World War II Casualties - Recent Historical Scholarship

Recent Historical Scholarship

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. In August 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers estimated Poland's dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million.

The German Army historian Dr. RĂ¼diger Overmans published a study in 2000 that estimated German military dead and missing at 5.3 million. War dead totals in this article 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 that are often omitted from other compilations of World War II casualties.

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