …’ The CAME authors added, ‘It is inconceivable that the United States government would endorse policies for which the Nazi leaders were tried and hanged under American auspices.’ Yet that is what happened.
⁹

4) Finally, for the Polish-administered areas of (former) Germany: the Soviet delegate said at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in April 1947 that 5.7 million expellees had probably as of October 1946) left Polish-administered areas since Potsdam, and 400,000 remained behind. This is amply confirmed by the report of the Canadian Legation in Warsaw at 25
January 1949. The Canadians were told by the Poles that as of June 1947, only 289,000 ethnic Germans remained in the former German territories taken over by Poland.
¹⁰

Murphy said that there had been originally 7 million potential expellees there, which would mean that the Missing/Not Accounted For were 0.9 million from 7 million in two years. Prorating to all of the 14/15 million refugees, we see a total of Missing/Not Accounted For of over 2 million from July 1945 to October 1946. Many millions were still left to endure the hardships of the trek after that.
¹¹

4: H
OW
G
OVERNMENTS
S
PY ON
W
RITERS

Some parts of this appeared in the essay ‘A Truth So Terrible’ in
Abuse
Your Illusions
, Russ Kick, ed., The Disinformation Company, New York, 2003, or in
Other Losses
, revised, Little, Brown, 1999.

In the autumn of 1989, my wife Elisabeth and I were staying in the villa of friends in the south of France. The phone was making strange sounds, so that it was difficult to hear. I called the telephone company, and they said they would send a repairman. The following day, as Elisabeth and I were leaving the house, we noticed a man in a suit with a briefcase standing in the driveway. I asked him what he wanted and he said he was looking for the Villa Autran. I said that it was the villa he had just seen us leaving, that we were the occupants, and asked him if he had come about the phone. He said yes, and I told him the villa was open and he could go in and fix it while we were out. That night, the phone worked fine.

The next day, I saw a blue and yellow phone company truck in the road just past the driveway, and a man in uniform with tools hanging from his belt. Suddenly I remembered the incident from the day before, so I asked the uniformed man if he was the regular repairman for the area. He said yes, except when he was on holiday and someone else took over. I asked if he had been told
to fix my phone and he said no. Then I remembered that there had been no telephone company truck in or near the driveway the day before.

Elisabeth and I talked it over and could not make it out. I saw no point in calling the phone company because they could say only that they knew nothing about it.

A few days later I was on the phone – the same phone – to my publisher in Toronto, Nelson Doucet. I told him about a discovery I had recently made about the prisoners, and my opinion of it. I also told him this was secret.

A few days after that, I was talking by phone – again, the same phone – to Sir John Keegan in London about a mistake he had made in reviewing my book, and he told me, ‘But you think …’ and went on to repeat what I had told Doucet. I was dumbfounded. How had he known that? Elisabeth and I discussed it and I said the place was bugged, but she pooh-poohed the idea. I could hardly believe it myself. For that to be true, I thought, the French would have to know about my book, which had not even been published in France. Then they would have had to realize I was in France, and then track me down. And the villa we were in was not rented – it was borrowed, and the phone was in the name of the owners. To the French police, I believed, I was just a tourist who had been there many times before, and represented no danger. Why then would someone bug my phone, and keep recording all the calls – always in English – and analyze them?

Above all, why phone Sir John Keegan and tell him? This was the most preposterous thing of all. But then, how did he know what I had told Doucet in confidence? Did he guess? Did someone phone him? Did Doucet blab? But Doucet is a discreet, loyal and courageous publisher. I could not imagine him doing such a thing. The whole affair seemed so bizarre that I simply had to dismiss it. So I did nothing about it for five years.

Then, in 1994, my editor at
Saturday Night
magazine, John Fraser, suggested that I meet Rod Stamler, a forensic accountant who had been until recently an Assistant Deputy Commissioner in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Over lunch in Toronto,
Stamler said he already knew about me. He said that after the publication of my book
Other Losses
in September 1989, ‘You were targeted right away.’

Stamler knew what he was talking about because he had been in one of the agencies that had done the spying. I told Stamler the story about me and Nelson Doucet. He explained how it was done. He said that the Americans were ‘on to you as soon as you published.’ He told me that as soon as I had arrived in Paris, the French police, who had been warned by the Americans, entered my hotel room and copied or read what they wanted and bugged the room. From then on it was easy to trace me in France.

He then explained the phone calls. The Americans routinely listen to all the international calls that interest them. They tape-record these calls, which are listened to by computers which are able to recognize key words. The computers are so sophisticated now, he said, that they have syntax built in. They distinguish between ‘fall’ as a verb and ‘fall’ as a season. If a phone call contains the key word or clusters of key words that interest them, the tape is turned over to a human being for analysis. The Canadians do the same thing. The French do the same thing. The British, Norwegians and others do the same thing. Since the Americans and Canadians (and presumably the others) are forbidden by their laws to bug their own citizens without a court order, they must either get that order, listen illegally, or not listen at all.

Not to listen is, for these spies, inconceivable. So, Stamler said, the Americans listen to Canadian calls, and the Canadians to American calls, all the time. The Canadians then offer the Americans everything they have and vice versa. Technically, no law is broken. And this is so routine now that the words Stamler used to describe it were ‘they publish this,’ meaning they exchange it regularly in an organized and prearranged manner, but, of course, always within narrow and secret limits.

This capacity naturally applies to all information that is transferred digitally or by satellite, such as bank transfers, faxes, e-mail on the Internet, TV signals – anything. While this is fairly common knowledge now, it certainly was news to me then. So far as
I can judge, it still is against the law.