World War II casualties

• 1. The Uncounted War

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  World War II killed an estimated 60 to 75 million people, roughly 3 percent of the 2.3 billion humans alive in 1940. More than half of those deaths fell on just two countries, the Republic of China and the Soviet Union. That total makes the war the deadliest military conflict in history. It also hides an uncomfortable fact. Nobody has ever produced a single agreed count of the dead. Governments, demographers and historians still disagree by millions, and sometimes by tens of millions. Who decides whether a villager who starved under occupation counts as a war death? What happens when two countries claim the same victim? And why do some of the largest losses sit in the least certain columns of the ledger? What follows is a tour through that ledger, country by country, and through the arguments that surround each figure.

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• 2. The Rules Of Counting

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  The authors of the Oxford Companion to World War II put the problem bluntly: "casualty statistics are notoriously unreliable." That warning shapes every number in the ledger. Compilers estimate direct war deaths, military and civilian together, at 50 to 56 million. They add another 19 to 28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. The detailed country table gives its own approximate grand total of 70 to 85 million, which sits above the headline range.

  Even the line between soldier and civilian is a choice. Military deaths include battle dead, men missing in action, accidents, disease, and prisoners who died in captivity. Partisans and resistance fighters are filed with the military. Military deaths from all causes run to 21 to 25 million, and about 5 million of them were prisoners of war who died in captivity. Civilian deaths run to 50 to 55 million. They cover victims of strategic bombing, the Holocaust, German and Japanese war crimes, Soviet population transfers, Allied war crimes, famine and disease. Because of famines, genocides and bombing, civilians frequently outnumbered soldiers among the dead.

  Famine is the biggest swing factor. This ledger includes 19 to 25 million famine deaths in the USSR, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and India, which other compilations often leave out. It does not count hypothetical losses from a fall in births. Sources for different countries use different methods, and in China and the Soviet Union starvation and disease make up a large share of civilian deaths. For states that suffered enormous losses, including Poland, Germany and Yugoslavia, sources give only a total population loss and a rough guess at how it divides.

  Nationality adds another layer. Austrians, French and ethnic Germans from eastern Europe who served in the Wehrmacht are counted as German military dead. Michael Strank is counted among the American dead, not the Czechoslovak. Civilians are counted where they lived, so German Jewish refugees in France who were deported to the death camps appear in French figures. The table also states a floor for military deaths from all causes: at least 21,124,905.

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• 3. The Soviet Ledger

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  Russian government figures now place Soviet losses within postwar borders at 26.6 million people, including 8 to 9 million who died of famine and disease. That number is itself a revision. Research in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union has pushed older estimates upward. The historian Erlikman, who says the breakdown is his own estimate, divides the toll into 10.6 million military dead, 10 million civilians killed by military activity and crimes against humanity, and 6 million lost to famine and disease. Against a Soviet-era prewar population of 194.09 million, that comes to 13.7 percent. Newer Russian studies correct the 1940 population to 192.598 million. Among the republics, the hardest hit lost 25.3 percent of its people.

  The military count is contested too. Official Soviet military dead and missing for 1941-45 stand at 8,668,400, out of 34,476,700 who served, or 25.1 percent. A further 14,685,593 were wounded, and 2,576,000 of them were left permanently disabled. Estimates of the military dead run from 8.6 to 10.6 million. Short wars in 1939-40, mainly the Winter War with Finland, add another 136,945.

  Prisoners expose the deepest gap. The official Russian figure for Soviet prisoners held by the Germans is 4,059,000, and 1,103,000 of them died. Western historians count 5.7 million prisoners and about 3 million deaths in captivity. Part of the difference is bookkeeping, because about 2 million of those deaths sit with civilian war dead in the Russian figures. Reservists called up in 1941 who died before reaching active strength are likewise filed as civilians.

  The Cambridge History of Russia puts civilian deaths in the Nazi-occupied USSR at 13.7 million, including 2 million Jews, plus 2.6 million deaths in the interior. Its authors admit that the scope for error is very wide. They compare the whole picture to a jigsaw puzzle: "people died in colossal numbers but in many different miserable and terrible circumstances."

