Ancient history

The number of victims of World War II - Film and visualization

A well-made documentary about the number of soldiers and civilians killed during the last world war. The number of victims of World War II shown in the film with data visualization. Film in English.

The number of victims of World War II

The first part of the video includes a visualization of the victims' data among soldiers. The division into nationalities and theaters of military operations was taken into account. However, from what I can see from the comments, not all nationalities are included. There is, for example, Canada, which has lost over 45 thousand. soldiers. The film did not lack Poland, including data including the victims after the end of the September campaign, e.g. the Katyn massacre. In this list, the largest number of fallen soldiers fell to the Soviet Union. Officially 8.7 million soldiers killed. The chart showing the number of fallen Soviet soldiers against the background of other countries is shocking. The Soviets simply did not take the lives of their soldiers into account. The victory over the Third Reich was to be achieved regardless of the number of victims.

Chart of killed soldiers during World War II - Source:www.fallen.io

The data on the fallen soldiers are interesting and spread over the time axis. There is an interactive version of this graph below on the project website www.fallen.io. So you can view every single month of World War II and see what losses a given country suffered that month.

Soldiers - World War II death toll on the timeline - Source:www.fallen.io

The second part of the film focuses on civilian casualties. Taking into account, of course, the victims of the Holocaust. The author of the film should be commended here for breaking it down into individual nationalities. Because sometimes the victims among Jews are not counted as losses of the Polish population. By adding up civilian and military casualties, Poland achieved the highest percentage of casualties among the population.

Civilians - Number of victims of World War II - Source:www.fallen.io

World War II in comparison to other wars

The death toll of World War II was greater than any other war in human history. The author of the film estimates the total number at over 70 million. Including civilian casualties, fallen soldiers, and the theater of operations in Asia. This is, of course, approximate figures, as it will never be possible to determine the exact value. The most interesting, however, is the chart comparing the victims of World War II and other conflicts in world history. The chart is presented below.

World War II casualties compared to other wars - Source:www.fallen.io

The bars in the chart show the values ​​in numbers. However, the graph changes interestingly when we start to compare the number of victims to the then number of the world's population. 70 million victims are different from 2 billion people, 40 million are different with 0.5 billion people. Thus, taking into account the then world population, it turns out that World War II was not the most destructive conflict in history. With this method of assessment, the bloodiest was the An Lushan Revolution, which, according to the American Wikipedia, claimed 36 million lives, compared to the world population at that time of about 210 million. The Mongol invasions were next.

Victims of World War II and other conflicts - Source:www.fallen.io

About the data and the author of the movie

Screenplay, director and film execution - Neil Halloran. For the preparation of the material, the author of the film obtained data about the victims from the following sources:

  • World War II Casualties - Wikipedia
  • Database - Google
  • Uppsala Conflict Data Program