Souveniers taken from the dead in time of war

[bob lembke]

I take it from your silence Bob, that you feel unable to share the issue you PBI'd me on a while ago ? A pity, it would no doubt have been received with some interest.

Kind regards,

Harry

Harry;

As this is a forum on the Great War, I felt that the topic was "a bridge too far", allthough I am a master of the Off Topic comment. It also is a topic that is personally sensitive to myself for several reasons. As you have brought it up, and possibly kindled some curiousity in some Pals, I will mention what I mentioned to you, although I do not think that this Forum, or at least this sub-forum, is the right place to discuss this.

I had mentioned to Harry that, at the conclusion of WW II, I understand that 1.8 million German servicemen survived the war with their units, but never got home alive. Among these men were members of my family. I don't recall if I also mentioned it, but the death rate (people killed per year) in my family was about 60 times as high during the six months following the cessation of hostilities and during the six years of the war; the latter deaths from both soldiers killed at the front and civilian family killed in bombings. (I must state that in the above business, both on the global scale and on the level of my family, the Brits behaved relatively very well.)

The other reason I am sensitive about this was that I mentioned this on another forum in a fashion that was On Topic, on a forum that did cover WW II, and my post was moved from a war sub-forum to the Holocaust sub-forum (which I had never visited) and I was in essence put on trial, and like the fool that I am I defended myself and my information, and I was found guilty (of something ?) by a self-appointed jury of American super-patriots who were not even capable of arithmetic. The experience was so bitter that I rarely since have visited that forum, despite some "outreach" by a moderator.

I want to mention that my family almost never spoke of these matters, certainly to me, and when they ever spoke of these times they recounted affectionate anecdotes and jokes, not bitter stories.

Bob Lembke

I take it from your silence Bob, that you feel unable to share the issue you PBI'd me on a while ago ? A pity, it would no doubt have been received with some interest.

Kind regards,

Harry

Harry;

As this is a forum on the Great War, I felt that the topic was "a bridge too far", allthough I am a master of the Off Topic comment. It also is a topic that is personally sensitive to myself for several reasons. As you have brought it up, and possibly kindled some curiousity in some Pals, I will mention what I mentioned to you, although I do not think that this Forum, or at least this sub-forum, is the right place to discuss this.

I had mentioned to Harry that, at the conclusion of WW II, I understand that 1.8 million German servicemen survived the war with their units, but never got home alive. Among these men were members of my family. I don't recall if I also mentioned it, but the death rate (people killed per year) in my family was about 60 times as high during the six months following the cessation of hostilities and during the six years of the war; the latter deaths from both soldiers killed at the front and civilian family killed in bombings. (I must state that in the above business, both on the global scale and on the level of my family, the Brits behaved relatively very well.)

The other reason I am sensitive about this was that I mentioned this on another forum in a fashion that was On Topic, on a forum that did cover WW II, and my post was moved from a war sub-forum to the Holocaust sub-forum (which I had never visited) and I was in essence put on trial, and like the fool that I am I defended myself and my information, and I was found guilty (of something ?) by a self-appointed jury of American super-patriots who were not even capable of arithmetic. The experience was so bitter that I rarely since have visited that forum, despite some "outreach" by a moderator.

I want to mention that my family almost never spoke of these matters, certainly to me, and when they ever spoke of these times they recounted affectionate anecdotes and jokes, not bitter stories.

Bob Lembke

Sorry. Damn my computer in its present crippled state.

Bob

[Beau Geste]

Hello Bob,

I would like to say that I admire your honesty and courage to place this posting on The Forum. I hope you don't feel I pushed you into it. When you mentioned it to me in a personal message I immediately felt pals should be invited to comment on what you said. You have now given them this opportunity and for that I admire and thank you. Kind Regards

Harry

As this is a forum on the Great War, I felt that the topic was "a bridge too far", allthough I am a master of the Off Topic comment. It also is a topic that is personally sensitive to myself for several reasons. As you have brought it up, and possibly kindled some curiousity in some Pals, I will mention what I mentioned to you, although I do not think that this Forum, or at least this sub-forum, is the right place to discuss this.

I had mentioned to Harry that, at the conclusion of WW II, I understand that 1.8 million German servicemen survived the war with their units, but never got home alive. Among these men were members of my family. I don't recall if I also mentioned it, but the death rate (people killed per year) in my family was about 60 times as high during the six months following the cessation of hostilities and during the six years of the war; the latter deaths from both soldiers killed at the front and civilian family killed in bombings. (I must state that in the above business, both on the global scale and on the level of my family, the Brits behaved relatively very well.)

