HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Casualties

Historians estimate that 62 million people lost their lives during World War II – about 25 million soldiers and 37 million civilians. This total includes the estimated 12 million lives lost due to the Holocaust. Approximately 80 percent of the deaths were on the Allied side and 20 percent on the Axis side.

Allied forces suffered approximately 17 million military deaths. About 10 million were Soviet, and four million were Chinese. The Axis forces suffered about eight million, of which more than five million were German.

The Soviet Union suffered by far the largest death toll of any nation in the war: of the 23 million Soviets who died in total, more than 12 million were civilians. The figures include deaths due to internal Soviet actions against its own people. The statistics available for Soviet and Chinese casualties are rough guesses, as they are poorly documented. Some modern estimates double the amount of Chinese casualties.

Genocide

The Holocaust was the organized murder of at least nine million people; about two-thirds were Jewish. Originally, the Nazis used killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, to conduct massive open-air killings, shooting as many as 33,000 people in a single massacre, as in the case of Babi Yar.

By 1942, the Nazi leadership implemented "the Final Solution" (Endlösung), the genocide of all Jews in Europe, and increased the pace of the Holocaust. The Nazis built six extermination camps to kill Jews. Millions of Jews who had been confined to massively overcrowded Ghettos were transported to these "death camps," where they were gassed or shot, usually immediately after arriving.

Concentration Camps, Labor Camps, and Internment

In addition to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag or labor camps led to the death of many citizens of the occupied countries of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war and Soviet citizens themselves. These included opponents of Stalin's regime and large proportions of some ethnic groups (particularly Chechens).

Japanese prisoner-of-war (POW) camps also had high death rates. Many were used as labor camps, and starvation conditions among the mainly U.S. and Commonwealth prisoners were little better than many German concentration camps. Sixty percent (1,238,000) of Soviet POWs died during the war. Vadim Erlikman estimates that 2.6 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity.

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Japanese North Americans were interned by the U.S. and Canadian governments. Though these camps did not involve heavy labor, forced isolation, and sub-standard living conditions were the norm.

War Crimes and Attacks on Civilians

From 1945 to 1951, German and Japanese officials and personnel were prosecuted for war crimes. Top German officials were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region.

None of the alleged Allied war crimes, such as the bombing of Dresden, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the alleged Red Army atrocities on the Eastern Front, were ever prosecuted.