World War II Casualties of The Soviet Union - Civilian Losses

Civilian Losses

The Russian Academy of Science puts the civilian death toll in the regions occupied by Germany at 13.7 million. Contemporary Russian sources use the terms "genocide" and "premeditated extermination" when referring to civilian losses in the occupied USSR caused by the result of direct, intentional actions of violence. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major part of the huge toll. Russian sources generally do not break down Jewish Holocaust deaths separately. Martin Gilbert puts Jewish losses at one million within the borders of 1939; Holocaust deaths in the annexed territories were another 1.5 million bringing the total in Soviet territory to about 2.5 million. These losses include deaths in the siege of Leningrad. David Glantz has noted that Soviet era sources put the number of dead in the Siege of Leningrad at “greater than 800,000” and that a Russian source from 2000 put the number of dead at 1,000,000. However, other Russian historians have put the death toll in the siege of Leningrad at between 1.4 and 2.0 million persons. The report of the Russian Academy of Science lists the deaths of civilian forced laborers in Germany totaling 2,164,313. G. I. Krivosheev in the report on military casualties gives a total of 1,103,300 POW dead. The total of these two figures is 3,267,613, which is in close agreement with estimates by western historians of about 3 million deaths of prisoners in German captivity. In the occupied regions Nazi Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in the famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, 4.1 million persons.

Source: The figures for civilian losses are taken from a report published by the Russian Academy of Science Human Losses of the USSR in the Period of WWII: Collection of Articles (In Russian). Saint-Petersburg, 1995. ISBN 978-5-86789-023-0 -M. V. Philimoshin of the War Ministry of the Russian Federation About the results of calculation of losses among civilian population of the USSR and Russian Federation 1941-1945 Pages 124-131

• These figures are for the regions of the USSR occupied by Germany with a population of about 70 million persons.

• These casualties are for 1941-1945 within the 1946-1991 borders of the USSR. Included with civilian losses are deaths in the territories annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940 including 600,000 in the Baltic states and 1,500,000 in Eastern Poland.

• In addition to the losses listed above an estimated 2.5 to 3.2 million civilians died due to famine and disease in non-occupied territory of the USSR which was caused by wartime shortages in the rear areas.

• Documents from the Soviet archives list the total deaths of prisoners in the Gulag from 1941 to 1945 at 621,637. In the 1995 Report by the Russian Academy of Science V.N. Zemskov noted "due to general difficulties in 1941-1945 in the camps, the GULAG and prisons about 1.0 million prisoners died

• These figures do not include an additional 622,000 persons who did not return to the USSR after 1946 according to the 1993 Russian Academy of Science report on total war losses by E.M. Andreev