Crimes and Mercies (33 page)

In my case, the line of communication is easy to see. The computers downloaded my Doucet call to tape, flagged it and passed it to probably Bert Cowdrey of the United States Army Center for Military History in Washington, who has written several articles defending the US Army and trying to discredit my research.

Cowdrey, if it was him, then informed the various American, Canadian, French, German and British writers, State Department employees, academics, print and TV journalists and army officers who were busy rebutting my charges.

This is only one of many bizarre incidents. My mail has been opened, the contents removed
and the empty envelopes delivered to
me
. After
Other Losses
was published in the US, a professor named Martin Brech who had given me an interview about his experiences as a guard in an American prison camp in Germany, received death threats by mail and by phone, his car was trashed in his driveway and his rural mailbox destroyed. At Heathrow, my laptop was taken from me by an official of British Airways as I was loading for a flight to Moscow. When I pointed out that I had been promised by BA in Toronto that I could take the computer in the cabin and that in fact I had just arrived from Toronto with the computer in my hand, the official quickly said, ‘If you want to get on this flight, check the bag.’ I checked it.

When I arrived in Moscow, my Russian researcher Alexei Kirichenko told me that he had been warned by a former KGB officer that a CIA man in Washington had just phoned him to say, ‘Tell Kirichenko not to work with Bacque, as he is a very dangerous man.’ Reassured that he had not been intimidated by the CIA, I began work with Kirichenko.

I invited him to stay at my house in Toronto to collaborate on a project. He arrived with no typewriter and no notes and nothing done. When I saw the childish scribbling he had done for a draft of a section in our projected book, I said, ‘Alexei, this is no good at all. You told me you had written five books.’ He admitted then he had written none. One day just before his departure, I was out of the house, leaving him there. When I
returned to my study, I could smell his strong body odour in the room. This was odd, as it was clear to both of us that there was no book to work on. The next day, after he left, I received a call from a Toronto lawyer warning me that Alexei had evidence that I was planning to steal his work from him.

The next time I used my copying machine, I discovered it was out of paper, though it had been loaded when Alexei was there. Clearly, he had been using a lot of copy paper while I was out. The lawyer then phoned
Saturday Night
magazine to warn them that because Bacque was planning to steal Kirichenko's work, if they published anything Bacque had stolen, they would be sued. They also threatened my book publishers, Stoddart/General. A few weeks later, the new editor of
Saturday Night
, Ken Whyte, refused to publish an excerpt from my new book (
Crimes and
Mercies
), even though it proved by my research in the KGB archives in Moscow that my earlier work on German POWs for
Saturday Night
had been absolutely correct. He did this despite the fact that John Fraser, his predecessor, had paid my way to Moscow and back to do that research, thereby acquiring exclusive rights to the work. Whyte then published an attack on me by – of all people – Sir John Keegan, and then refused to print a mild letter from me rebutting Keegan’s incorrect criticism even though he had invited me to respond.

Work commissioned from me by the
Globe and Mail
, the
Times
Literary Supplement
and the
Ottawa Citizen
has been refused. My letters to the editor have been refused by such papers as
Le
Monde
, the
New York Times
, the
Toronto Star
, the
Globe and Mail
, and
Saturday Night
magazine under Ken Whyte. Although my previous book was an international best-seller, the manuscript of
Crimes and Mercies
was turned down by 23 publishers. And let us remember that this has nothing to do with the quality of my writing, or of my research, or of any anticipated financial loss.

Are these rejections a conspiracy? Or did fear outweigh greed in editorial offices throughout the West? Or was it a sudden attack of editorial likemindedness? Whatever, for three years I suffered the censorship by rejection slip of the proscribed writer.
There is no freedom of the press in the West, only freedom to own the press.

When I said to Stamler, ‘Why would they go to all this trouble over a book of history?’ He said, ‘They wanted to know who you were working for. Especially when you went to Moscow.’ I said, ‘It’s obvious who I work for. I work for my readers.’ He just laughed.

In the West, many of us in our innocence had thought that the fall of the Soviets would only reduce world tensions as it liberated a great nation. This has begun to happen, but the repressive habits of Soviet society, like a mutating virus, have spread into our own institutions.

In 1997, I published an earlier version of the Appendix above.

Although the book was published in Canada, the UK, Germany and Korea, and has sold worldwide on the Internet, no one anywhere commented. So I took the information to a former Cabinet Minister, now a highly-placed judge, who gave me lunch and passed me on to a civil liberties outfit, who gave me half an hour, and a cup of tea. I also passed it to the Writers’ Union of Canada and PEN Canada. Nothing.