The other reason I am sensitive about this was that I mentioned this on another forum in a fashion that was On Topic, on a forum that did cover WW II, and my post was moved from a war sub-forum to the Holocaust sub-forum (which I had never visited) and I was in essence put on trial, and like the fool that I am I defended myself and my information, and I was found guilty (of something ?) by a self-appointed jury of American super-patriots who were not even capable of arithmetic. The experience was so bitter that I rarely since have visited that forum, despite some "outreach" by a moderator.

I want to mention that my family almost never spoke of these matters, certainly to me, and when they ever spoke of these times they recounted affectionate anecdotes and jokes, not bitter stories.

Bob Lembke

Sorry. Damn my computer in its present crippled state.

Bob

[PhilB]

I had mentioned to Harry that, at the conclusion of WW II, I understand that 1.8 million German servicemen survived the war with their units, but never got home alive.

Bob, if you find this figure credible, what do you suspect happened to these men and where?

[linden]

Hello Bob .

I would imagine that very large numbers of people died moving from the East and that this movement would have continued after the end of the war . Many of them must have disappeared on the journey .

I remember refugees arriving until the Berlin wall was built .

What proportion of the deaths occurred amongst those who were held in Russia for several years ?

POW's held in the UK didn't return home until after 1948 .

I've also seen accounts of the horrifyingly cold winter after the war , in which , again , many must have died .

The third topic is one that I hadn't heard about until I got access to all the TV history channels . Apparently , some of the most fanatical Nazis trained terrorists to carry on fighting after the war . They were dropped behind the lines of the advancing British and Americans and many did manage to carry on isolated attacks for a couple of years , often targetting Germans .

I have German friends who lost family in the last 3 days of the war , but it took months and years to discover what had happened to them . So much of Europe ended the war scattered apart , and in the wrong place . How anyone ever found their family again mystifies me .

There must also have been many atrocities .

And , does anyone know how many "disappeared" to South America ?

Regards,

Linden

[bob lembke]

QUOTE (Phil_B @ Dec 17 2007, 01:12 PM)

Bob, if you find this figure credible, what do you suspect happened to these men and where?

Phil;

This is a tough one to research. The western Allies, or at least the Americans, did not keep files or records of individual prisoners. In other words, the actual identity of men in an American POW camp was not kept, I believe. The author of a book mentioned below states that he has an affidavit from a US military archivist that says when the war-time records from Europe were moved to the US he and others went thru 17 1/2 miles of files to remove and destroy all documents touching on these events. A Canadian journalist wrote a book about this. He was researching the life of a remarkable French Resistance hero, who saved over 1000 Jews, literally one by one, while he was the major of a small French town during the war. While working in the mayor's files, the writer found a set of post-war postcards from two Germans. Puzzled, he asked the mayor, and it turned out, the mayor had saved not only 1000+ Jews during the war, but also saved two German POWs after the war. Intrigued, the writer first wrote a book about the post-war prisoner question, and then returned and wrote a book about the French mayor.

(I have not looked at the book in years, and the title and author do not immediately come to mind, and the book is not in my WW I library, which is the room I am in and in the hallway outside, but rather in an office that I have largely abandoned, partially due to piles of books that make it hard to reach.)

Now, the story the Canadian told jibed with the story of my cousin Siegfried in Wisconsin, and so I sent him a copy, and he read part of it, and stopped, and I beat him with a stick, and he supposedly finished it. He said that he was in a number of the camps described, that everything that he read was accurate, except that some of the daily death rates cited were too low, and I got some other detail. Then he clammed up, and has not discussed the topic since. He is afraid of the US government, and when we talk and I criticize the fiasco in Iraq he gets upset; he is afraid that the FBI or someone is listening. I visited recently and brought a tape recorder (more for family history, not this stuff), and his family told him not to even let him know that I have a tape recorder. Incidentally, almost the entire family of his wife was killed after the war; her father, a POW, died in a camp.

Basically, as far as I know (no one knows this accurately, not by accident) the conditions for most POWs in the west were, after the war, roughly sub-Andersonville, and many of those in these camps died. The French asked for 1 1/4 million slave laborers, but were only sent 900,000. Having no experience with slave labor, they seem to have killed about 300,000 in a year with little work produced. My cousin and my father's best friend (not a soldier) was sent to France as labor, and both got back, my cousin almost dying, but saved by a French officer who had been a POW of the Germans for five years and who told his POWs that he had been treated perfectly correctly as a POW and what was happening to them was a war crime, and who worked hard to save them, even taking them on route marches to improve their condition once they were fit for it.

