Bacque had just completed a comic drama for the stage entitled Conrad, about a media mogul in prison, which was scheduled for production on 2 October 2009 at the George Ignatieff Theatre in Toronto.
In Other Losses (1989), Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "protecting power" and POWs were reclassified as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" to circumvent recognition under the Geneva Convention.
Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945,[5] there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses."
"[9] Jonathan Osmond, writing in the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "Bacque […] has published a corrective to the impression that the Western allies after the Second World War behaved in a civilised manner to the conquered Germans […] It is clear that he has opened up once more a serious subject dominated by the explanations of those in power.
The book also details the charity work conducted by the Allies, primarily Canada and the United States, crediting it with saving or improving the lives of up to 500 million people around the world in the post war period.
Bacque's figures for prisoners of war and expellees are in excess of those accepted by historians, and his claim of 5.7 million unrecorded civilian deaths in East and West Germany between 1946 and 1950 censuses has no correspondence at all in historical literature.
A review of "Crimes and Mercies" by German historian Bernd Greiner considers the aforementioned 5.7 million claim to have no substance, contextualizes Bacque's book with attempts of the extreme right to gain mainstream acceptance, and expresses surprise at historians' passivity in the face of such tendencies ("Es ist mehr als erstaunlich, wie Wolfgang Wippermann unlängst zu Recht anmerkte, daß die seriösen Fachhistoriker diesem Treiben noch immer ungerührt zusehen.").
[14] A panel of scholars gathered at the annual German Studies Association meeting in Salt Lake City in October 1999 and found the charges of "Crimes and Mercies" even more extravagant than those proffered in "Other Losses".
The panel's papers were never published, however, since the participants thought that the business of refuting Bacque's claims again and again and in detail gives more credence to his wild conspiracy history, and trying to revive the debate was yet another attempt by him to gain acceptability in the scholarly community.