We hear much about the troubles of Salman Rushdie because he is threatened by Islamists, but almost nothing of the men held without charge in British, Canadian and American jails, for many years, deprived of lawyers, some in isolation. The suspected terrorists in Canadian jails are not even alleged to have done or plotted anything, because most of them have never been charged. In the one case recently investigated by Mr Justice Dennis O’Connor, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was released with an apology and it was revealed that he had been arrested, deported, vilified and tortured, by mistake – a mistake American security officials are still denying, despite Arar’s full exoneration by the Canadian government.

The publisher of
Other Losses
, Stoddart, also published
By Way
of Deception
, a denunciation of Israeli dirty tricks by Victor
Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent. Soon after its publication, Stoddart’s offices were broken into, files searched, but nothing taken that was financially valuable. The next night, Ostrovsky, wary of hotels, which he was sure were watched, stayed with my wife and me. Since our house has no electronic security, Victor leaned paddles against doors and windows, which he said was much more effective, since Mossad and the Mounties can easily disarm electronic devices.

The one thing that these and countless other illegal uses of power have in common, is that they were not necessary. But the absence of cause is not the worst thing about the many new laws and changes to old ones in our ‘new, security-conscious age’. Their worst effect on us is that they are the beginning of the destruction of our free societies, because police snooping frightens people, and a frightened people is a docile people.

Having studied the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in the 1930s, I see frightening parallels between the Weimar republic and our own democracies. The Nazis rose to power because they were determined, well-organized, violent, cynical and better informed than their more democratic opponents, who did not know how to defend themselves. Their opponents wavered, and then they were done for. The determined neo-cons in the USA, and the power-hungry fear-mongers in Canada and elsewhere, have abolished or damaged institutions that we still believe protect our freedom and our democracy, but do no longer. The list is impressive: loss of
habeas corpus
for everyone charged under security certificates; no trial by jury for them; the banning of dissenting opinion on a historical topic; secret ‘renditions’ and torture of political prisoners held without charge; evasion of the Geneva Convention; illegal spying and police harassment of writers expressing unpopular views, and probably other things that we do not yet even know about.

The people like Lesley Sheppard, Elizabeth O’Connor, Alfred de Zayas, Nikolai Tolstoy, Alan Samson, Patrick Martin, Ken Whyte, John Fraser, Nelson Doucet and who knows how many others, whose vocation and/or duty it is to report on the state of
our freedoms, and who are one way or another, politely or otherwise warned to desist, may in fact desist.

And if they do, we will end up knowing only what we are told to know, and nothing more.

5: L
OCAL
D
EATH
R
ATES IN
G
ERMANY
, 1946–50

Most reports show a high death rate. Few of the towns reporting give complete population statistics. Most of the towns that report death rates near or below the 12.1%% rate given for 1947 by the Statistisches Bundesamt also display characteristics that demonstrate their unreliability, e.g. Karlsruhe and Bonn.

Death statistics for one Austrian and nine German cities and towns for certain critical years appear below. Four were issued by the authorities in the places concerned, the rest by other authorities and observers as listed. Those that accord with the general death rates calculated in Chapter VI are in Table A. Those in conflict appear in Table B with the author’s comments.

TABLE A

Brilon: City officials in 1995 were asked by the author for death statistics of their city for 1945–49, and replied that they were understaffed and could not fulfil the request. The author, during research in Ottawa, came upon a copy of a three-page report made by the official of the City of Brilon in 1946, and given to the Canadian Military Governor. This shows the death rate reported above. A copy has been sent to Brilon. Landau: 1946 population averaged from (January 1946) 19,370 and (October 1946) 20,450. 1947 population averaged from (1946) 19,910 and (1948) 21,694. All statistics from Landau Town Archives, Landau, Rheinland-Pfalz.

Berlin: Among the 3 million people of Berlin the death rate in May of 1946 was three times the pre-war rate, i.e. around 37%%. In 1947, according to Chancellor Adenauer, it was around 29%%. (Adenauer, Speech to Swiss Parliamentary Chamber, March 1949, and Ernst-Günther Schenck,
Das Menschliche Elend
im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Pathographie der Kriegs-, Hunger- und poli-tischen
Katastrophen Europas
, p. 68.) In Königsberg, taken over by the Soviets, over 70 per cent of the population died in two years (ibid., p. 79).
¹²
Cannibalism was reported to have occurred among some of them. Similar conditions prevailed in other areas of East Prussia, West Prussia, near Frankfurt-am-der-Oder and in many Silesian towns, according to Dr Schenck.

Marktoberdorf: Complete statistics for this small town near Augsburg are available from the Bayerische Statistisches Landesamt and from the Statistical Service in the Rathaus of Marktoberdorf. Average for five years equals 24.2%%.

Augsburg: The Augsburg city archives do not have any figures for 1946, and statistics for only three months of 1947 and three months of 1948, and again none for 1949 and 1950.

TABLE B