Christmas Day, 1942. An Australian soldier, George "Dick" Whittington, is aided by Papuan orderly Raphael Oimbari, at the
Battle of Buna-Gona. Whittington died in February 1943 from the effects of
bush typhus, the little-known killer of many Allied and Japanese soldiers in the Pacific. (Picture by
George Silk.)
was the
deadliest military conflict in history. Over 60 million people were killed. The tables below give a detailed country-by-country count of human losses.
Total dead
World War II casualty statistics vary greatly. Estimates of total dead range from 50 million to over 70 million. The
sources cited on this page document an estimated death toll in World War II of 62 to 78 million, making it the deadliest war ever. 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 uncertain. Civilians killed totaled from 40 to 52 million, including 13 to 20 million from war-related disease and famine. Total
military dead: from 22 to 25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war.
Recent historical scholarship
An
Einsatzgruppe D member about to shoot a Jew kneeling at a mass grave in
Vinnitsa,
Ukrainian SSR,
Soviet Union, in 1942. The photograph is inscribed:
The last Jew in Vinnitsa.Recent historical scholarship has shed new insight into the topic of Second World War casualties. Research in Russia since the collapse of the
Soviet Union has caused a revision of estimates of Soviet war dead. Estimated USSR losses within postwar borders now stand at 26.6 million. Scholars in post-communist
Poland now put total Polish war dead at between 4.9 and 5.6 million.
The
German Army historian Dr. Rüdiger Overmans published a study in 2000 that estimated German military dead and missing at 5.3 million. War dead totals on this page for the
British Commonwealth are based on the research of the
Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Casualties listed here include about 4 to 12 million war-related famine deaths in China, Indonesia,
Vietnam, the Philippines,
India, and Bangladesh that are often omitted from other compilations of World War II casualties.
Human losses by country
Some nations in World War II suffered disproportionally more casualties than others. This is especially true regarding
civilian casualties. The following chart gives data on the number of dead for each country, along with population information to show the relative impact of losses. 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,
Nazi persecution,
Japanese war crimes,
population transfers in the Soviet Union,
Allied war crimes and deaths due to war related famine and disease. Jewish losses in the
Holocaust are listed separately for each nation, since they are known. Compiling or estimating the numbers of
deaths caused during wars and other violent conflicts is a
controversial subject. Historians often put forward many different estimates of the numbers killed during World War II. The distinction between
military and
civilian casualties caused directly by warfare and
collateral damage is not always clear cut. For nations that suffered huge losses such as the U.S.S.R., China, Poland, Germany and Yugoslavia, our sources can give us 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
footnotes give a detailed breakdown of the casualties and their
sources, including data on the number of wounded where reliable sources are available.
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