In 1945, the bloodiest war of the 20th century ended, causing terrible destruction and claiming millions of lives. From our article you can find out what losses the countries participating in World War II suffered.
The most global military conflict of the 20th century involved 62 countries, 40 of which were directly involved in hostilities. Their losses in World War II are primarily calculated by casualties among military and civilians, which amounted to about 70 million.
The financial losses (the price of lost property) of all parties to the conflict were significant: about $2,600 billion. The country spent 60% of its income on providing the army and conducting military operations. The total cost reached $4 trillion.
The Second World War led to enormous destruction (about 10 thousand people). major cities And settlements). In the USSR alone, more than 1,700 cities, 70 thousand villages, and 32 thousand enterprises suffered from bombing. About 96 thousand were destroyed by the enemy. Soviet tanks and self-propelled artillery units, 37 thousand units of armored vehicles.
Historical facts show that it was the USSR that, of all the participants in the anti-Hitler coalition, suffered the most serious losses. Special measures were taken to clarify the number of deaths. In 1959, a population census was conducted (the first after the war). Then the figure of 20 million victims was announced. To date, other specific data are known (26.6 million), announced by the state commission in 2011. They coincided with the figures announced in 1990. Most of the dead were civilians.
Rice. 1. Destroyed city during World War II.
Unfortunately, the exact number of victims is still not known. Objective reasons (lack of official documentation) complicate the count, so many continue to be listed as missing.
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Before talking about the dead, let us indicate the number of people called up for service by states whose participation in the war was key, and those injured during the fighting:
Rice. 2. Wounded soldiers from World War II.
For convenience, we present a table of countries' losses in World War II. The death toll is indicated taking into account all causes of death approximately (averages between the minimum and maximum):
|
A country |
Dead military personnel |
Dead civilians |
|
Germany |
About 5 million |
About 3 million |
|
Great Britain |
||
|
Australia |
||
|
Yugoslavia |
||
|
Finland |
||
|
Netherlands |
||
|
Bulgaria |
At the same time, as the study of the balance of power on the world stage and the reconsideration of the role of all those who participated in the coalition against Hitler are proceeding, a quite reasonable question increasingly arises: “How many people died in World War II?” That's it now modern means mass media and some historical documents continue to support the old ones, but at the same time create new myths around this topic.
One of the most inveterate says that the Soviet Union won victory only thanks to colossal losses, which exceeded the loss of enemy manpower. To the last, most modern myths, which are being imposed on the whole world by the West, one can attribute the opinion that without the help of the United States, victory would have been impossible, supposedly all this is only because of their skill in warfare. However, thanks to statistical data, it is possible to conduct an analysis and still find out how many people died in World War II and who made the main contribution to the victory.
Of course, he suffered huge losses; brave soldiers sometimes went to their death with understanding. Everyone knows this. In order to find out how many people died in the Second World War in the USSR, it is necessary to turn to dry statistical figures. According to the 1939 census, approximately 190 million people lived in the USSR. The annual increase was about 2%, which amounted to 3 million. Thus, it is easy to calculate that by 1941 the population was 196 million people.
We continue to reason and back everything up with facts and numbers. Thus, any industrialized country, even with complete total mobilization, could not afford the luxury of calling on more than 10% of the population to fight. Thus, the approximate number of Soviet troops should have been 19.5 million. Based on the fact that men born in the period from 1896 to 1923 and then until 1928 were first called up, it is worth adding another one and a half million for each year, from which it follows that the total number of all military personnel during the entire period of the war was 27 million.
In order to find out how many people died in World War II, it is necessary from the total number of military personnel in the territory Soviet Union deduct about 2 million for the reason that they fought against the USSR (in the form of different groups such as OUN and ROA).
That leaves 25 million, of which 10 were still in service at the end of the war. Thus, approximately 15 million soldiers left the army, but it is worth considering that not all of them were dead. For example, about 2.5 million were released from captivity, and some were simply discharged due to injury. Thus, official figures fluctuate constantly, but it is still possible to derive an average: 8 or 9 million people died, and these were military personnel.
The problem is that it was not only the military who were killed. Now let's consider the question of how many people died in the Second World War among the civilian population. The fact is that official data says the following: out of 27 million people total losses(the official version offers us), it is necessary to subtract 9 million military personnel, whom we calculated earlier using simple arithmetic calculations. Thus, the resulting figure is 18 million civilians. Now let's look at it in more detail.
In order to calculate how many people died in World War II in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, it is necessary to again turn to dry but irrefutable statistics that indicate the following. The Germans occupied the territory of the USSR, which after the evacuation was home to about 65 million people, which was one third.