Western people looking at this question (the few) said, basically: "Yea, lots of people died, but it was those brutal Ruskies." Well, when the Soviet Union fell people were able to get into their files, and they did keep records on their POWs, typically 20 to 200 pages per POW, and it seems that their death rate, terrible during the war (as was the death rate among Russian POWs of the Germans), was perhaps a tenth of the average across the western Allies. The Russians have a vast experience with slave labor (supposedly the Gulag at its peak held 24,000,000 prisoners, its area greater than the area of the US), and they knew how to keep valuable skilled slave labor alive and productive. So although they generally kept their POWs 10 years at hard work, relatively, they didn't kill that many.

On a personal level of cover-up, I have a friend which whom I have had dinner once a week for the last 30 years, when he is in the US. He is a retired Military Intelligence LTC. We ourselves have dueled on this, him trying to convince me that it didn't happen, but have not mentioned it in years. Once a mutual friend, who was in Military Intelligence in Europe at the end of the war, and who was 90, gave him evidence of this stuff to bring to me (they lived in adjoining apartments), and he never gave it to me. (She later gave me a second set of the material.) Once my friend got extremely angry, discussing this, and shouted: "Yes, we killed them. We killed them because they lost the war!" He then stormed out of my house. He then spent a couple of years trying to convince me that he had not said that.

The small Canadian publishing house which published the original book was immediately closed, as it was profitable, but a subsidiary of an American company. (I asked a publisher of militaria and he told me that in the trade that instant closing of a profitable publisher was widely interpreted as a warning. The writer has written another book on the topic but had it published in the UK.) The author claims to have been harrassed, and he detailed how the French mayor (94 years old and a decorated hero) has been harrassed by the French secret services, and how a major US informant, a colonel in Allied HQ, in his 80's, has been harrassed by people from the Pentagon, who lectured him on what a memo that he wrote in the HQ actually meant.

Is this a can of worms, or what?

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

Hello Bob .

I would imagine that very large numbers of people died moving from the East and that this movement would have continued after the end of the war . Many of them must have disappeared on the journey .

I think that the hard figure for the number of ethnic German civilians who died in the east at the end of the war and in the next few months is a minimum of 2 1/4 million, with some giving a total of 6 million. There were literally millions of ethnic Germans living all over eastern Europe and Russia, some for hundreds of years, and of course millions fled from the Eastern parts of Germany. None of these are part of the POWs I mentioned elsewhere.

I remember refugees arriving until the Berlin wall was built .

What proportion of the deaths occurred amongst those who were held in Russia for several years ?

The Russians held about 2,000,000 POWs for slave labor for, generally, ten years, plus some civilians. But the death rate was relatively low, although I doubt that it was a country club experience.

And , does anyone know how many "disappeared" to South America ?

A few thousand?

Regards,

Linden

[salesie]

Any evidence, Bob?

Cheers - salesie.

[linden]

Having listened to programmes about the UK immediately post war I imagine that anyone in the British sector will have had very little food or heat . The UK was about to go bankrupt just as the Marshall plan was introduced and only finished repaying war debts last year (is that right?). The rationing was more severe than during the war , in order to begin to feed people on the Continent , and the programme quoted WW2 soldiers talking about how helpless they felt seeing so many freezing to death during the cold winter .

If you watch "Germany Year Zero" , a film by Rosselini , you wonder how there was any discipline or order at all .

I would also imagine that men who liberated the death camps might have found it difficult to restrain their shock and anger .

There must have been millions across Europe who had many civilian relatives to avenge .

The hatred and revulsion in 1945 has to have been very strong .

I'm not sure that this happened to German POWs in the UK , did it ?

If there are documents in the US , aren't they now open to the public ?

Linden

[bob lembke]

Any evidence, Bob?

Cheers - salesie.

There is a lot of evidence, but also problems looking into this. If I can reach my abandoned office I could look at a shelf and give you a short reading list. The first book by the Canadian had a foreward by a US colonel (Ret.), who was a Historian in the US Army. I first heard of it when I saw him being interviewed on US TV when the book came out. Not a lot of people want to look into this particular can of worms, in particular the German government, I am afraid. I have spoken to several people who were there, so to speak; of course they are now dead or will be so soon. Congress was to finally probe some related war-time abuses, and then 9/11 happened, and the appetite for probes of US war crimes or crimes against humanity vanished to zero. I believe Sen. Feingold of Wisconsin was sponsoring the proposed probe. His press aide is a good childhood friend of my wife's, I could ask him about the proposed investigation.