  Then there is the state's own violence. About 1 million of the Soviet dead are counted as victims of Stalin's regime, since wartime overcrowding and food shortages raised death rates in the Gulag. Soviet archives, opened to Russian scholars after 1990, list 1,187,783 reported deaths for 1939-1945. They include 46,350 judicial executions, 718,804 deaths in Gulag labor camps and 422,629 in labor colonies and prisons. J. Arch Getty and Stephen G. Wheatcroft trust these figures. Robert Conquest and Steven Rosefielde dispute them. Rosefielde points out that the archive tally omits the 22,000 victims of the Katyn massacre. His demographic analysis gives 2,183,000 excess deaths in 1939-40 and 5,458,000 in 1941-45.

  Deportations added to the toll. About 2.3 million people from Soviet ethnic minorities were deported during the war, including 1,209,000 Soviet Germans and 479,000 Chechens and Ingush. Special settlements reported 309,100 deaths between 1941 and 1948.

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• 4. Asia Under Japan

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  The People's Republic of China puts its war dead at 20 million, while the Japanese government counts 3.1 million for its own losses. Between those official positions lies a wide field of scholarship. John W. Dower writes that "So great was the devastation and suffering in China that in the end it is necessary to speak of uncertain 'millions' of deaths." He finds about 10 million reasonable, a toll surpassed only by the Soviet Union. A United Nations report in 1947 said 9 million. Rana Mitter calls 14 million a conservative estimate, citing Odd Arne Westad's split of 2 million combat deaths and 12 million civilian deaths. A Chinese study published in 2006 gave 8 to 10 million.

  Higher estimates exist. An academic study of the Chinese population concluded that the war of 1937-1945 directly caused between 15 million and 20 million casualties. The Chinese scholar Bianxiu Yue puts the dead at 20.6 million and the injured at 14.2 million. The Chinese government's own figure also lists 15 million wounded. Official Nationalist figures were far lower, with 1,319,958 killed. The academic study called those numbers "unreasonably low" and "highly suspect."

  Colonial Asia suffered quietly. An estimated 7 to 10 million people died in the Dutch, British, French and US colonies of South and Southeast Asia, mostly from war-related famine. In Burma, civilian deaths during the Japanese occupation reached 250,000, made up of 110,000 Burmese, 100,000 Indians and 40,000 Chinese. Werner Gruhl estimates that 70,000 Asian laborers died building the Burma Railway.

  Two researchers give strikingly different totals for civilians killed by Japanese forces. R. J. Rummel estimates 5,964,000, including 3,695,000 in China. Gruhl estimates 20,365,000, including 12,392,000 in China and 3,000,000 in the Dutch East Indies. They also disagree on prisoners, with Rummel counting 539,000 deaths in Japanese custody and Gruhl 331,584.

  The smaller counts show the human scale. Of 60,000 Indian Army prisoners taken at the Fall of Singapore, 11,000 died in captivity. Among 130,895 Western civilians interned by the Japanese, 14,657 died of famine and disease.

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• 5. The Holocaust By Numbers

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  Martin Gilbert estimates that 5.7 million of the 7.3 million Jews in German-occupied Europe died in the Holocaust, which is 78 percent. Other estimates range from 4.9 to 5.9 million. Researchers at the Polish Institute of National Remembrance count 2,830,000 Jews murdered in the Nazi death camps. Their figures give 1,100,000 at Auschwitz, 850,000 at Treblinka, 500,000 at Belzec, 150,000 each at Sobibor and Chełmno, and 80,000 at Majdanek. Raul Hilberg puts the camp toll at 3.0 million, counting Romanian Transnistria.

  Hilberg also counts 1.4 million Jews killed by the mobile killing groups in the Soviet Union and 700,000 who died in the ghettos. Names give a floor that no argument can lower. In early 2019, the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names held 4.8 million of them.

