West European Studies

The Second World War was the deadliest war ever fought in human history. So many people died during the war that more than sixty years later and even after numerous studies, no one has been able to say for sure exactly how many lives were lost to the War between 1939 and 1945. An accurate estimation becomes even more difficult because a huge number of people did not die in the actual battlefield but due to disease and epidemic. The biggest irony of World War II was that it killed more innocent civilians than the soldiers on the frontline. While exact number of casualties remains a mystery, various estimates put the total number of dead at somewhere around 60 million, with another 30 million wounded. Yet another casualty of the War was the millions of people displaced, which some estimates put at around 20 million.

The Second World War caused huge destructions on both sides and the War spared nobody. The biggest casualty was the European Jews who were systematically exterminated in German concentration camps. Most historians agree that around six million Jews were killed during the holocaust. However, Jews were not the only victims of the holocaust. Another six million non-Jews were also killed in the concentration camps. The German army also killed over 2 million civilians in Russia and Poland between 1939 and 1943 in military operations when German forces killed resistors, local leaders, hostages and bystanders.

Russia, by far, suffered the largest human toll in the number of dead and wounded, both civilian and military. Various estimates put the number of military deaths in the USSR anywhere between 7 and 13 million, with another 7 million civilian deaths. Poland, on the other hand, suffered the maximum number of casualties as a percentage of its pre-war population. Of the 34 million pre-War population, over 6 million Polish people died in the war and another 10 million fled the country. Of those who fled Poland, many later died in German concentration camps. China suffered the second highest human casualty during the War as at least 10 million Chinese were killed by the Japanese occupying forces. Other Allied countries who suffered great human losses included Yugoslavia, Greece, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Netherlands. In Netherlands, while around 200,000 people died due to German bombing, another 16,000 died due to starvation during the 1944-45 winter, when they were under German occupation. Such examples of deaths due to famine, disease, starvation etc during the war, make it even more difficult to accurately estimate the real human cost of the Second World War.

During the later part of World War II, as the Axis armies began to lose, it resulted in huge human losses to Axis countries. During the last two years, the Soviet Army took revenge on the Germans and killed at least 1.5 million German civilians. Germany also lost about 4 million men to military deaths. Japans military deaths were around 2 million and there were another 200,000 casualties in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

While these numbers are huge, the statistics do not capture the real human cost of the Second World War. The loss of family, friends, neighborhoods and country cannot be represented in numbers. Many soldiers left there homes as healthy individuals but returned without a limb or suffering from serious diseases. And the lifelong psychological impact of the war can never be expressed in words, much less through numbers. The real human cost of the Second World War can never really be accurately estimated.