Poland lost about one-fifth of its population in this war, despite the fact that the front line passed through its territory many times, etc. During the war, Warsaw was practically destroyed to the ground, which gives approximately 20% of the dead population.
Belarus lost approximately a quarter of its population, and this despite the fact that the most severe fighting and partisan activity took place on the territory of the republic.
On the territory of Ukraine, losses amounted to approximately one-sixth of the entire population, and this despite the fact that there were a huge number of punitive forces, partisans, resistance units and various fascist “rabble” roaming the forests.
What percentage of civilian casualties should be typical for the entire occupied part of the USSR territory? Most likely, no higher than approximately two-thirds of the total population of the occupied part of the Soviet Union).
Then we can take as a basis the figure 11, which was obtained when two-thirds were subtracted from the total 65 million. Thus we get the classic 20 million total losses. But even this figure is crude and inaccurate to the maximum. Therefore, it is clear that the official report on how many people died in World War II, both military and civilian, exaggerates the numbers.
The United States of America also suffered losses in both equipment and manpower. Of course, they were insignificant compared to the USSR, so after the end of the war they could be calculated quite accurately. Thus, the resulting figure was 407.3 thousand dead. As for the civilian population, there were almost none of them among the dead American citizens, since no military operations took place on the territory of this country. Losses totaled 5 thousand people, mostly passengers of passing ships and merchant marine sailors who came under attack from German submarines.
As for the official figures regarding German losses, they look at least strange, since the number of missing people is almost the same as the dead, but in fact everyone understands that it is unlikely that they will be found and return home. If we add together all those who were not found and killed, we get 4.5 million. Among civilians - 2.5 million. Isn't this strange? After all, then the number of USSR losses turns out to be doubled. Against this background, some myths, guesses and misconceptions appear regarding how many people died in World War II in Russia.
The most important myth that persistently spread throughout the Soviet Union after the end of the war is the comparison of German and Soviet losses. Thus, the figure for German losses, which remained at 13.5 million, was also taken into circulation.
In fact, the German historian General Bupkhart Müller-Hillebrand announced the following figures, which were based on a centralized accounting of German losses. During the war, they amounted to 3.2 million people, 0.8 million died in captivity. In the East, approximately 0.5 million did not survive captivity, and another 3 died in battle, in the West - 300 thousand.
Of course, Germany, together with the USSR, fought the most brutal war of all times, which did not imply a single drop of pity and compassion. The majority of civilians and prisoners on one side and the other died of hunger. This was due to the fact that neither the Germans nor the Russians could provide food for their prisoners, since hunger would then starve their own people even more.
Historians still cannot count exactly how many people died in World War II. Every now and then different figures are announced in the world: it all started with 50 million people, then 70, and now even more. But the same losses that Asia suffered, for example, from the consequences of the war and outbreaks of epidemics against this background, which claimed a huge number of lives, will probably never be possible to calculate. Therefore, even the above data, which was collected from various authoritative sources, is far from final. And it will most likely never be possible to obtain an exact answer to this question.
To date, it is not known exactly how many people died in World War II. Less than 10 years ago, statisticians claimed that 50 million people had died; 2016 figures put the number of victims above 70 million. Perhaps, after some time, this figure will be refuted by new calculations.
The first mention of the dead was in the March 1946 issue of the Pravda newspaper. At that time, the official figure was 7 million people. Today, when almost all the archives have been studied, it can be argued that the losses of the Red Army and the civilian population of the Soviet Union totaled 27 million people. Other countries that were part of the anti-Hitler coalition also suffered significant losses, or rather:
Budapest, Hungary. A monument on the banks of the Danube in memory of the Jews executed in these places in 1944-45.
At the same time, losses on the German side were noticeably smaller and amounted to 5.4 million soldiers and 1.4 million civilians. The countries that fought on the side of Germany suffered the following human losses:
The fewest deaths were in Switzerland, Finland, Mongolia and Ireland.
The most difficult time for the Red Army were 1941–1942, it was then that losses amounted to 1/3 of those killed during the entire period of the war. Armed forces fascist Germany suffered the greatest losses between 1944 and 1946. In addition, 3,259 German civilians were killed at this time. Another 200,000 German soldiers did not return from captivity.
The United States lost the most people in 1945 during air attacks and evacuations. Other countries involved in the war experienced the most terrible times and enormous casualties in the final stages of World War II.
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During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet people suffered enormous losses. In the post-war years, calculations of human casualties did not give a real picture. Many documents were destroyed, lost, some of them were falsified, which prevented the determination of the real results. Thus, in 1946, Stalin announced a figure of 7 million people, and there was no clear distinction between the nationalities of the dead. Already in 1961, Khrushchev, in his letter to the Swedish minister, wrote about 20 million dead.
