The number of people killed in the Second World War. Losses in World War II

The other day parliamentary hearings were held in the Duma “ Patriotic education citizens of Russia: “Immortal Regiment”. They were attended by deputies, senators, representatives of legislative and higher executive bodies state power of subjects Russian Federation, Ministries of Education and Science, Defense, Foreign Affairs, Culture, members public associations, organizations of foreign compatriots... True, there were no those who came up with the action itself - journalists from Tomsk TV-2, no one even remembered them. And, in general, there was really no need to remember. "Immortal Regiment", which by definition did not provide for any staffing table, no commanders or political officers, has already completely transformed into the sovereign “box” of the parade squad, and its main task today is to learn to march in step and maintain alignment in the ranks.

“What is a people, a nation? “This is, first of all, respect for victories,” the chairman of the parliamentary committee, Vyacheslav Nikonov, admonished the participants when opening the hearing. - ​Today, when it goes new war, which someone calls “hybrid,” our Victory becomes one of the main targets for attacks on historical memory. There are waves of falsification of history, which should make us believe that it was not us, but someone else who won, and also make us apologize...” For some reason, the Nikonovs are seriously confident that it was they, long before their own birth, who won Great Victory, for which, moreover, someone is trying to force them to apologize. But those weren’t the ones attacked! And the aching note of the ongoing national misfortune, the phantom pain of the third generation of descendants of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War is drowned out by a cheerful, thoughtless cry: “We can repeat it!”

Really - ​can we?

It was at these hearings that a terrible figure was mentioned casually, but for some reason no one noticed, and did not make us stop in horror as we ran to understand WHAT we were told after all. Why this was done right now, I don’t know.

At the hearings, the co-chairman of the “Immortal Regiment of Russia” movement, State Duma deputy Nikolai Zemtsov, presented a report “Documentary basis of the People’s Project “Establishing the fates of missing defenders of the Fatherland”, within the framework of which studies of population decline were conducted, which changed the understanding of the scale of losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.

“The total decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people,” Zemtsov said, citing declassified data from the USSR State Planning Committee. — ​Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of war factors are ​more than 19 million military personnel and about 23 million civilians. The total natural mortality of military personnel and civilians during this period could have amounted to more than 10 million 833 thousand people (including 5 million 760 thousand deaths of children under the age of four). The irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of war factors amounted to almost 42 million people.

Can we... repeat?!

Back in the 60s of the last century, the then young poet Vadim Kovda wrote a short poem in four lines: “ If there are only three elderly disabled people walking through my front door, / does that mean how many of them were wounded? / Was it killed?

Now these elderly disabled people are natural causes noticeable less and less. But Kovda understood the scale of losses absolutely correctly; it was enough to simply multiply the number of front doors.

Stalin, based on inaccessible to a normal person considerations, he personally determined the losses of the USSR at 7 million people - slightly less than the losses of Germany. Khrushchev - 20 million. Under Gorbachev, a book was published, prepared by the Ministry of Defense under the editorship of General Krivosheev, “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed,” in which the authors named and in every possible way justified this very figure - ​27 million. Now it turns out that she was also untrue.

Estimates of the losses of Soviet citizens in the Great Patriotic War have a huge range: from 19 to 36 million. The first detailed calculations were made by the Russian emigrant, demographer Timashev in 1948 - he came up with 19 million. The maximum figure was called by B. Sokolov - 46 million. The latest calculations show that the USSR military alone lost 13.5 million people, but the total losses were over 27 million.

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

In the West, this figure was perceived with skepticism. Already at the end of the 1940s, the first calculations of the demographic balance of the USSR during the war years appeared, contradicting Soviet data. Case in point- calculations of the Russian emigrant, demographer N.S. Timashev, published in the New York “New Journal” in 1948. Here is his method:

The All-Union Population Census of the USSR in 1939 determined its population 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 mid-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 went to Finland, the Poles who fled to the west, and the Germans who were 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% per year, that is, lower than in the USSR, and also taking into account the short time period between their entry into the USSR and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the author determined the population growth for these territories by mid-1941 at 300 thousand. By sequentially adding the above figures, he received 200 .7 million living in the USSR on the eve of June 22, 1941.

Next, Timashev divided 200 million into three age groups, again based on data from the 1939 All-Union Census: adults (over 18 years old) - 117.2 million, adolescents (from 8 to 18 years old) - 44.5 million, children (under 8 years old) - 38.8 million At the same time, he took into account two important circumstances. First: in 1939-1940 from childhood Two very weak annual streams, born in 1931-1932, moved into the group of teenagers during the famine, which covered large areas of the USSR and negatively affected the size of the teenage group. Second: in the former Polish lands and Baltic states there were more people over 20 years of age 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 to 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 total figure, and the population over 18 years of age, 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 to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the spring of 1946 was 101.7 million. Adding to this figure the 4 million Gulag prisoners he calculated, he received 106 million adult population in the USSR at the beginning of 1946. When calculating the teenage group, he took as a basis 31.3 million primary and high school in 1947/48 academic year, compared with data from 1939 (31.4 million schoolchildren within the borders of the USSR before September 17, 1939) and received a figure of 39 million. When 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 thousand, during in the second quarter of 1942 it decreased by 37.5%, and in 1943-1945 - by half.

Subtracting from each year group the percentage due according to normal table mortality rate for the USSR, it received 36 million children at the beginning of 1946. 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.

Other Western researchers came to approximately the same results. 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.

