World War II (WWII) was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 60–75 million deaths were caused by the conflict, including those who died from deprivation, famine and disease. This represents about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940. Deaths directly caused by the war (including military and civilian fatalities) are estimated at 50–56 million, with an additional estimated 19–28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilian deaths totaled 50–55 million. Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about five million prisoners of war. More than half of total deaths were in the Republic of China and the Soviet Union. The following tables give a detailed country-by-country count of human losses.
Recent historical scholarship has shed new light on the topic of WWII casualties. Research in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union has caused a revision of estimates of Soviet WWII fatalities.Geoffrey A. Hosking (2006). "Rulers and victims: the Russians in the Soviet Union". Harvard University Press. p. 242; According to Russian government figures, Soviet losses within postwar borders now stand at 26.6 million,Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: a note – World War II – Europe Asia Studies, July 1994.Andreev EM; Darsky LE; Kharkova TL, Population dynamics: consequences of regular and irregular changes. in Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union Before 1991. Routledge. 1993; including 8 to 9 million due to famine and disease. In August 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers estimated Poland's dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million.Wojciech Materski and Tomasz Szarota. Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Warsaw, 2009; Historian Rüdiger Overmans of the Military History Research Office (Germany) published a study in 2000 estimating the German military dead and missing at 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside of Germany's 1937 borders in Austria and in east-central Europe. The Soviet Red Army claimed responsibility for the majority of Wehrmacht casualties during WWII. The People's Republic of China puts its war dead at 20 million,China's Anti-Japanese War Combat Operations. Guo Rugui, editor-in-chief Huang Yuzhang Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2005; , pp. 4–9. while the Japanese government puts its casualties due to the war at 3.1 million. An estimated 7–10 million people died in the Dutch, British, French and US colonies in South and Southeast Asia, mostly from war-related famine.Archived copy John W. Dower. War Without Mercy 1986; , p. 296 (300,000 forced laborers)
Classification of casualties
Compiling or estimating the numbers of deaths and wounded caused during wars and other violent conflicts is a controversial subject. Historians often put forward many different estimates of the numbers killed and wounded during World War II. The authors of the Oxford Companion to World War II maintain that "casualty statistics are notoriously unreliable".I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot Oxford Companion to World War II Oxford, 2005; , p. 290 The table below gives data on the number of dead and military wounded for each country, along with population information to show the relative impact of losses. When scholarly sources differ on the number of deaths in a country, a range of war losses is given, in order to inform readers that the death toll is disputed. Since casualty statistics are sometimes disputed the footnotes to this article present the different estimates by official governmental sources as well as historians. Military figures include battle deaths (KIA) and personnel missing in action (MIA), as well as fatalities due to accidents, disease and deaths of prisoners of war in captivity. Civilian casualties include deaths caused by strategic bombing, Holocaust victims, German war crimes, Japanese war crimes, population transfers in the Soviet Union, Allied war crimes, and deaths due to war-related famine and disease.
The sources for the casualties of the individual countries do not use the same methods, and civilian deaths due to starvation and disease make up a large proportion of the civilian deaths in China and the Soviet Union. The losses listed here are actual deaths; hypothetical losses due to a decline in births are not included with the total dead. The distinction between military and civilian casualties caused directly by warfare and collateral damage is not always clear-cut. For states that suffered huge losses such as the Soviet Union, China, Poland, Germany, and Yugoslavia, sources can give only the total estimated population loss caused by the war and a rough estimate of the breakdown of deaths caused by military activity, crimes against humanity and war-related famine. The casualties listed here include 19 to 25 million war-related famine deaths in the USSR, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India that are often omitted from other compilations of World War II casualties.John W. Dower War Without Mercy (1986); R.J. Rummel. China's Bloody Century. Transaction 1991;
The footnotes give a detailed breakdown of the casualties and their sources, including data on the number of wounded where reliable sources are available. Several categories are used to classify World War II casualties, mainly to separate between military people and civilians. Due to the broad effects of war-induced famines, genocides like the Holocaust, and strategic bombings, civilian casualties frequently outnumbered military fatalities.