This whole business seems to have been largely run on verbal orders, as we saw how dumb the Germans were to run a death machine and document it with millions of pages of carefully organized documents.

An interesting question is why. The author of the two books (his second included more material and had a somewhat wider scope) suggests several possible reasons. Right after the war the Morgenthau Plan still had wide appeal, and any fool would know that that could only work if 10 or 20 million Germans would conveniently dissapear. Germany was kept on an official national ration of 800 calories for a year or two, which in some cases dipped down to 500 calories, and that probably got rid of another couple of a million people.

An interesting detail was the involvement, or lack of same, of the International Red Cross, which as you know is a Swiss organization. Hearing that there was a severe famine in POW camps, and having a great surplus of food parcels made surplus by the end of the war, they sent a trainload of food, and proposed more; the Americans sent it back, with a warning to never try something like that again. There is only one known instance in which a Red Cross delagation actually made it into a camp; the officials were so shocked that they supposedly stripped off their outer clothing and gave it to prisoners and drove away in their underwear. They never were allowed to enter a a camp again, which was against international law. The press was also carefully controlled, but generally did not care anyway.

Another way to look at this, given the lack of documents and cooperation, is a demographic study. This has been done, and indicates millions of missing people.

Another way would be to conduct a sampling survey, similar to the John Hopkins School of Public Health/Columbia University/ Baghdad University study of about 1 1/2 years ago, which concluded that, at that time, about 667,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the little adventure. A month or so ago a Brit sampling study company conducted a similar study, using a very large sample size, and they came up with a figure of 1,200,000, with a statistical confidence level of 2.4%. Such a study could still be conducted in Germany, with statistical controls for death of witnesses, etc., but the German police would snap you up in a second, or otherwise manage the situation.

Bob Lembke

PS: The bottom line is that interest in these types of issues is highly selective. On this forum the "rape of Belgium" comes up frequently, and the basic question is arguing over how many of the 6000 or 6500 dead Belgian civilians were murdered and how many shot for unlawfully firing on German troops. Meanwhile, a few decades before the King of Belgium killed an estimated 10,000,000 Congolese on his private African estate, and absolutely nothing was written about it for over a hundred years. (The author of the second book was on my radio station a few hours ago.) I could give many other examples of our selective amnesia.

I am not sure how much further to go with this. Harry is our Fuehrer here (oops!), perhaps he could guide us.

[bob lembke]

Hi, linden;

Having listened to programmes about the UK immediately post war I imagine that anyone in the British sector will have had very little food or heat . The UK was about to go bankrupt just as the Marshall plan was introduced and only finished repaying war debts last year (is that right?). The rationing was more severe than during the war , in order to begin to feed people on the Continent , and the programme quoted WW2 soldiers talking about how helpless they felt seeing so many freezing to death during the cold winter .

The UK did not have the resources, financial or food, to feed Europe after the war. That made it difficult for them to oppose this policy, which was decided elsewhere. I have a Brit friend, who told me how three kids of one mother of her family starved to death in Glasgow during the war. It is alleged that there was a world-wide shortage of food, but I have seen this refuted.

I might add that as the very severe 1945/46 winter approached, the policy was to tear down every single structure inside these camps, no shelter at all, with tens of thousands of men living and sleeping on liquid or frozen mud within a belt of barbed wire. Another innovative feature was to sometimes provide one water pipe for 10,000 men or more, so that the POWs had to line up for 10 hours for a quick gulp of water. This was supposedly done in sight of the Rhine. The professor testified that as POWs went mad with thirst and ran towards the river they were machine-gunned in the wire. There is testimony about this from a former guard who is a retired professor of theology; his home was vandalized after he gave his affidavat. My cousin said that as winter approached one of their two blankets were taken away as well, and that during that winter every smoker died. Every one.

If you watch "Germany Year Zero" , a film by Rosselini , you wonder how there was any discipline or order at all .

I would also imagine that men who liberated the death camps might have found it difficult to restrain their shock and anger .

Policies set up affecting the treatment of say 4.5 million POWs was not set by privates or captains.

There must have been millions across Europe who had many civilian relatives to avenge .

The hatred and revulsion in 1945 has to have been very strong .

