The exact number of deaths in World War II. The myth of German military losses in World War II

What were the population losses of the USSR during World War II? Stalin stated that they were equal to 7 million, Khrushchev - 20. However, is there any reason to believe that they were significantly larger?
By the beginning of the war, the population of the USSR was 197,500,000 people. The "natural" population growth from 1941 - 1945 was 13,000,000 people, and the "natural" decline was 15,000,000 people, since the war was going on.
By 1946, the population of the USSR should have been 195,500,000 people. However, at that time it was only 168,500,000 people. Consequently, the loss of population during the war was 27,000,000 people. An interesting fact: the population of the republics and territories annexed in 1939 is 22,000,000 people. However, in 1946 it was 13 million. The fact is that 9 million people emigrated. 2 million Germans (or those who called themselves Germans) moved to Germany, 2 million Poles (or those who knew a few words from the Polish dialect) moved to Poland, 5 million inhabitants of the western regions of the USSR moved to the countries of the West.
So, direct losses from the war: 27 million - 9 million = 18 million people. 8 million people out of 18 million - these are civilians: 1 million Poles who died at the hands of Bandera, 1 million who died during the blockade of Leningrad, 2 million civilians classified by the Nazis as persons capable of taking up arms (age from 15 to 65 years) and kept in concentration camps along with Soviet prisoners of war, 4 million Soviet citizens, classified by the Nazis as communists, partisans, etc. Every tenth Soviet person died.

Losses of the Red Army - 10 million people.

What were the German population losses during World War II?By the beginning of the war, the population of Germany proper was 74,000,000 people. The population of the Third Reich is 93 million people.By the autumn of 1945, the population of Germany (Vaterland, not the entire Third Reich) was 52,000,000 people. More than 5 million Germans immigrated from the Volksdeutsche to the country. So, the losses of Germany: 74 million - 52 million + 5 million = 27 million people.

Consequently, the loss of the German population during the war was 27,000,000 people. About 9 million people emigrated from Germany.
Direct military losses of Germany - 18 million people. 8 million of them are civilians who died as a result of air raids by US and British aircraft, as a result of shelling. Germany lost about a third of its population! By October 1946, more than 13 million Volksdeutsche arrived in Western Germany from Alsace and Lorraine (about 2.2 million people Volksdeutsche) , Saara ( 0.8 million people ), Silesia (10 million people), Sudetenland ( 3.64 million people), Poznan (1 million people), Baltic States (2 million people), Danzig and Memel (0.54 million people) and other places. The population of Germany began to equal 66 million people. Persecution began against the German population outside the territory of the occupation zones. The Germans were thrown out of their homes and were often slaughtered in the streets. The non-German population spared neither children nor the elderly. It was because of this that the mass exodus of the Germans and those who collaborated with them began. The Kashubians with Schlenzaks considered themselves Germans. They also went to the western occupation zones.

Editorial note. For 70 years, first the top leadership of the USSR (having rewritten history), and later the government of the Russian Federation, supported a monstrous and cynical lie about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century - World War II.

Editorial note . For 70 years, first the top leadership of the USSR (having rewritten history), and later the government of the Russian Federation, supported a monstrous and cynical lie about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century - World War II, mainly privatizing victory in it and keeping silent about its price and the role of other countries in the outcome. wars. Now in Russia, victory has been made into a ceremonial picture, victory is being supported at all levels, and the cult of the St. George ribbon has reached such an ugly form that it has actually grown into a frank mockery of the memory of millions of fallen people. And while the whole world mourns for those who died fighting against Nazism, or became its victims, eReFiya arranges a blasphemous Sabbath. And over these 70 years, the exact number of losses of Soviet citizens in that war has not been finally clarified. The Kremlin is not interested in this, just as it is not interested in publishing the statistics of the dead military of the Russian Armed Forces in the Donbass, in the Russian-Ukrainian war, which he unleashed. Only a few who did not succumb to the influence of Russian propaganda are trying to find out the exact number of losses in WWII.

In the article that we bring to your attention, the most important thing is that the Soviet and Russian authorities spat on the fate of how many millions of people, while PR in every possible way on their feat.

Estimates of the losses of Soviet citizens in World War II have a huge spread: from 19 to 36 million. The first detailed calculations were made by a Russian emigrant, demographer Timashev in 1948 - he got 19 million. B. Sokolov called the maximum figure - 46 million. The latest calculations show that only the military of the USSR lost 13.5 million people, the total losses were over 27 million.

