Right-Wing Pseudohistory: Part 1
Eisenhower's Nonexistent Death Camps
Note: Many of my statements will just have page numbers in parentheses rather than links. All of these page numbers come from the book "Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood,” edited by Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose and published in 1992. This book was published as a rebuttal to James Bacque’s “Other Losses,” the 1989 book that is the origin of Yarvin’s claim (though Yarvin ignores parts of Bacque’s thesis, like it being Eisenhower’s personal decision and the total noncomplicity of the British).
A few days ago, Curtis Yarvin wrote an X thread alleging the United States intentionally starved hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war to death in 1945 in concentration camps on the Rhine.
Once you strip away the many verbal flourishes carefully devoid of evidence or positive1 claims but designed to make the reader think they are learning secret hidden knowledge, his argument can be summed up as follows:
The Rhine Meadow Camps were called concentration camps. Concentration camp is a descriptive term, literally meaning “where you concentrate a group of people.” It does not imply death camps.
The death rate at one of the Japanese internment camps in the US was 5/1000 people/year. Since conditions at the camps were worse than at the Japanese internment camps in the US, the implication is that the true death rate at these camps must have been higher, though Yarvin doesn’t give a number. But that implication is wrong; most deaths occur among the old, very young, or sick, and German military prisoners were almost all reasonably healthy adult men, while the Japanese internment camps included the entire population. More importantly, the Rhine Meadow Camps were only atrociously bad for a few months, before the Allied forces got properly organized.
German troops were not classified as POWs to dodge the Geneva convention. This is actually true, for the simple reason that the Geneva convention required feeding POWs as much as your own base soldiers, and there was literally not enough food in Europe to feed the five million or so German POWs in the West the same as their British or American counterparts.
One observer said the camps looked like Andersonville. They did, in the sense of being basically open fields surrounded by barbed wire with minimal facilities. But lack of facilities is not fatal; Andersonville had a death rate of 28% because of disease (much more easily controlled in 1945 than 1865) and because prisoners were in there for years. The Rhine camps were only open for a few months, and conditions were only egregiously bad there from April to July of 1945.
Yarvin personally “would expect a death rate of 50% per year.” This is based on absolutely nothing.
Some Wikipedia editor called the official death rate of 3-4/1000 people/year the “official death rate” and not the “death rate” and this implies serious doubt rather than mere linguistic precision. There is doubt as to the exact numbers, but it’s factor-of-two doubt, not factor-of-200 as Yarvin needs it to be.
You might notice something missing: any real evidence at all. Yarvin’s entire case is innuendo based on Wikipedia article word choice, eyeballing the picture, and the purely verbal comparison to Andersonville. Based on this, Yarvin alleges the “bureaucratic murder of hundreds of thousands of people, successfully covered up.”
The original source of this claim, which unlike Yarvin actually does provide (extremely selectively quoted and misinterpreted, but real) evidence, is the 1989 book Other Losses by Canadian novelist James Bacque, which further alleges that this was an American and French conspiracy alone, with no involvement from the British (this despite the fact that many of Eisenhower’s staff officers, who would have been fully involved, were British).
The idea that hundreds of thousands (Bacque alleged a million) of Germans were starved to death in American custody in a few months (April-July) in 1945 is frankly absurd. For comparison, about 1 million German POWs total died in Soviet hands (19). This in the context of an apocalyptic (approximately 60% of Soviet POWs in German hands died, mostly through deliberate starvation) race war, in a country with far fewer resources (about a million Russians starved to death in 1946/47, after the war, to say nothing of the mass starvation during it), a regime that had zero compunction about killing people en masse in peacetime and took place over the course of 14 years (1941-1955, when the last German POWs were released from the USSR).