The beginning of an in-depth study of this issue can be dated back to the 1980s. Research was carried out by many historians independently of each other. Special contributions were made here by G. Krivosheev, V. Litvinenko, V. Zemskov, L. Lopukhovsky and many others. Based on declassified archives, historians have concluded that the numbers were underestimated. Confusion arose in the distinction between prisoners of war, civilians, and missing soldiers. There was also unrealistic information regarding the distribution of the dead by nationality.
Only in 1990 were figures made public that were as close as possible to the number real losses during the war. Thus, according to official data, this figure reached 27 million people. While the total human losses are estimated at almost 44 million people. Moreover, about 4 million of them are considered to have died in captivity. These data are still followed today. There are also alternative calculations that were carried out after 2000. During this period, many versions appeared about the number of deaths during the war, most of them indicating that the officially recognized figures diverged from the new estimates of historians. Much time is still devoted to research on this issue. In particular, historians are trying to establish the real death toll by nationality.
During the Great Patriotic War, the USSR represented a multinational country. Significant losses, naturally, were suffered by representatives of absolutely all nationalities. Russians, in the calculations of historians, took first place in the number of deaths. Their share accounted for about 70%. The second position on this list was taken by the Ukrainian SSR. During the war, the number of Ukrainians killed in the total share was 16%. The rest fell on Belarus, the Baltic countries, Georgia, Tajikistan, Moldova, etc. It is quite difficult to divide the dead by demographic criteria, because according to population censuses of each individual country, the population living on its territory included different nationalities. Historians have encountered particular difficulties in assessing the national composition of the Baltic countries and Moldova. In the post-war years, it was very difficult to restore the population of these countries.
If we consider the total population of the countries that were part of the USSR, then heavy losses Belarus suffered. Considering that from the first days of the war its territory was completely occupied, the BSSR lost about 30% of its population at the very beginning. The losses were no less in Georgia - more than half of the 700 thousand conscripted soldiers did not return.
“According to the results of calculations, during the years of the Great Patriotic War (including the campaign on Far East against Japan in 1945) total irrevocable demographic losses (killed, missing, captured and did not return from it, died from wounds, illnesses and as a result of accidents) of the Soviet Armed Forces together with the Border Guard and Internal troops amounted to 8 million 668 thousand 400 people.” Ratio with Germany and its allies 1:1.3
Every time another anniversary approaches Great Victory, the myth about our unimaginable losses is activated
Every time, knowledgeable and authoritative people with numbers in their hands convincingly prove that this myth is an ideological weapon in the information and psychological war against Russia, that it is a means of demoralizing our people. And with each new anniversary, a new generation grows up, which must hear a sober voice that, to some extent, neutralizes the efforts of manipulators.
WAR OF NUMBERS
Back in 2005, literally on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Victory, the President of the Academy of Military Sciences, Army General Makhmut Gareev, who in 1988 headed the Ministry of Defense commission to assess losses during the war, was invited to Vladimir Pozner’s TV show “Times”. Vladimir Pozner said: “This is an amazing thing - we still don’t know exactly how many of our fighters, soldiers, and officers died in this war.”
And this despite the fact that in 1966 - 1968 the calculation of human losses in the Great Patriotic War was led by a commission of the General Staff, headed by Army General Sergei Shtemenko. Then, in 1988 - 1993, a team of military historians was engaged in collating and verifying the materials of all previous commissions.
The results of this basic research losses of personnel and military equipment of the Soviet Armed Forces in hostilities for the period from 1918 to 1989 were published in the book “Classified as Classified. Losses of the Armed Forces in wars, hostilities and military conflicts.”
This book says: “According to the results of calculations, during the years of the Great Patriotic War (including the campaign in the Far East against Japan in 1945), the total irreversible demographic losses (killed, missing, captured and did not return from it) , died from wounds, illnesses and as a result of accidents) of the Soviet Armed Forces, together with the Border and Internal Troops, amounted to 8 million 668 thousand 400 people.” The ratio of human losses between Germany and its allies by Eastern Front it was 1:1.3 in favor of our opponent.
In the same TV program, a famous front-line writer entered into the conversation: “Stalin did everything to lose the war... The Germans lost a total of 12.5 million people, and we lost 32 million in one place, in one war.”
There are people who, in their “truth,” bring the scale of Soviet losses to absurd, absurd levels. The most fantastic figures are given by the writer and historian Boris Sokolov, who estimated the total number of deaths in the ranks of the Soviet Armed Forces in 1941 - 1945 at 26.4 million people, with German losses on the Soviet-German front at 2.6 million (that is, with loss ratio 10:1). And the total number of deaths in the Great Patriotic War Soviet people he counted 46 million.