At the end of the war, long before any historical and demographic studies, Stalin gave a figure of 5.3 million military casualties. He included in it the missing (obviously, in most cases - prisoners). In March 1946, in an interview with a correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, the generalissimo estimated the casualties at 7 million. The increase was due to civilians who died in the occupied territory or were driven to Germany.

In the West, this figure was perceived with skepticism. Already in the late 1940s, the first calculations of the demographic balance of the USSR for the war years, contradicting Soviet data, appeared. An illustrative example is the estimates of the Russian emigrant, demographer N. S. Timashev, published in the New York "New Journal" in 1948. Here is his technique.

The all-Union census of the population of the USSR in 1939 determined its number at 170.5 million. The increase in 1937-1940. reached, according to his assumption, almost 2% for each year. Consequently, the population of the USSR by the middle of 1941 should have reached 178.7 million. But in 1939-1940. Western Ukraine and Belarus, three Baltic states, the Karelian lands of Finland were annexed to the USSR, and Romania returned Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Therefore, excluding the Karelian population who fled to Finland, the Poles who fled to the West, and the Germans repatriated to Germany, these territorial acquisitions gave a population increase of 20.5 million. Considering that the birth rate in the annexed territories was no more than 1% in year, that is, lower than in the USSR, and also taking into account the shortness of the time period between their entry into the USSR and the start of World War II, the author determined the population growth for these territories by mid-1941 at 300 thousand. Sequentially summing up the above figures, he received 200.7 million living in the USSR on the eve of June 22, 1941.

Next, Timashev divided the 200 million into three age groups, again relying on data from the All-Union Census of 1939: adults (over 18 years old) - 117.2 million, adolescents (from 8 to 18 years old) - 44.5 million, children (under 8 years) - 38.8 million. At the same time, he took into account two important circumstances. First: in 1939-1940. two very weak annual flows, born in 1931-1932, during the famine, which engulfed large areas of the USSR and negatively affected the size of the adolescent group, passed from childhood to the group of adolescents. Second, there were more people over 20 in the former Polish lands and the Baltic states than in the USSR.

Timashev supplemented these three age groups with the number of Soviet prisoners. He did it in the following way. By the time of the elections of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937, the population of the USSR reached 167 million, of which voters made up 56.36% of the total, and the population over 18 years old, according to the All-Union Census of 1939, reached 58.3%. The resulting difference of 2%, or 3.3 million, in his opinion, was the population of the Gulag (including the number of those executed). This turned out to be close to the truth.

Next, Timashev moved on to post-war figures. The number of voters included in the voting lists for the elections of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the spring of 1946 amounted to 101.7 million. Adding to this figure 4 million prisoners of the Gulag calculated by him, he received 106 million of the adult population in the USSR at the beginning of 1946. Calculating the teenage group, he took as a basis 31.3 million primary and secondary school students in the 1947/48 academic year, compared with the data of 1939 (31.4 million schoolchildren within the borders of the USSR until September 17, 1939) and received a figure of 39 million Calculating the children's group, he proceeded from the fact that by the beginning of the war the birth rate in the USSR was approximately 38 per 1000, in the second quarter of 1942 it decreased by 37.5%, and in 1943-1945. - half.

Subtracting from each annual group the percentage due according to the normal mortality table for the USSR, he received at the beginning of 1946 36 million children. Thus, according to his statistical calculations, in the USSR at the beginning of 1946 there were 106 million adults, 39 million adolescents and 36 million children, and a total of 181 million. Timashev’s conclusion is as follows: the population of the USSR in 1946 was 19 million less than in 1941.

Approximately the same results came and other Western researchers. In 1946, under the auspices of the League of Nations, F. Lorimer's book "The Population of the USSR" was published. According to one of his hypotheses, during the war the population of the USSR decreased by 20 million people.

In an article published in 1953, "Casual losses in World War II," the German researcher G. Arntz concluded that "20 million people is the closest figure to the truth of the total losses of the Soviet Union in World War II." The collection, which includes this article, was translated and published in the USSR in 1957 under the title "Results of the Second World War". Thus, four years after Stalin's death, Soviet censorship let the figure of 20 million into the open press, thereby indirectly recognizing it as true and making it the property of at least specialists: historians, international affairs specialists, etc.