The idea that this could have could have been covered up is even worse. WWII in the West is one of the most well-documented events in history, and we have thousands of memoirs, orders, unit histories, government reports from every major power including Germany, and copious statistics on the subject. The alleged mass deaths (and presumably, graves) occurred square in the middle of one of the most densely populated parts of Europe. Millions of German citizens spent time in American custody, and the fate of the POWs was a major political issue postwar. Occupation policy in Germany after the war was closely coordinated by the United Nations; four different allied armies (US, Britain, France, USSR), in addition to millions of West Germans, would have had to collude to hide this, not to mention that US soldiers, who went against orders to give German kids candy bars, would have to be willing to do it in the first place (they might have been willing in Japan, but not Germany).
The nonfraternization policy proved impossible to enforce. Eisenhower said so directly in a June 2 letter to Marshall. There was no way to keep the GIs from fraternizing with small children; Eisenhower said it was “simply silly” to forbid soldiers to talk to or give candy bars or chewing gum to German children. In July, official orders on nonfraternization were amended to include the phrase “‘except small children,” and ultimately the nonfraternization policy became a major embarrassment and was quietly dropped. (34)
Many Americans had family in Germany (one of the motivators for the restoration of mail service after the war). There was even a Pope (Benedict XVI) who was in one of these camps. The Soviets, operating in a comparative wasteland that was then repeatedly fought over and with a far stronger tradition of secrecy and no other countries to deal with couldn’t even cover up Katyn (approximately 1/20th the size of the alleged German genocide). Yarvin’s story is akin to someone claiming there was a hidden genocide of Russians in Lithuania in the 1990s; so ridiculous that claiming it is a sure marker of a liar or a complete ignoramus.
What Actually Happened
The core problem facing the US army in Germany in 1945 was the following:
The numbers of German prisoners taken by U.S. forces shot up from 313,000 to 2.6 million in early April, 1945, then to more than 5 million a month later. These masses created vast problems for the Allies. By the terms of the Geneva Convention, which the United States had signed and which had the force of a treaty, SHAEF was required to feed German prisoners a ration equal to that of its own base soldiers. SHAEF had insufficient resources to meet those requirements. (9)
American military logistics and administration worked miracles in WWII, but properly dealing with millions of German soldiers surrendering in a few months, millions more than had been expected because so many fled the Soviets, was too much to handle perfectly. The US was also primarily responsible for feeding the civilian population of Germany and an additional 20 million displaced persons and refugees, not to mention the ongoing war in the Pacific (which took up a huge proportion of available shipping) and stopping the rest of Europe from starving.
What is pertinent to this discussion on postwar hunger is that dietary levels lower than the 1,800- to 2,000-calorie minimum do not lead immediately to starvation. If they did, then only the citizens of a few isolated nations such as Switzerland and Sweden, which were almost alone in being above the 2,000-calorie mark on the Continent after the war, would have escaped hunger edema of massive proportions. (98)
In the face of very limited shipping, near-universal hunger in Europe, and far more prisoners than were expected or could be reasonably handled, both the US and Britain chose not to classify their millions of German captives as POWs to avoid the legal obligation to feed them the same rations as their own troops. Not to starve them; merely to feed them less than their own soldiers2.
Furthermore, Allied policy (and this was Allied policy, not just American or Eisenhower alone) was to prioritize their own troops, other displaced persons, and liberated nations above Germany (74). This meant Germany got last crack at food imports; JCS 1067 explicitly said that German living conditions should be no better than any of their liberated conquests, and several American commanders expressed that sentiment that Germans should suffer (though explicitly not starve or face epidemics), for their conduct during the war (this was when Germany’s actual death camps were being discovered). All of this was exacerbated by the fact that several million additional German civilians fled from Eastern Europe and the Soviet occupation zone to the American and French zones, and the fact that one of the major food producing regions of Germany was occupied by the Soviets. Eisenhower, who understood conditions in Germany much better than Allied leadership, did his best to get more imports into Germany (74).
German POWs also could not just be released because of the denazification policy decided before the surrender (which, in retrospect, was too impractical and partly rolled back as a result). Nazis had to be identified before they could be let go, which took time in a very overstretched administrative environment.