  A table drawn from The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust compares losses with prewar Jewish populations. It totals 9,067,000 Jews in 1933 and 4,869,860 to 5,894,716 deaths. Poland lost between 83.1 and 92.3 percent of its 3,250,000 Jews. Yugoslavia lost 82.4 to 95.6 percent, and Lithuania lost 83.9 to 92.3 percent. Denmark stands at the other end, with between 60 and 116 deaths among 8,000 Jews, or 0.8 to 1.5 percent.

  Borders and definitions bend these numbers. Between 1933 and 1939, about 400,000 Jews fled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and some were in western Europe when Germany occupied it in 1940. In the Netherlands, 8,000 Jews in mixed marriages were not subject to deportation. The Dutch periodical De Groene Amsterdammer maintains that some were deported anyway. Hungary shows the problem best. Its Jewish losses of 569,000 include territories annexed in 1939-41, while the toll inside the 1938 borders was 220,000.

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• 6. Victims Beyond The Camps

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  Donald L. Niewyk, a history professor at Southern Methodist University, argues that the Holocaust can be defined in four ways. The narrowest covers the genocide of Jews alone. Another sees parallel Holocausts, one per group. A third adds Roma and handicapped people. The widest takes in all racially motivated German crimes, including the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, political prisoners, religious dissenters and homosexuals. On that widest definition the toll is between 11 million and 17 million. Timothy Snyder counts 10.4 million killed by deliberate mass murder, such as executions, deliberate famine and death camps, including 5.4 million Jews. Dieter Pohl gives 12 to 14 million. R. J. Rummel reaches 20.9 million.

  The Roma are the sharpest example of an undercount. Most estimates range from 130,000 to 500,000. Ian Hancock of the University of Texas at Austin argues for 500,000 to 1,500,000, a toll that proportionately matched and probably exceeded the Jewish one. He says Nazi records grouped Roma under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated," "hangers-on" and "partisans." The authors of The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust call the statistics "especially unreliable and controversial."

  Other groups have their own counts. A 2003 report by the German Federal Archive puts the number of handicapped people murdered under the Action T4 and Action 14f13 programs at 200,000. Prisoners of war who died in Nazi captivity total 3.1 million, including 2.6 to 3.0 million Soviet prisoners. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says the Germans killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance estimated 2,770,000 ethnic Polish deaths in 2009.

  Nazi ideology treated Slavs as sub-humans, to be killed, enslaved, starved or expelled eastward. Bohdan Wytwycky held that 3.0 million Ukrainian and 1.4 million Belarusian civilian deaths were racially motivated. Pohl breaks Soviet losses into 500,000 civilians killed in repressing partisans, 1.0 million victims of the Nazi Hunger Plan, about 3.0 million prisoners of war and 1.0 million Jews. Georgiy Kumanev counts 8.2 million civilians, made up of 4.0 million Ukrainians, 2.5 million Belarusians and 1.7 million Russians.

  Some victims left almost no statistics. Police arrested an estimated 100,000 men as homosexuals between 1933 and 1945, and 50,000 were sentenced by the courts. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were interned in concentration camps, but no figures exist for how many died there. Between 1,000 and 2,000 Roman Catholic clergy and about 1,000 Jehovah's Witnesses also perished in Nazi prisons and camps.

  Serb losses under the Ustaše are fiercely debated. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates 320,000 to 340,000 murdered in the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945. Yad Vashem estimates over 500,000, and Tito-era Yugoslav sources range from 200,000 to at least 600,000. At the Jasenovac camp alone, the Wiesenthal Center counts at least 90,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croatians.

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• 7. Germany And Poland

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  In a study published in 2000, the historian Rüdiger Overmans estimated German military dead and missing at 5.3 million. That includes 900,000 men conscripted from outside Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria and east-central Europe. The breakdown is grim. Some 2,303,320 were killed in action and 2,007,571 were missing or unaccounted for after the war. Another 25,000 died by suicide, and 11,000 were sentenced to death by court martial. Confirmed prisoner deaths number 459,475, with 363,000 in Soviet custody against 77,000 in the hands of the United States, Britain and France. Overmans calls it plausible, though not provable, that half of the 1.5 million missing on the eastern front died in battle and the other 700,000 died in Soviet custody.