Only in 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to the Swedish Prime Minister Erlander, admitted that the war against fascism "claimed two tens of millions of lives of Soviet people." Thus, in comparison with Stalin, Khrushchev increased the Soviet casualties by almost 3 times.

In 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, Brezhnev spoke of "more than 20 million" human lives lost by the Soviet people in the war. In the 6th and final volume of the fundamental “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union” published at the same time, it was stated that out of the 20 million dead, almost half “are military and civilians killed and tortured by the Nazis in the occupied Soviet territory.” In fact, 20 years after the end of the war, the USSR Ministry of Defense recognized the death of 10 million Soviet troops.

Four decades later, the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, in a footnote, told the truth about the calculations that military historians carried out in the early 1960s when preparing the “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”: “Our losses in the war were then they were determined at 26 million. But the figure “over 20 million” turned out to be accepted by high authorities.

As a result, "20 million" not only took root for decades in historical literature, but also became part of the national identity.

In 1990, M. Gorbachev published a new figure of losses, obtained as a result of research by demographic scientists, - "almost 27 million people."

In 1991, B. Sokolov's book “The Price of Victory. The Great Patriotic War: the unknown about the known. In it, direct military losses of the USSR were estimated at about 30 million, including 14.7 million military personnel, and "actual and potential losses" - at 46 million, including 16 million unborn children.

A little later, Sokolov clarified these figures (brought new losses). He received the loss figure as follows. From the size of the Soviet population at the end of June 1941, which he determined at 209.3 million, he subtracted 166 million who, in his opinion, lived in the USSR on January 1, 1946, and received 43.3 million dead. Then, from the resulting number, he subtracted the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces (26.4 million) and received the irretrievable losses of the civilian population - 16.9 million.

“It is possible to name the number of killed Red Army soldiers during the entire war close to reality, if we determine that month of 1942, when the losses of the Red Army by the dead were taken into account most fully and when it had almost no losses as prisoners. For a number of reasons, we chose November 1942 as such a month and extended the ratio of the number of dead and wounded obtained for it to the entire period of the war. As a result, we came to a figure of 22.4 million killed in battle and died from wounds, diseases, accidents and shot by the tribunals of Soviet military personnel.

To the 22.4 million received in this way, he added 4 million fighters and commanders of the Red Army who died in enemy captivity. And so it turned out 26.4 million irretrievable losses suffered by the Armed Forces.

In addition to B. Sokolov, similar calculations were made by L. Polyakov, A. Kvasha, V. Kozlov, and others. USSR, which is almost impossible to determine exactly. It was this difference that they considered the total loss of life.

In 1993, the statistical study “Secret Class Removed: Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in Wars, Combat Operations and Military Conflicts” was published, prepared by a team of authors headed by General G. Krivosheev. Previously secret archival documents became the main source of statistical data, primarily the reporting materials of the General Staff. However, the losses of entire fronts and armies in the first months, and the authors specifically stipulated this, were obtained by them by calculation. In addition, the reports of the General Staff did not include the losses of units that were not organizationally part of the Soviet Armed Forces (army, navy, border and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR), but were directly involved in the battles: the people's militia, partisan detachments, underground groups.

Finally, the number of prisoners of war and missing persons is clearly underestimated: this category of losses, according to the reports of the General Staff, totals 4.5 million, of which 2.8 million remained alive (were repatriated after the end of the war or re-conscripted into the ranks of the Red Army on the liberated from the occupiers of the territory), and, accordingly, the total number of those who did not return from captivity, including those who did not want to return to the USSR, amounted to 1.7 million.

As a result, the statistical data of the handbook “The Classification Removed” were immediately perceived as requiring clarifications and additions. And in 1998, thanks to the publication of V. Litovkin “During the war years, our army lost 11 million 944 thousand 100 people”, these data were replenished by 500 thousand reserve reservists drafted into the army, but not yet included in the lists of military units and who died along the way to the front.

V. Litovkin's study states that from 1946 to 1968, a special commission of the General Staff, headed by General S. Shtemenko, prepared a statistical reference book on the losses of 1941-1945. At the end of the work of the commission, Shtemenko reported to the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal A. Grechko: “Taking into account that the statistical collection contains information of national importance, the publication of which in the press (including closed) or in any other way is currently not necessary and undesirable, the collection is supposed to be stored in the General Staff as a special document, to which a strictly limited circle of persons will be allowed to familiarize themselves. And the prepared collection was under seven seals until the team led by General G. Krivosheev made public his information.