This legal and logistical context is why German POWs were not classified as POWs and suffered in muddy fields surrounded by barbed wire with inadequate food for several months. This could have ended disastrously. Only timely US intervention saved ~200,000 Germans held in French camps from starving (152), and the annualized death rate for the worst six weeks (May 1 to June 15 1945) in the 16 worst camps (the infamously overcrowded Rhine Meadow Camps) “would have been 35.6 per thousand, or 3.56 percent.” But these conditions did not continue (90). Allied officials fortunately got the situation under control before major disease outbreaks or starvation occurred, and there were no mass deaths.
After the war, the West German government was very concerned with verifying the fates of missing Germans, with the “missing million” being a major political issue. These missing men had millions of loved ones and relatives of their own, and so “there were rumors of secret POW camps from which no messages could be sent. ‘Where are the lost millions?’ and ‘Where are the vanished divisions?’ were questions voiced often.” (133) Furthermore, pensions for widows and orphans as well as inheritance of property depended on an official declaration of death, giving even more reason to figure things out. As a result, the German government set up the Maschke Commission3, a team of historians, to look into the fates of German prisoners, which they did from 1962-1974. Their findings on the supposedly genocidal Rhineland camps were that it was impossible for there to have been more than 10,000 deaths (2% of the total), and it could have been lower, though the official American numbers were probably too low.
Yarvin’s hundreds of thousands of dead and Bacque’s million are off by a factor of 1-200. Not a trivial mistake. German POW deaths were approximately distributed as per the Maschke Commission4 as follows:
Of the occupying Western powers, death rates were highest among French prisoners, both because of lack of resources and because the French were not feeling merciful after the occupation and made the most extensive use of “labor reparations” (a euphemism for corvee labor or temporary slavery). Britain had the best record, with US deaths being about 4x higher (entirely because of the Rhine Meadow Camps) but still very low in absolute terms. Yarvin’s alternate timeline in which Eisenhower and Truman were as murderous as Stalin is nowhere to be found.
Other reports give similar numbers:
Böhme reports that the European theater of operations provost marshal listed a total of 15,285 prisoners who died in American hands. In 1950 the Suchdienst (Tracing Service) of the German Red Cross reported that 100,000 members of the Wehrmacht remained missing on the western front, a number that included both battle losses and deaths in prison camps. In 1974, the German Red Cross reported that of the 1,743,000 missing in action (MIAs) for both eastern and western fronts, 2.35 percent, or about 41,000 men, were last reported in western Germany, where all the transient camps were located. (91)
Given the known numbers and distribution of unaccounted-for German soldiers above, the highest plausible total death rate of German POWs in American hands during WWII was around 1%, with about 56,000 out of five million dying (20). This is about the same as the American POW death rate in German hands. For context, around 30% of Americans and British in Japanese hands or Germans in Soviet hands died, as did 60% of Soviets in German hands. It’s easy to see why Germans were so desperate to surrender to Yarvin’s genocidal New Deal regime in 1945.
Yarvin just made his numbers up, but the original source of the Eisenhower death camp myth, Bacque, did have a rationale, which is that there were hundreds of thousands of prisoners listed as “other losses” in US records (hence the title of his book). He interpreted that to mean deaths, but it was actually a mix of Volkssturm released irregularly and transfers to other US commands or occupying powers.
The August report lists the numbers of DEFs discharged by United States forces (2,083,500) and those transferred to the British and French (1,178,415), mostly to be used as labor. The report continues, “An additional group of 663,576 are listed as ‘other losses’, consisting largely of members of the Volkssturm released without formal discharge” (23)
Once that error is corrected, Bacque’s paper genocide disappears:
His method of reaching the Big Number therefore deserves examination. He asserts that roughly a million German prisoners—the “Missing Million” —disappeared from European theater of operations (ETO) records between two reports issued on June 2, 1945.° In the first, the grand total of prisoners “‘in U.S. custody, ETO” is given as 2,870,400, and in the second, “Total PWs on hand in COM Z”’ is given as 1,836,000. But the Communications Zone (COM Z) was a subordinate command of the ETO, and its total omitted the million or so prisoners held by the armies and army groups. Moreover, both reports state exactly the same number of prisoners for which the ETO is responsible overall—3,193,747. To judge by these documents, there was no Missing Million. There was not even a Missing One. (79)
While this is independent of the issue of the nonexistent death camps, Yarvin also claimed the hunger in Germany 1945-1948 showed genocidal intent on the part of the US (rather than what it actually reflected, a decision to prioritize the rest of Europe in the face of sharply limited food and transportation), so it’s worth pointing out that we have mortality statistics from West Germany. By 1947 civilian mortality was at the pre-war level, and by 1948 it was below it.
