Rheinwiesenlager

Were one million German soldiers killed by Eisenhower in death camps at the end of WWII?

Here's a telling of that version:

https://21stcenturywire.com/2023/12/22/eisenhowers-dirty-wwii-secret/

Wikipedia mentions but does not accept this version, which probably stems from the 1989 book by James Bacque.  Wikipedia lists 3 American Historians who have written against it.  But a more colorful and specific debunking is here which has all the debunking Wikipedia has and more

(Skip past the first paragraphs, which are related to a Youtube documentary, then get to the part where he debunks the book by Bacque).

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nggi0/comment/cvo0buu/

Well, applying some of the "Moderators" own technique, I'd point out he is hiding behind the name of a long deceased Soviet general.

The low death version often goes along with a storyline about how the US was a model of morality, etc.  However nobody denies that the conditions in the camps were truly deplorable.

If we didn't quite follow it during World War II, we saw much of Eisenhower's "morality" when he became President, including:

1) Death and destruction for North Koreans

2) Coups everywhere Democracy poked up.

3) An unparalleled US military industrial complex, vastly expanded by Eisenhower himself (regardless of his warning about it afterwards, which I see as pure CYA).

I believe his operations in WW2 may well have show a similar ruthlessness.  So no reason to believe he was a moral giant.

But here I'd like to introduce my magical "starting estimate" approach.  We have a low number, 6000 deaths, quoted by Eisenhower apologists, and 1,000,000 deaths, estimated by a Canadian investigator in 1989.

If we guess both are wrong for essentially partisan reasons, the true value lies in between, and a plausible starting guess would be the geometric mean of 6,000 and 1,000,000.  The geometric mean (sqrt(a * b)) is

41,292

Which happens to be pretty close to the 50,000 that Eisenhower quipped he'd like to see.