Human losses by country Total deaths by country
CountryTotal population1/1/1939Military deaths from all causesCivilian deaths due to military activity and crimes against humanityCivilian deaths due to war-related famine and diseaseTotal deathsDeaths as % of 1939 populationAverage deaths as % of 1939 populationMilitary wounded Albania 1,073,000 30,000Albania: a country study Federal Research Division, Library of Congress; edited by Raymond E. Zickel and Walter R. Iwaskiw. 2nd ed. 1994. . Available online at Federal Research Division of the U.S. Library of Congress. See section "On The Communist Takeover". Library of Congress Country Study 30,000 2.80 2.80 NA 6,968,000 39,700 700 40,400 0.58 0.58 39,803 Austria (Unified with Germany) 6,653,000Included with Germany (See table below.)Included with Germany 8,387,000 12,000Gregory Frumkin. Population Changes in Europe Since 1939, Geneva 1951.p.44-45 76,000 88,000 1.05 1.0555,513 Brazil 40,289,000 1,000 1,000 2,000 0.00 0.004,222 6,458,000 18,500 3,000 21,500 0.33 0.3321,878 Burma (British colony) 16,119,000 2,600 250,000 to 1,000,000McLynn, The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–1945, pg. 1. 252,600 to 1,000,000 1.57 to 6.2 3.89NA 11,267,000 42,000 1,600 1,600 in Merchant Navy 43,600 0.38 0.3853,174 (1937–1945) 517,568,000 2,000,000 to 3,750,000+ 7,357,000R. J. Rummel. China's Bloody Century. Transaction 1991 . Table 5A to 8,191,000Werner Gruhl, Imperial Japan's World War Two, 1931–1945 Transaction 2007 p. 85 5,000,000to 10,000,00014,000,000to 20,000,000Ho Ping-ti. Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. p. 252 2.90 to 3.86 3.381,761,335 4,235,000 100100 0.00 0.00NA (in postwar 1945–1992 borders) 14,612,000Waller Wynne, Population of Czechoslovakia. (International Population Statistics Reports series P-90, No. 3). U.S. Dept. of Commerce) Washington 1953. p. 43 – The U.S. Commerce Dept. Census Bureau cited the following source for the population at 1/1/1939 for Czechoslovakia, State Statistical Office, Statistical Bulletin of Czechoslovakia, v. II (1947) no. 4, Prague p. 57 35,000 to 46,000Urlanis, Boris (1971). Wars and Population. Moscow Page 294 294,000 to320,000 340,000 to 355,000 2.33 to 2.43 2.388,017 3,795,000 6,000 6,000 0.16 0.162,000 69,435,00011,500Van Waterford. Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, McFarland & Company, 1994; , p. 144 (8,500 Dutch POW deaths) 300,000 2,400,000to 4,000,000 3,000,000to 4,000,000 4.3 to 5.76 5.03NA Egypt 16,492,000 1,100Heike Liebau et al., World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions, and Perspectives from Africa and Asia. Studies in Global Social History, 2010), p. 227. 1,100 0.00 0.00NA (within 1939 borders) 1,134,000 34,000 (in both Soviet & German armed forces)Estonian State Commission on Examination of Policies of Repression;The White Book: Losses inflicted on the Estonian nation by occupation regimes. 1940–1991 Tallinn 2005. , p. 38, Table 2 (24,000 mobolized by USSR and 10,000 with Germans) 49,000Estonian State Commission on Examination of Policies of Repression;The White Book: Losses inflicted on the Estonian nation by occupation regimes. 1940–1991 Tallinn 2005. , p. 38, Table 2 83,000 7.3 7.3NA Ethiopia 17,700,000 15,000 85,000 100,000 0.56 0.56NA 3,700,000 94,700 2,100Tiina Kinnunen, Ville Kivimäki. Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations, BRILL 2011. pp. 172Gregory Frumkin. Population Changes in Europe Since 1939, Geneva 1951. pp. 58–59 96,800 2.62 2.62 197,000 (including colonies) 41,680,000 210,000 390,000600,000 1.44 1.44390,000 24,664,000 1,000,000to 2,000,000Gunn, Geoffrey (2011) "The Great Vietnamese Famine of 1944–45 Revisited", The Asia-Pacific Journal, 9(5), no 4, January 31, 2011. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Geoffrey-Gunn/3483 1,000,000to 2,200,000 4.05 to 8.11 6.08NA 69,300,000Marschalck, Peter. Bevölkerungsgeschichte Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Suhrkamp 1984 p.149 4,440,000The Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1960, p. 78 to 5,318,000 1,500,000to 3,000,000 6,900,000 to 7,400,000 (See table below.) 7,300,000 7,222,000 35,100 171,800 300,000Baranowski, Shelley (2010). Nazi Empire: German colonialism and imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 273; .to 600,000507,000to 807,000 7.02 to 11.17 9.09547,290 Guam 22,800 1,000to 2,000Werner Gruhl, Imperial Japan's World War Two, 1931–1945, Transaction 2007; , p. 102 1,000to 2,000 4.39 to 8.77 6.58NA (figures in 1938 borders not including territories annexed in 1938–41) 9,129,000 200,000Támas Stark. Hungary's Human Losses in World War II. Uppsala Univ. 1995 p.33 264,000to 664,000Támas Stark. Hungary's Human Losses in World War II. Uppsala Univ. 1995 p.59464,000to 864,000 5.08 to 9.46 7.27 89,313 Iceland 118,900 200 200 0.17 0.17NA 377,800,000 87,000Figures include identified burials and those commemorated by name on memorials 2,100,000to 3,000,000 2,200,000to 3,087,000 0.58 0.5864,354 3,698,000 500 200