Regarding the impossibility of a conspiracy on the scale purported by Bacque, Villa states that "[i]n truth, had Eisenhower committed the crimes Bacque alleges, someone surely would have gossiped, ratted, leaked, or even just hinted. None did. Not even Field Marshal Montgomery. Certainly, if there had been a holocaust, it could never have been covered up." Regarding the overall bureaucracy within which Eisenhower had to operate, Villa stated that "Although the average reader of "Other Losses" would never know it, there was a constellation of authorities to whom Eisenhower had to report his actions. Examining the situation as of May 8, 1945, when his murderous policy is said to have gone into full gear, no responsible historian could ignore the many limitations on Eisenhower's authority that made it impossible for him to carry out an independent policy in Germany." Cowdrey stated that Bacque's methodology for determining just the "Other Losses" figures was also "slipshod", with Bacque filling gaps in the records where no "other losses" were recorded by "comput[ing] the number of deaths by applying the death rate given in Army statistics for another period to the known number of prisoners at hand." Cowdrey states that the "rate given in Army statistics" turned out to be a "rate invented by Bacque himself." Cowdrey states that, with regard to Bacque's attempt to analyze a U.S. Army hospital record document, Bacque not only missed an obvious typo throwing his calculations off by 10, but he also badly erred in the math used to tabulate purported death rates of 30%, which he attempts to use to support his claim that the "other losses" column in the weekly army reports reflects a body count. Cowdrey concludes that "the mathematical blunders of "Other Losses" are elementary. One turns from them feeling only embarrassment for the author who naively grounds his thesis upon them." Historian Rolf Steininger stated that Bacque's claim that the failure to publish the 1960s and 1970s German Maschke Commission finding death figures to be a "cover up" contradicts that the entire 22 volume series was actually published in 1972 without any restrictions, to which only an oblique reference is made in an "Other Losses" endnote. Steininger says that "Bacque himself is one of the mythmakers" and that, when Bacque attacks the Maschke Commission scholars as "client-academics", "he oversteps the bounds of mythmaking and enters the territory of libel."