V. Litovkin’s research sowed even greater doubts about the completeness of the information published in the collection “Secret Classification Removed”, because a logical question arose: were all the data contained in the “Statistical Collection of the Shtemenko Commission” declassified?

For example, according to the data given in the article, during the war years, military justice authorities convicted 994 thousand people, of which 422 thousand were sent to penal units, 436 thousand to places of detention. The remaining 136 thousand, apparently, were shot.

And yet, the handbook “Secrecy Removed” significantly expanded and supplemented the ideas not only of historians, but of the entire Russian society about the price of the 1945 Victory. It is enough to refer to the statistical calculation: from June to November 1941, the Armed Forces of the USSR daily lost 24 thousand people, of which 17 thousand were killed and up to 7 thousand were wounded, and from January 1944 to May 1945 - 20 thousand people , of which 5.2 thousand were killed and 14.8 thousand were wounded.

In 2001, a significantly expanded statistical publication appeared - “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century. Losses of the armed forces. The authors supplemented the materials of the General Staff with reports from military headquarters about losses and notices from the military registration and enlistment offices about the dead and missing, which were sent to relatives at the place of residence. And the figure of losses received by him increased to 9 million 168 thousand 400 people. These data were reproduced in the 2nd volume of the collective work of the staff of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Population of Russia in the 20th century. Historical essays”, edited by academician Yu. Polyakov.

In 2004, the second, corrected and supplemented, edition of the book by the head of the Center for Military History of Russia of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, “Feat and Forgery: Pages of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945”, was published. It provides data on losses: about 27 million Soviet citizens. And in the footnotes to them, the same addition mentioned above appeared, explaining that the calculations of military historians back in the early 1960s gave a figure of 26 million, but the "high authorities" preferred to take something else for "historical truth": "over 20 million".

Meanwhile, historians and demographers continued to look for new approaches to ascertaining the magnitude of the losses of the USSR in the war.

The historian Ilyenkov, who served in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, followed an interesting path. He tried to calculate the irretrievable losses of the personnel of the Red Army on the basis of card indexes of the irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers. These file cabinets began to be created when, on July 9, 1941, the department for recording personal losses was organized as part of the Main Directorate for the Formation and Manning of the Red Army (GUFKKA). The duties of the department included personal accounting of losses and the compilation of an alphabetical file of losses.

Accounting was carried out according to the following categories: 1) dead - according to reports from military units, 2) dead - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 3) missing - according to reports from military units, 4) missing - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 5) those who died in German captivity , 6) those who died from diseases, 7) those who died from wounds - according to reports from military units, those who died from wounds - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices. At the same time, the following were taken into account: deserters; military personnel sentenced to imprisonment in forced labor camps; sentenced to the highest measure of punishment - execution; removed from the register of irretrievable losses as survivors; those who are suspected of having served with the Germans (the so-called "signals"), and those who were captured, but survived. These soldiers were not included in the list of irretrievable losses.

After the war, the file cabinets were deposited in the Archive of the USSR Ministry of Defense (now the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation). Since the early 1990s, the archives have begun counting index cards by alphabetical letters and loss categories. As of November 1, 2000, 20 letters of the alphabet were processed, according to the remaining uncounted 6 letters, a preliminary calculation was carried out, which fluctuates up or down by 30-40 thousand personalities.

Calculated 20 letters in 8 categories of losses of privates and sergeants of the Red Army gave the following figures: 9 million 524 thousand 398 people. At the same time, 116 thousand 513 people were removed from the register of irretrievable losses as they turned out to be alive according to the reports of the military registration and enlistment offices.

A preliminary calculation for 6 uncounted letters gave 2 million 910 thousand people of irretrievable losses. The result of the calculations turned out as follows: 12 million 434 thousand 398 Red Army soldiers and sergeants lost the Red Army in 1941-1945. (Recall that this is without the loss of the Navy, internal and border troops of the NKVD of the USSR.)

The alphabetical card file of irretrievable losses of officers of the Red Army, which is also stored in the TsAMO of the Russian Federation, was calculated using the same methodology. They amounted to about 1 million 100 thousand people.