  The Red Army claimed responsibility for the majority of Wehrmacht casualties. Prisoner tallies in the other direction clash sharply. Soviet sources list 474,967 deaths among 2,652,672 German prisoners. Russian sources count 580,589 Axis prisoner deaths in Soviet captivity, while some Western scholars estimate 1.7 to 2.3 million.

  The wider toll of Nazi Germany, combined in the table with Austria and ethnic Germans abroad, is 6.9 to 7.4 million. That is 8.26 to 8.86 percent of an 83.5 million prewar population. Civilian deaths from Allied strategic bombing run from 353,000 to 434,000. Civilian deaths from Nazi persecution add 400,000 to 600,000, and the expulsion of Germans accounts for 600,000 to 2,111,000. Austria tells its own account. Its government cites 2,700 Austrians executed, more than 16,000 murdered in concentration camps, and over 67,000 Austrian Jews deported to death camps, of whom only 2,000 lived to see the war's end.

  Poland's losses, by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance's estimate of August 2009, were between 5.6 and 5.8 million. The country table puts the total at 5.9 to 6.0 million, more than one in six of the 34,849,000 people living there before the war. Deaths under Soviet repression add a separate dispute. The Institute estimates 150,000 Polish citizens killed. Andrzej Paczkowski gives 90,000 to 100,000 deaths among 1.0 million deported and 30,000 executed, while Tadeusz Piotrowski estimated 350,000 in 2005.

  Double counting complicates the picture. Figures for Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania include about two million civilian dead who also appear in Polish totals. Historian Krystyna Kersten estimated losses of about two million in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union.

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• 8. The Western Armies

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  Of 16,353,639 Americans who served in uniform, 407,316 were killed or missing, which is 2.5 percent. The US Department of Defense says about 250,000 of the 407,300 dead fell in the European theater. Battle deaths alone were 293,121, covering 234,874 in the Army, 38,257 in the Navy and Coast Guard, and 19,990 in the Marine Corps. Prisoners suffered too, as 14,059 American prisoners of war died in captivity. Of those, 12,935 were held by Japan and 1,124 by Germany.

  Smaller groups carry their own numbers. About 1.2 million African Americans served, and 708 were killed in action. Some 350,000 women served, and 16 were killed in action. Of 26,000 Japanese-Americans in uniform, over 800 were killed in action.

  Risk varied sharply by branch. About 16,000 American submariners served, and 3,506 died, or 21.9 percent. The German U-boat arm fared far worse, losing 28,000 of about 40,900 men, or 68.5 percent. Across all German forces, 29.2 percent of 18.2 million who served were killed or missing, and the Waffen SS lost 34.9 percent of 900,000. Imperial Japan counted 2,121,955 killed or missing among 8.4 million who served, or 25.3 percent. Italy's forces lost between 319,207 and 341,000, or 9.3 to 9.9 percent.

  The British Empire and Commonwealth sent 17,843,000 into service and lost 580,497, or 3.3 percent. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission counts deaths from the 3rd of September 1939 to the 31st of December 1947. Its totals are 383,898 for the United Kingdom and Crown Colonies, 87,026 for India under British colonial administration, 45,388 for Canada and 40,696 for Australia. New Zealand lost 11,926 and South Africa 11,914. Preliminary 1945 figures for the United Kingdom alone gave 264,443, made up of 144,079 in the Army, 69,606 in the Royal Air Force and 50,758 in the Royal Navy.

  Even Commonwealth records differ by source. The Australian War Memorial reports 39,648 military deaths, and Australia counts 349 merchant mariners killed in action among civilian dead. The Canadian War Museum gives 42,000 military losses plus 1,600 Merchant Navy deaths, while Library and Archives Canada gives 44,090. The Commission's Debt of Honour Register lists 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the two world wars.

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