Bacque, a Canada-based writer and former reporter, has a grim story to tell, backed up by a fair amount of documentation. He claims that in the immediate post-war years, more than nine million German soldiers and civilians died as a result of deliberate Allied policies, through starvation and expulsion. It was, of course, a chaotic time with food shortages endemic through the whole of Europe, but there can be little doubt that German prisoners of war, in particular, were treated with savagery (the French were amongst the worst, but American armies were also ruthless). Infant mortality shot up to sixteen times its previous level in Berlin and other places, where families huddled in cellars or beneath piles of rubble. Nazi atrocities were blamed on an entire nation, and the nation suffered accordingly; there was a worldwide feeling that "Germany should be taught she had lost the war". Bacque especially accuses Henry Morgenthau for his infamous Plan, but Eisenhower too seems to have been culpable; against that, Herbert Hoover's food distribution saved millions of lives in Europe as a whole, and Mackenzie King, the Canadian Premier, also played an honourable role.