Thus, during the Second World War, the Red Army lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders in the dead, missing, dead from wounds, diseases and in captivity.

These data are 4 million 865 thousand 998 more than the irretrievable losses of the USSR Armed Forces (roster) according to the General Staff, which included the Red Army, military sailors, border guards, internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR.

Finally, we note another new trend in the study of the demographic results of World War II. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to assess the human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century, L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate value of the human losses of the RSFSR within its then borders. According to his estimates, it amounted to approximately 13 million people - slightly less than half of the total losses of the USSR.

(Quotes: S. Golotik and V. Minaev - "The demographic losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War: the history of calculations", "New Historical Bulletin", No. 16, 2007.)

The United States was forced into the war on December 7, 1941, as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And although the scale of the battles was not the same as on the Eastern Front, this does not negate their fierceness. Getting bogged down in battles with the Japanese, the United States was able to secure the rear of the USSR, and subsequently opening a second front, brought the defeat of Germany closer and made its collapse inevitable. In total, the main losses in World War II are due to the following factors:

The contribution of the Allies to victory cannot be underestimated. In fact, while fierce battles were going on in the east and the blitzkrieg thundered, Great Britain and the United States also did not sit idly by, stretching the forces of the Germans and their allies in several directions, thereby reducing the pressure on the USSR.

During the entire war in the United States, a huge number of recruits were mobilized - more than 16 million people. Such reserves were enough to fight long wars of attrition, in addition, the American soldiers did not have the worst level of training, which allowed them to withstand even superior enemy forces.

After the unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor and the destruction of one of the most powerful military bases, the United States entered the war. Just hours after the attack, the Americans declared war on Japan and began planning their response.

Starting from 1942, the Japanese army lost its advantage and ceased to win significant victories, which led to the defeat in the Battle of Midway, and dealt a crushing blow to the imperial troops.

After that, the Americans continued their systematic offensive, freeing all the islands that came across on the way. The Japanese refused to capitulate, even when they found themselves in a completely stalemate in 1945. Anticipating heavy losses at the beginning of the assault on the main island of Japan, the US command decided to drop two atomic bombs, which finally broke the spirit of the Japanese and led to the subsequent complete surrender.

In total, during the war with the Japanese, the Americans lost about 300 thousand soldiers and sailors killed, captured and subsequently died from wounds. In addition, it is known about the injured civilians. So the Japanese managed to intern more than 12 thousand civilians.

One of the main "meat grinders" - the place where the Allies suffered the greatest losses - was the beaches during Operation Overlord. The infantry had to storm the enemy bunkers, advancing across open terrain, under furious artillery and machine gun fire. However, due to the disagreements of the German commanders, who as a result could not provide organized assistance to each other, the defense was broken through. The battle for Normandy went on for about two months. The main task of the allies was to capture, expand and strengthen the coastal bridgeheads in order to create favorable conditions for subsequent attacks on the enemy. This operation went down in history as the largest landing, as it involved more than 3 million soldiers who crossed the English Channel.

Great losses were inflicted on the allies by powerful German armored vehicles - the outdated military doctrine affected. The main tank of the US Army at that time was the M4 Sherman, equipped with a short-barreled 75-mm gun, which was not able to adequately deal with enemy tanks that destroyed Shermans at distances of more than a kilometer. The use of specialized self-propelled guns did not give significant results, which is why the Americans lost heavily to the mechanized divisions of the Wehrmacht. As a result, due to the heavy casualties, the Americans had to quickly develop new types of tanks, as well as figure out how to modernize the current ones that remained in service.

Even despite the complete dominance of the Americans in the air, the German forces continued to offer serious resistance. Especially here the Hitler Youth managed to distinguish itself. Teenagers, under the guidance of experienced officers, managed to inflict enormous damage on American forces, turning French vineyards into a real hell. However, they didn't stand a chance, as the Americans were better trained and already had combat skills by the time the operation began. Some units had real combat experience gained during the battles with the Japanese. This played a cruel joke on the American Marines, since the Germans used completely different battle tactics, which also led to heavy losses at first.