I'm not sure that this happened to German POWs in the UK , did it ?

Of course not. Appologists often cite the fact that the POWs in the US were well-treated. It has been noted that they were taken to the cinema and seated in preference to black Americans in the South.

If there are documents in the US , aren't they now open to the public ?

Are you kidding?

Congress has recently passed a law to in part restrict the information available on the mis-treatment of German-Americans and Italian-Americans during World War II. I might add that my mother and I were almost put into a camp in the US by US Naval Intelligence (my father said that that was a relative term), although she had been a legal resident of the US for 16 years and was married to a US citizen doing valuable war work for the US Navy in a combat zone. We were saved by my father's CO, who told the Naval Intelligence officer that he had the authority to put my mother and I (a 4 year old citizen) in a camp, but that the captain had the authority to move the officer's tent into a jungle with three-foot poisonous centipedes. This is in part why I am a cranky old ****.

Linden

[salesie]

So there is no real evidence then, Bob? Only hearsay fuelling conjecture.

Of course, the main problem you have, Bob, is that most people in the countries that suffered at Germany's hands believe the German people got exactly what they deserved, especially after being let off the hook the first time round. I for one go along with that, and, even if your rantings are true, I would not be unduly concerned - after all, if they'd stayed at home the German soldiers you wring your hands over would have been perfectly safe and the civilians they left behind in the Fatherland would not have been harmed. Thanks, but I'll save my sympathies for the victims of the murdering, raping, pillaging hordes that swept out of your ancestral homeland.

Here's a poem, written by Robert Ernest Vernede - a man who fell leading his platoon in an attack on Havrincourt wood, 9th April 1917. It is very prophetic in its warning about Germany's fate, but, funnily enough, not in the war he was writing about and died in.

MENE, MENE

In that green land behind you

The well-loved homesteads stand

Quiet as when you left them

To spoil a little land.

And still your busy housewives

Sit knitting unafraid

And still your children play as once

The Flemish children played.

In that green land behind you

Whence you went forth to kill

Your maids await their lovers,

With hope their bosoms thrill.

Oh lips too sweet almost to kiss,

Oh eyes grown bright in vain—

So waited many a Flemish maid

Whom none shall kiss again.

In that green land behind you,

Heard you a bugle call?

See you in dreams a writing form

On every homestead wall?

What is yon cloud that grows and grows?

The Cossacks ride that way—

Pray that their hearts be not as yours—

If Gods be left you, pray!

Cheers - salesie.

[bob lembke]

So there is no real evidence then, Bob? Only hearsay fuelling conjecture.

Cheers - salesie.

Salesie;

The primary book that I mentioned, whose title and author I will happily cite once I can mount an expedition to my "lost office" (I have to be careful, it is literally dangerous to enter the room, and I busted up a rib last week), has about 150 pages of text, and about (from memory, not having opened it for years) 30 pages or more of footnotes. With such explosive allegations, the Canadian author seems to have formally footnoted and documented every significant assertion. Of course, since you have not seen the book, you know that its assertions are "only hearsay fueling conjecture".

I foolishly tried to assist you yesterday, but I have generally learned that it is pointless to respond to your predictable mix of venom and illogic. I have no intention to trade insults with you.

Bob Lembke

[PFF]

Some time ago while surfing the Interenet came across a photograph/postcard of a British Soldier killed in last German Offensive in 1918. According to Strory with picture-it was found by a German soldier after he had the deceased soldiers {among several others} reamins moved off a road-the picture was sent to widow after World War I in 1920's-she later remarried. Anyone come across this story or smiliar ones like it?

[scottmarchand]

the book you wnat is Called "Other Losses" by James Baque, out of print, but you shoudl fine a copy or two on abbooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Losses-James-B...e/dp/1551681919

What Bob is talking about did indeed happen.

However this is not a WW I topic and we are in danger of lossing an otherwise interesting thread germaine to WW I, I'd suggest PM's from now on about this WW II topic.

Cheers,

Scott

[Edward J.]

Actually, the last few posts are entirely relevant to World War I.

Europeans are still finding mass graves from 1914-18, so I'm assuming somebody has unearthed the bones of at least a few of the 1.8 million German POWs we Americans murdered in our death camps sixty years ago. I mean, everybody's hated the U.S. since we brought so much horror to Europe, so you'd think that during the last six decades an anthropologist with a burning desire for justice would unearth some of these corpses so that we Americans could get our comeuppance for this appalling crime.