Germany 1945-1948 was hungry and miserable, but not starving, and certainly not starving as a result of genocidal US policy.
Wrapping Things Up
After fabricating a nonexistent genocide based on approximately nothing, Yarvin has the gall to ask how this was hidden (the correct answer, that it didn’t happen, being excluded).
This post is what inspired me to write this. I hate historical blood libels with a passion. That applies to fake genocides in Canadian residential schools, absurdly inflated death numbers in King Leopold’s Congo, the $45 trillion not stolen from British India, the elevation of the Tulsa race riot to a massacre, and to this garbage. The only reason to fabricate past atrocities is to justify future hostilities, and Yarvin is defaming, at minimum, tens of thousands of American soldiers in the process. And then to snidely imply that the coverup of this nonexistent mass murder is the interesting part?
An Aside: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Criticism of Western conduct in WWII is not taboo. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, strategic bombing, and Japanese internment are three of the five parts of WWII (the other two being the Holocaust and D-Day) regularly taught in US middle and high school classes, and the morality and efficacy of the first two are hotly debated. This was even more true during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, the Soviet-friendly Western Left with its strong representation in academia, journalism, and entertainment, and most of all the Third Worldists (who tended to claim the US, Britain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union were all fundamentally the same as white imperialists) often equated the US and British Empire to discredited and defeated Nazi Germany, and even today there’s a (wrong) mainstream narrative that the USSR effectively won WWII solo5 while the US and Britain pointlessly killed civilians and claimed all the credit. And yet no one ever claimed anything like Yarvin’s fictional genocide until 1989, even though a million Germans starved in camps after the war is a far better match for Nazi conduct than what’s usually brought up: the Bengal Famine, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and strategic bombing6. So not only are practically the entire population of West Germany and the US, French, and British forces in Europe in on our conspiracy of silence, but the Soviet Union, their sympathizers, and the broader anti-West left are too.
Why?
This is far from the only piece of WWII pseudo-history that’s become common on the online right. It’s not hard to see why; while most of the really disastrous decisions were made 1963-73, anti-racism in particular became overwhelmingly dominant thanks to WWII, and is currently killing the West. Many right-wingers thus side with the Axis7. But they’re not actually willing to break with conventional post-Christian and post-World War morality8, in which aggressive war and mass killing is, in and of itself, evil, which is something of a problem, since both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did a lot of both. So instead we get tortured alternate histories in which Roosevelt deliberately provoked Pearl Harbor, Hitler was forced into a war he didn’t want, and the US ran death camps in 1945 Germany9.
With Yarvin, there’s more to it. Yarvin’s biggest ideological commitment is to undivided power, which is supposed to lead on its own (independent of demographics, even, hence his love of colonial Africa) to both pleasant and great societies, while divided power, especially democracy, leads to hell, or at least Brazil. This sort of sounds plausible if you look at the post-Cold War era10, but is obviously absurd if you look at the 19th and 20th centuries, in which the US and Britain, exemplars of what Yarvin hates, were clearly among the most successful and humane societies in the world and all of human history, while states ruled by a single man committed some of histories’ most insane (eg Soviet whale slaughter) and evil acts.