In total, during the bloody battles in Europe, the United States lost almost 186,000 servicemen killed, which, of course, is quite small when compared with the losses of the USSR.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, he made the biggest contribution to the victory over the Third Reich. The Allies could only indirectly help the Soviet troops, diverting the attention of the Wehrmacht command and forcing them to disperse their forces. They also additionally supplied weapons for the Soviet army under the Lend-Lease program. In total, US losses in World War II amounted to 405,000 killed and 671,000 wounded.

The military historian from Freiburg, R. Overmans, published the book "German Military Losses in World War II", which took him 12 years - a rather rare case in our fleeting time.

The personnel of the German military machine in World War II is 13.6 million infantrymen, 2.5 million military pilots, 1.2 million military sailors and 0.9 million employees of the SS troops.

But how many German soldiers fell in that war? To answer this question, R. Overmans turned to the surviving primary sources. Among them is a consolidated list of identification marks (tokens) of German military personnel (about 16.8 million names in total) and Kriegsmarine documentation (about 1.2 million names), on the one hand, and a summary file of losses of the Wehrmacht Information Service about military losses and prisoners of war (about 18.3 million cards in total), on the other.

Overmans claims that the irretrievable losses of the German army amounted to 5.3 million people. This is approximately one million more than the figure rooted in the mass consciousness. According to the scientist's calculations, almost every third German soldier did not return from the war. Most of all - 2743 thousand, or 51.6% - fell on the Eastern Front, and the most crushing losses in the entire war turned out not to be the death of the 6th Army near Stalingrad, but the breakthroughs of the Army Group Center in July 1944 and the Army Group "Southern Ukraine" in the Yass region in August 1944. Between 300 and 400 thousand people died during both operations. On the Western Front, irretrievable losses amounted to only 340 thousand people, or 6.4% of the total losses.

The most dangerous was the service in the SS: about 34% of the personnel of these specific troops died in the war or in captivity (that is, every third; and if on the Eastern Front, then every second). The infantry also got it, the mortality rate in which was 31%; with a large "lag" followed by the air (17%) and naval (12%) forces. At the same time, the proportion of infantry among the dead is 79%, the Luftwaffe is in second place - 8.1%, and the SS troops are in third - 5.9%.

Over the last 10 months of the war (from July 1944 to May 1945), almost the same number of soldiers died as in the previous 4 years (therefore, it can be assumed that in the event of a successful assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 and subsequent surrender, irrevocable the combat losses of the Germans could have been half that, not to mention the uncountable losses of the civilian population). Only in the last three spring months of the war, about 1 million people died, and if those called up in 1939 were given an average of 4 years of life, then those called up in 1943 - only a year, and those called up in 1945 - a month!

The most affected age is born in 1925: of those who would have turned 20 in 1945, every two out of five did not return from the war. As a result, the ratio of men and women in the key age group from 20 to 35 years in the structure of the post-war German population reached a dramatic ratio of 1: 2, which had the most serious and diverse economic and social consequences for the dilapidated country.

Pavel Polyan, "Obshchaya Gazeta", 2001

Summary of the last part: approximately 19 million people were mobilized into the German armed forces (AFG) during the Second World War. But how many VSG lost in the war? It is impossible to calculate this directly, there are no documents that would take into account all the losses, and it only remained to add them up to get the desired figure. The mass of German troops was out of action at all without being reflected in any reporting.

The military-historical team led by Krivosheev stated: “determining ... the losses of the German armed forces ... is a very difficult problem ... this is due to the lack of a complete set of reporting and statistical materials ...” (quote from the book “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the 20th century”). To solve the problem of determining German losses, according to Krivosheev, it is possible to use the balance method. We need to look at how much was mobilized in the VSG and how much was left at the time of surrender, the difference will decrease - it remains to distribute it according to reasons. We got the following result (in thousands of people):

In total, during the war years, recruited into the armed forces
Germany, taking into account those who served before March 1, 1939 - 21107

By the beginning of the surrender of the German troops:
- remained in service - 4100
- were in hospitals - 700

Lost during the war (total) - 16307
of them:
a) Irretrievable losses (total) - 11844
Including:
- died, died of wounds and disease, missing - 4457
- was captured - 7387

b) Other loss (total) - 4463
of them:
- dismissed due to injury and illness for a long time
as unfit for military service (disabled), deserted - 2463
- demobilized and sent to work

in industry - 2000

The balance according to Krivosheev: 21.1 million were mobilized in the VSG, of which 4.1 million remained to surrender (+ 0.7 million wounded in hospitals). Consequently, 16.3 million left during the war - of which 7.4 million were captured, 4.4 million were crippled or sent to industry; 4.5 million remain - these are the dead.