Saddam wasn't able to hide his mass graves. There have to be a couple of photos showing rows of skeletons in rags of Wehrmacht or SS uniforms, don't there? How about just one?

It's also odd that a German soldier would survive an American death camp and then move to the U.S. and become an American citizen, where he has to live in constant fear of the FBI and other jackbooted thugs breaking down his door and hauling him off to God-knows-where for daring to express dissent against the government.

Maybe he's an adrenaline junkie.

[bob lembke]

Some time ago while surfing the Interenet came across a photograph/postcard of a British Soldier killed in last German Offensive in 1918. According to Strory with picture-it was found by a German soldier after he had the deceased soldiers {among several others} reamins moved off a road-the picture was sent to widow after World War I in 1920's-she later remarried. Anyone come across this story or smiliar ones like it?

PFF;

I have to look this up, but a junior German officer, I think it was von Brandeis, the "official" conqueror of Fort Douaumont at Verdun, who found the effects of a noble French officer on the battlefield of Verdun. He sent them to his wife (von Brandeis's wife in Germany), who then made contact with the French officer's widow through Switzerland, and eventually was able to get the effects to the widow in France through Switzerland. Nice story.

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

the book you wnat is Called "Other Losses" by James Baque, out of print, but you shoudl fine a copy or two on abbooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Losses-James-B...e/dp/1551681919

What Bob is talking about did indeed happen.

However this is not a WW I topic and we are in danger of lossing an otherwise interesting thread germaine to WW I, I'd suggest PM's from now on about this WW II topic.

Cheers,

Scott

I agree. We should throttle this back, and put the baby to bed. Perhaps tomorrow I can put a short reading list together. I posted this stuff at the request of Harry, with considerable misgivings.

Bob

[bob lembke]

"Edward J.";

Yes, mass graves have been found. Read Baque's book. I will PM you about your comments about my family.

Bob Lermbke

PS: Come on team, let's throttle back.

[Beau Geste]

"Edward J.";

Yes, mass graves have been found. Read Baque's book. I will PM you about your comments about my family.

Bob Lembke

PS: Come on team, let's throttle back.

I agree. As Bob said I asked him to post it. He PBId me about it and I assumed that this thread which is, of course, about battlefield dead might benefit from its inclusion. As others have pointed out, it's difficult in some cases to separate the two world wars.

Harry

[PhilB]

This whole business seems to have been largely run on verbal orders, as we saw how dumb the Germans were to run a death machine and document it with millions of pages of carefully organized documents.

Bob Lembke

Unfortunate choice of words there, Bob? Would it have been smart to run a death machine without documentation? But I take your point - questionable acts don`t often leave a paper trail. Unfortunately, there are folk who think that, if there`s no overt evidence, it didn`t happen.

[salesie]

QUOTE (Phil_B @ Dec 18 2007, 09:40 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Unfortunately, there are folk who think that, if there`s no overt evidence, it didn`t happen.

Conspiracy theorists, of which there are many, rely entirely on no overt evidence being readily available. A lack of evidence helps those with agendas of their own to feed the mind of the gullible and/or fanatical, and to profit greatly from selling more books and television programmes. Is the fact that only one book has been published on this particular "war crime" and, it would seem, no TV documentaries broadcast at all, not give us enough evidence to doubt the scale of this so-called atrocity?

If any real evidence were available would there not be a feeding frenzy by the media? Would those who readily write books and make television programmes, with very little evidence to feed this highly lucrative market, not be churning out their wares and filling their pockets? It seems to me the answer to both questions is a resounding yes - consequently, in my opinion there is enough evidence to say that James Baque (there are criticisms in the reviews of his book as well as praise) is probably from the same mould as David Irving.

Cheers - salesie.

[PBI]

"Arry" its called PMing NOT PBIing....Yours Pedanticaly PBI....

[PhilB]

Your suspicions may be well founded, Salesie. I`m not proposing gullibility, just open mindedness! But back to the topic....

[PBI]

"Arry" its called PMing NOT PBIing....Yours Pedanticaly PBI.... .I get the Disitinct Impression that this Thread is rapidly moving off Topic away from the Primary Subject.

[Beau Geste]

"Arry" its called PMing NOT PBIing....Yours Pedanticaly PBI....

Thank you Rus. I'd like to be able to say that my current state of health (a lousy dose of flu) is responsible but I'm on the mend so it must be age.

I've put a note in huge block capitals above my desk Not PBIing, PMing !!!!!!

Harry