Crimes and Mercies

More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II—one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. That these deaths occurred at all is still being denied by Western governments.At the same time, Herbert Hoover and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King created the largest charity in history, a food-aid program that saved an estimated 800 million lives during three years of global struggle against post–World War II famine—a program they had to struggle for years to make accessible to the German people, who had been excluded from it as a matter of official Allied policy.Never before had such revenge been known. Never before had such compassion been shown. The first English-speaking writer to gain access to the newly opened KGB archives in Moscow and to recently declassified information from the renowned Hoover Institution in California, James Bacque tells the extraordinary story of what happened to these people and why.Revised and updated for this new edition, bestseller Crimes and Mercies was first published by Little, Brown in the U.K. in 1997.

For Germany, the end of World War II occurred officially on 8th May 1945; but the end of suffering did not. Using recently released documents from the USA and detailed research in the Moscow archives, the author shows how millions of Germans died unnecessarily - from starvation, disease and forced homelessness. The Red Army in the east took revenge for the crimes of the Nazis, as did the French and Americans in the west. The governments responsible have never acknowledged any mass deaths. Bacque argues that the Allies came not as liberators and rescuers, but as judges and avengers.