His calculations are absurd: during all the years of the war, 34.5 million people were mobilized (taking into account the pre-war number of military personnel), of which about 27 million people were direct participants in the war. After the end of the war in Soviet army there were about 13 million people. Of the 27 million participants in the war, 26.4 million could not have died.
They are trying to convince us that “we overwhelmed the Germans with the corpses of our own soldiers.”
LOSSES BATTLE, IRREVOCABLE AND OFFICIAL
Irreversible combat losses include those killed on the battlefield, those who died from wounds during medical evacuation and in hospitals. These losses amounted to 6329.6 thousand people. Of these, 5,226.8 thousand were killed or died from wounds during the sanitary evacuation stages, and 1,102.8 thousand people died from wounds in hospitals.
Irretrievable losses also include those missing and captured. There were 3396.4 thousand of them. In addition, in the first months of the war there were significant losses, the nature of which was not documented (information about them was collected subsequently, including from German archives). They amounted to 1162.6 thousand people.
The number of irretrievable losses also includes non-combat losses - those who died from illnesses in hospitals, those who died as a result of emergency incidents, those who were executed by verdicts of military tribunals. These losses amounted to 555.5 thousand people.
The sum of all these losses during the war amounted to 11,444.1 thousand people. Excluded from this number are 939.7 thousand military personnel who were registered as missing in action at the beginning of the war, but were called up for the second time into the army in the territory liberated from occupation, as well as 1,836 thousand former military personnel who returned from captivity after the end of the war - a total of 2,775, 7 thousand people.
Thus, the actual number of irretrievable (demographic) losses of the USSR Armed Forces amounted to 8668.4 thousand people.
Of course, these are not final numbers. The Russian Ministry of Defense is creating an electronic database, which is constantly being updated. In January 2010, the head of the Russian Ministry of Defense Department for perpetuating the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland, Major General Alexander Kirilin, told the press that on the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, official data on our country’s losses in the Great Patriotic War would be made public. The general confirmed that the Ministry of Defense currently estimates the losses of military personnel of the Armed Forces in 1941 - 1945 at 8.86 million people. He said: “By the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, we will finally come to the official figure that will be recorded in regulatory document government and communicated to the entire population of the country to stop speculation on loss figures.”
Close to real information about losses is contained in the works of the outstanding Russian demographer Leonid Rybakovsky, in particular one of his latest publications, “Human Losses of the USSR and Russia in the Great Patriotic War.”
Objective research is also appearing abroad in Russia. Thus, the famous demographer Sadretdin Maksudov, who works at Harvard University and studied the losses of the Red Army, estimated irrevocable losses at 7.8 million people, which is 870 thousand less than in the book “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed.” He explains this discrepancy by the fact that the Russian authors did not exclude from the number of losses those military personnel who died a “natural” death (this is 250 - 300 thousand people). In addition, they overestimated the number of dead Soviet prisoners of war. From these, according to Maksudov, it is necessary to subtract those who died “naturally” (about 100 thousand), as well as those who remained in the West after the war (200 thousand) or returned to their homeland, bypassing official repatriation channels (about 280 thousand people). ). Maksudov published his results in Russian in the article “On the front-line losses of the Soviet Army during the Second World War.”
THE PRICE OF EUROPE'S SECOND COMING TO RUSSIA
In 1998, a joint work of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation “The Great Patriotic War. 1941 - 1945" in 4 volumes. It says: “The irretrievable human losses of the German armed forces on the Eastern Front are equal to 7181.1 thousand military personnel, and together with the allies... - 8649.3 thousand.” If we count using the same method - taking into account prisoners - then “irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR... exceed enemy losses by 1.3 times.”
This is the most reliable loss ratio at the moment. Not 10:1, like other “seekers of truth”, but 1.3:1. Not ten times more, but 30%.
The Red Army suffered its main losses at the first stage of the war: in 1941, that is, just over 6 months of the war, 27.8% of the total number of deaths during the entire war occurred. And for 5 months of 1945, which included several major operations, - 7.5% of the total number of deaths.
Also, the main losses in the form of prisoners occurred at the beginning of the war. According to German data, from June 22, 1941 to January 10, 1942, the number of Soviet prisoners of war amounted to 3.9 million. At the Nuremberg trials, a document was read out from the office of Alfred Rosenberg, which reported that of the 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war by the beginning of 1942 1.1 million remained in the camps for a year.
The German army was objectively much stronger at the first stage.