Krivosheev's figures have long been the object of criticism. The total number of mobilized (21 million) is overestimated. But the subsequent figures are clearly doubtful. The column "demobilized for work in industry" is unclear - 2,000,000 people. Krivosheev himself does not give references and explanations for the origin of such a figure. So, he just took it from Müller-Gillebrand. But how did M-G get this number? M-G does not give links; his book is fundamental, it does not refer to anything, it is referred to. There is an opinion that these are soldiers who were seriously wounded, because of which they could no longer carry out military service, but they were still able to work. No, this contingent should be included in the column demobilized due to disability (2.5 million people).

It is not clear with the number of prisoners. 7.8 million are counted as having surrendered during the fighting. The number is incredible, the ratio of those who surrendered to those who died in the German army simply was not like that. After the surrender, another 4.1 million surrendered; 700 thousand were in hospitals - they should also be classified as prisoners. 7.8 million prisoners before the surrender and 4.8 million after, total: German soldiers taken prisoner - 12.2 million.

Krivosheev cites statistics: our troops reported taking 4377.3 thousand prisoners. Of these, 752.5 thousand military personnel of Germany's allied countries. Another 600 thousand people. were released directly on the fronts - it turned out that these were not German soldiers. Approximately 3 million people remain.

The number of prisoners taken is really huge. But the problem is that these were not only German soldiers. There are references that firefighters and railway workers were captured (they are in uniform, men of military age); police officers were taken prisoner without fail; the same applies to members of paramilitary organizations, as well as the Volsksturm, the German construction battalion, the Khivs, the administration, and so on.

From striking examples: the troops reported that 134,000 prisoners were taken in Berlin. But there are publications whose authors insist that there were no more than 50,000 German troops in Berlin. The same with Koenigsberg: 94,000 were taken prisoner, and the garrison, according to German data, was 48,000, including the Volsksturm. In general, there were many prisoners, but how many of them were actually soldiers? - It's unknown. What is the percentage of real soldiers among the total number of prisoners - one can only guess.

Between the Normandy landings and the end of April 1945, 2.8 million surrendered to the Western Allies, 1.5 million of them in April - the German front in the west at that time collapsed. The total number of prisoners of war recorded by the Western Allies by April 30, 1945 amounted to 3.15 million people, and increased to 7.6 million after the surrender of Germany.

But the Allies also counted as prisoners of war not only military personnel, but also the personnel of numerous paramilitary formations, NSDAP functionaries, security and police officers, up to firefighters. There were 7.6 million prisoners of war, but there were much fewer actual prisoners of war.

Canadian D. Buck drew attention to the huge discrepancy between how many the Allies took prisoner and how much they then released. The number released is much less than the number taken. From this, D. Bak concluded that up to a million German prisoners died in the Allied camps. Buck's critics were quick to assure that the prisoners were not starved, and the discrepancies in numbers arose due to careless, relaxed accounting.

Until April 1945, approximately 1.5 million people were taken into Soviet and Western captivity (this is if you count with all the stretch). The total number of prisoners according to Krivosheev is 12 million. It turns out that by April 1945 Germany had a 9 million army - despite all the defeats suffered. And, despite such an army, she suffered a final defeat in a month. Rather, it should be assumed that something is wrong with the count of prisoners. Perhaps there was a double count of the same prisoners. The 4.8 million prisoners taken after the surrender were mixed with the 7.4 million taken before the surrender. So, the figure of 7.4 million taken prisoner before surrender cannot be accepted.

It is also not clear where the figure of 4.1 million soldiers who remained in the VSG at the beginning of the surrender came from.

The map shows the territory remaining with the Reich by May 1945. By May 9, this territory had decreased even more. Could more than 4 million soldiers fit on it? How was such a number established? Perhaps based on the count of those who surrendered after the surrender. We return to the question: who was in captivity, considered to be German soldiers?

The general surrender of Germany on May 9 was preceded by a series of surrenders in the west: on April 29, 1945, German troops in Italy surrendered; On May 4, the act of surrender of the German armed forces in Holland, Denmark, and North-West Germany was signed; On May 5, German troops surrendered in Bavaria and Western Austria.