To get around this, he’s constructed an entire elaborate anti-American historical mythology11, one in which the US is primarily responsible for the decline of monarchy in Europe, both the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, Mao’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, decolonization, WWII, and the Cold War (in which the USSR was actually a puppet of the US left, another insane belief). But even that’s not enough; indirectly killing tens of millions via Communism doesn’t indite American democracy sufficiently, so Yarvin resorts to the Third Worldist approach of declaring all empires basically the same.
In the case of WWII, where this was not even remotely true (all major combatants had big differences both internally and externally), this requires inventing American death camps. And so here we are.
Yarvin says “read JCS 1067” to understand the “genocidal vibe” of the New Deal regime. I’m confident Yarvin hasn’t read it, but you can read the version that went into effect (April 26th, 1945) yourself here. This is the key paragraph:
As a member of the Control Council and as zone commander, you will be guided by the principle that controls upon the German economy may be imposed to the extent that such controls may be necessary to achieve the objectives enumerated in paragraph 4 above and also as they may be essential to protect the safety and meet the needs of the occupying forces and assure the production and maintenance of goods and services required to prevent starvation or such disease and unrest as would endanger these forces. No action will be taken in execution of the reparations program or otherwise which [Page 488] would tend to support basic living conditions in Germany or in your zone on a higher level than that existing in any one of the neighboring United Nations.
In short, at a time when Europe was desperately short on everything, prioritize non-German countries for limited resources, except as necessary to prevent starvation or disease and unrest. This is entirely reasonable in April 1945, and not in any way genocidal.
It says something about the legalistic nature of the Anglo-Saxon mind that both countries created a legal loophole rather than just ignore the Geneva Convention like everyone else, including France, did.
Erich Maschke, the leader of the commission, was a POW for 8 years in the Soviet Union.
Quoting from page 155 “The figures are intended, rather, to give the scale of mortalities. It is quite possible that the number of deaths in any one country or altogether may exceed the stated numbers by several tens of thousands, without in any way casting suspicion on the calculative methods used by the Maschke Commission.” WWII was absolutely colossal in scale and while the big picture is very well documented, tens of thousands of people falling through the cracks, especially given the Eastern Front, is entirely plausible.
Even the surrender of Japan is credited to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
And this is not just Germans being seen as acceptable victims. Germans being subhuman scum who had everything coming only became a semi-mainstream left-wing opinion in the last decade. During the Cold War, with the ideological struggle paramount, everyone made a clear distinction between Nazism and the German people. Dresden and Hamburg were widely, though not universally, condemned as soon as they happened, and city bombing of Germany is one of the crimes often laid at the feet of the Western Allies.
It’s not hard to make a right-wing anti-Axis case (for instance, the Empire of Japan was by far the most anti-white world power in 1939), but I don’t think the conflicts of WWII are relevant today, and the truth of what happened is independent of the political implications.
This does not apply to right-wingers who are happy to bite that bullet.
This is not to say WWII Western Allied conduct is unimpeachable; the attack on the French fleet, city bombing in Germany, and playing nice with Stalin all immediately come to mind. These aren’t enough from some pro-Axis right-wingers, but have the benefit of actually having happened.
Though only if you don’t think too hard. Yarvin was and is a huge Russia/Putin-ophile, and Russia has not had a great 21st century. Ultimately, democracy has big intrinsic problems (pensions), but form of government matters way less than demographics or Communism.
One almost perfectly symmetrical with very similar Communist mythologies. In both cases, the failure of the ideology is blamed on the US becoming powerful for other reasons (colonialism in the Communist case, race in Yarvin’s. Here, at least, Yarvin is basically correct; I don’t think American institutions are particularly great), then intervening to crush competitors. Both are wrong.
If I knew nothing about Yarvin I would just assume he was engaging in communist apologia for the Soviet camps. In many cases, if a German soldier ended up in a Soviet camp, the death rate was as high as 90%. Very few German soldiers ever returned home. Yarvin's equivocation is insulting to their memory.
Perfect rebuttal to this nonsense.
Your characterization of the moral and historical contortions which bubble up in the pro-Nazi online right were really on point. Nothing more to say about it really, except thanks.