And the numerical advantage at first was on the side of Germany. On June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht and SS troops deployed a fully mobilized and combat-experienced army of 5.5 million people against the USSR. The Red Army had western districts 2.9 million people, a significant part of whom have not yet completed mobilization and have not completed training.
We must also not forget that, in addition to the Wehrmacht and SS troops, 29 divisions and 16 brigades of Germany’s allies - Finland, Hungary and Romania - immediately joined the war against the USSR. On June 22, their soldiers made up 20% of the invading army. Then Italian and Slovak troops joined them, and by the end of July 1941, German satellite troops accounted for about 30% of the invasion force.
In fact, there was an invasion of Europe into Russia (in the form of the USSR), in many ways similar to the invasion of Napoleon. A direct analogy was drawn between these two invasions (Hitler even granted the “Legion of French Volunteers” the honorable right to begin the battle on the Borodino field; however, during one major shelling, this legion immediately lost 75% of its personnel). The Red Army was fought by the Spanish and Italian divisions, the Netherlands, Landstorm Netherlands and Nordland divisions, the Langermac, Wallonia and Charlemagne divisions, the Bohemia and Moravia division of Czech volunteers, and the Skanderberg Albanian division. , as well as separate battalions of Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes.
Suffice it to say that in battles with the Red Army on the territory of the USSR, the Romanian army lost more than 600 thousand soldiers and officers killed, wounded and captured. Hungary fought with the USSR from June 27, 1941 to April 12, 1945, when the entire territory was already occupied Soviet troops. On the Eastern Front, Hungarian troops numbered up to 205 thousand bayonets. The intensity of their participation in the battles is evidenced by the fact that in January 1942, in the battles near Voronezh, the Hungarians lost 148 thousand people killed, wounded and captured.
Finland mobilized 560 thousand people, 80% of the conscript contingent, for the war with the USSR. This army was the most trained, well-armed and resilient among Germany's allies. From June 25, 1941 to July 25, 1944, the Finns pinned down large forces of the Red Army in Karelia. The Croatian Legion was small in number, but had a combat-ready fighter squadron, whose pilots shot down (according to their reports) 259 Soviet aircraft, losing 23 of their own aircraft.
The Slovaks were different from all of these allies of Hitler. Of the 36 thousand Slovak military personnel who fought on the Eastern Front, less than 3 thousand died, and more than 27 thousand soldiers and officers surrendered, many of whom joined the Czechoslovak Army Corps, formed in the USSR. At the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, all Slovak military aviation flew to Lvov airfield.
In general, according to German data, 230 thousand people were killed and died on the Eastern Front as part of foreign formations of the Wehrmacht and SS, and 959 thousand people as part of the armies of satellite countries - a total of about 1.2 million soldiers and officers. According to a certificate from the USSR Ministry of Defense (1988), the irretrievable losses of the armed forces of the countries officially at war with the USSR amounted to 1 million people. In addition to the Germans, among the prisoners of war taken by the Red Army were 1.1 million citizens of European countries. For example, there were 23 thousand French, 70 Czechoslovaks, 60.3 Poles, 22 Yugoslavs.
Perhaps even more important is the fact that by the start of the war against the USSR, Germany had occupied or effectively brought under control all of continental Europe. A territory of 3 million square meters was united under common power and purpose. km and a population of about 290 million people. As the English historian writes, “Europe has become an economic whole.” All this potential was thrown into the war against the USSR, whose potential, by formal economic standards, was approximately 4 times less (and decreased by approximately half in the first six months of the war).
At the same time, Germany also received, through intermediaries, significant assistance from the United States and Latin America. Europe supplied German industry with labor on a huge scale, which made it possible to carry out an unprecedented military mobilization of the Germans - 21.1 million people. During the war, approximately 14 million foreign workers were employed in the German economy. On May 31, 1944, there were 7.7 million foreign workers (30%) in the German war industry. Germany's military orders were carried out by all large, technically advanced enterprises in Europe. Suffice it to say that the Skoda factories alone produced as much military products in the year before the attack on Poland as the entire British military industry. On June 22, 1941, a military vehicle burst into the USSR with an amount of equipment and ammunition unprecedented in history.
The Red Army, which had only recently been reformed on a modern basis and had only just begun to receive and master modern weapons, faced a powerful enemy of a completely new type, which had not been seen either in the First World War or in Civil wars, not even in the Finnish war. However, as events showed, the Red Army had an exceptionally high ability to learn. She showed rare resilience in the most difficult conditions and quickly strengthened. Military strategy and tactics high command and officers were creative and had high system quality. Therefore on final stage During the war, the losses of the German army were 1.4 times greater than those of the Soviet Armed Forces.