By May 9, the active German troops remained only in front of the Soviet army (in Czechoslovakia, Austria, Courland) and in front of the Yugoslav. On the western fronts the Germans had already surrendered; only the army remained in Norway (9 divisions with reinforcement units - this is no more than 300,000 military personnel) and small garrisons of several seaside fortresses. Soviet troops reported 1.4 million taken prisoner after capitulation; the Yugoslavs reported 200,000 prisoners. Together with the army in Norway, it turns out no more than 2 million people (again, it is not known how many of them are actually military personnel). Perhaps the phrase "to the beginning of surrender" does not mean by May 9, but by the end of April, when the surrender began on the Western fronts. That is, 4.1 million in the ranks and 0.7 million in hospitals - this is the situation at the end of April. Krivosheev does not specify this.

4.5 million dead German soldiers - such a figure was ultimately received by Krivosheev. The modern (comparatively) German researcher R. Overmans counted 5.1 million military dead (5.3 * together with the dead employees of paramilitary organizations (+ 1.2 million civilian dead)). This is already more than Krivosheev's figure. The figure of Overmans - 5.3 million dead military personnel - is not officially accepted in Germany, but it is indicated in the German wiki. That is, society accepted it

In general, Krivosheev's figures are clearly doubtful; he does not solve the problem of determining German losses. The balance method does not work here either, since there are no necessary reliable data for this either. So this question remains: where did the 19 million fighters of the German army go?

There are researchers who propose a method of demographic calculation: to determine the total losses of the population of Germany, and on their basis, approximately estimate the military. There were also such calculations on the topvar (“Losses of the USSR and Germany in the Second World War”): the population of Germany in 1939 was 70.2 million (excluding Austrians (6.76 million) and Sudetes (3.64 million)). The occupying authorities in 1946 conducted a census of the population of Germany - 65,931,000 people were counted. 70.2 - 65.9 \u003d 4.3 million. To this figure we must add the natural increase in the population in 1939-46. - 3.5-3.8 million. Then you need to subtract the figure of natural mortality for 1939-46 - 2.8 million people. And then add at least 6.5 million people, and presumably even 8 million. These are Germans expelled from the Sudetenland, Poznan and Upper Silesia (6.5 million) and about 1-1.5 million Germans fled from Alsace and Lorraine. Arithmetic mean from 6.5-8 million - 7.25 million

So, it turns out:

The population in 1939 was 70.2 million people.
The population in 1946 was 65.93 million people.
Natural mortality 2.8 million people.
The natural increase is 3.5 million people.
Emigration inflow of 7.25 million people.
Total losses (70.2 - 65.93 - 2.8) + 3.5 + 7.25 = 12.22 million people.

However, according to the 1946 census, much is unclear. It was carried out without the Saar (800,000 pre-war population). Were prisoners taken into account in the camps? The author does not clarify this point; in the English wiki there is an indication that no, they were not taken into account. The emigration inflow is clearly overestimated; 1.5 million Germans from Alsace did not flee. Still, not Germans live in Alsace, but Alsatians, loyal French citizens, there was no need for them to flee. 6.5 million Germans could not be expelled from the Sudetenland, Poznan and Upper Silesia - there were not so many Germans there. And part of the expelled settled in Austria, and not in Germany. But besides the Germans, others also fled to Germany - a lot of variegated accomplices, how many were there? Not even known approximately. How were they counted in the census?

As Krivosheev wrote: “Determining with reliable accuracy the scale of human losses of the German armed forces ... on the Soviet-German front during the Second World War is a very difficult problem.” Krivosheev, apparently, believed that this problem was complex, but solvable. However, his attempt was completely unconvincing. In fact, this task is simply unsolvable.

* Distribution of losses by fronts: 104,000 were killed in the Balkans, 151,000 in Italy, 340,000 in the West, 2,743,000 in the East, 291,000 in other theaters, 1,230,000 in the final period of the war (of which East up to a million), died in captivity (according to official data from the USSR and Western allies) 495,000. According to the Germans, 1.1 million died in captivity, mostly in the Soviet. According to Soviet records, more than half as many died in captivity. So, those dead that are attributed in Germany to Soviet captivity actually died in battle (at least for the most part). After their death, they were again mobilized - to the propaganda front.