In the article “Human Losses in the Second World War,” published in 1953, the German researcher G. Arntz came to the conclusion that “20 million people is the closest figure to the truth.” total losses Soviet Union in World War II." The collection including 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 released the figure of 20 million into the open press, thereby indirectly recognizing it as correct and making it public knowledge. at least specialists - historians, international affairs specialists, etc.

Only in 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Erlander, admitted that the war against fascism “claimed two tens of millions of lives.” Soviet people" Thus, compared to Stalin, Khrushchev increased 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 of the 20 million dead, almost half “were military and civilians killed and tortured by the Nazis in 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 military personnel.

Four decades later, the head of the Center military history Russian Institute Russian history RAS Professor G. Kumanev, in a line-by-line commentary, 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 determined at 26 million. But the high authorities turned out to be The accepted figure is “over 20 million.”

As a result, “20 million” not only stuck for decades in historical literature, but also became part of the national identity.

In 1990, M. Gorbachev announced a new figure for losses obtained as a result of research by demographers - “almost 27 million people.”

In 1991, B. Sokolov’s book “The Price of Victory” was published. The Great Patriotic War: the unknown about the known.” In it, direct military losses of the USSR were estimated at approximately 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 (he added new losses). He obtained the loss figure as follows. From the size of the Soviet population at the end of June 1941, which he determined to be 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, I subtracted the irretrievable losses of the armed forces (26.4 million) and received the irretrievable losses of the civilian population - 16.9 million.

“We can name the number of Red Army soldiers killed during the entire war, which is close to reality, if we determine the month of 1942, when the Red Army’s losses in casualties were taken into account most fully and when it had almost no losses in 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 Soviet military personnel who were killed in battle and died from wounds, illnesses, accidents and executed by the verdict of tribunals.”

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

In addition to B. Sokolov, similar calculations were carried out by L. Polyakov, A. Kvasha, V. Kozlov and others. Methodological weakness this kind calculations is obvious: the researchers proceeded from the difference in the size of the Soviet population in 1941, which is known very approximately, and the size of the post-war population of the USSR, which is almost impossible to accurately determine. It was this difference that they considered the total human losses.

In 1993, a statistical study was published, “The classification of secrecy has been removed: losses Armed Forces USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts”, prepared by a team of authors headed by General G. Krivosheev. The main source of statistical data was previously secret archival documents, primarily reporting materials General Staff. However, the losses of entire fronts and armies in the first months, and the authors specifically stipulated this, were obtained 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 - civil uprising, partisan detachments, groups of underground workers.

Finally, the number of prisoners of war and missing in action 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 again drafted into the ranks of the Red Army in the territory liberated from the occupiers), 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 in the “Classified as Classified” directory was immediately perceived as requiring clarification and additions. And in 1998, thanks to V. Litovkin’s publication “During the war years, our army lost 11 million 944 thousand 100 people,” these data were replenished by 500 thousand 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 losses in 1941-1945. At the end of the commission’s work, 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 ones) or in any other way is currently not necessary and undesirable, the collection is intended to be kept at the General Staff as a special document, to which a strictly limited circle of persons will be allowed to become familiar.” And the prepared collection was kept under seven seals until the team under the leadership of General G. Krivosheev made its information public.

V. Litovkin’s research sowed even greater doubts about the completeness of the information published in the collection “Classified as Classified”, because a logical question arose: were all the data contained in the “statistics 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 were apparently shot.

And yet, the reference book “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed” significantly expanded and complemented the ideas not only of historians, but of everyone Russian society about the cost of Victory in 1945. It is enough to refer to the statistical calculation: from June to November 1941, the Armed Forces of the USSR lost 24 thousand people every day, of which 17 thousand were killed and up to 7 thousand wounded, and from January 1944 to May 1945 -20 thousand people, of which 5.2 thousand killed and 14.8 thousand 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 General Staff materials with reports from military headquarters about losses and notifications from military registration and enlistment offices about the dead and missing, which were sent to relatives at their place of residence. And the figure of losses he received increased to 9 million 168 thousand 400 people. These data were reproduced in volume 2 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”, published under the editorship of academician Yu. Polyakov.

In 2004, the second, corrected and expanded, edition of the book by 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, “Feat and Forgery: Pages of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” was published. It provides data on losses: about 27 million Soviet citizens. And in the footnote comments 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 accept something else as the “historical truth”: “over 20 million."

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

The historian Ilyenkov, who served in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, followed an interesting path. He tried to calculate the irretrievable losses of the Red Army personnel based on the files of irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers. These files began to be created when, on July 9, 1941, a department for recording personal losses was organized as part of the Main Directorate for the Formation and Recruitment of the Red Army (GUFKKA). The responsibilities of the department included personal accounting of losses and compiling an alphabetical card index of losses.

The records were kept in the following categories: 1) dead - according to reports from military units, 2) dead - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 3) missing in action - according to reports from military units, 4) missing - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 5) dead 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 forced labor camps; those sentenced to capital punishment - execution; removed from the register of irretrievable losses as survivors; those on suspicion of having served with the Germans (the so-called “signals”) and those who were captured but survived. These military personnel were not included in the list of irretrievable losses.

After the war, the card files 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 archive began counting registration cards by letters of the alphabet and categories of losses. As of November 1, 2000, 20 letters of the alphabet were processed; for the remaining 6 letters that were not counted, a preliminary count was carried out, with fluctuations up or down by 30-40 thousand persons.

The calculated 20 letters for 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 reports from military registration and enlistment offices.

A preliminary calculation based on 6 uncounted letters gave 2 million 910 thousand people as irretrievable losses. The result of the calculations was as follows: 12 million 434 thousand 398 Red Army soldiers and sergeants were lost by the Red Army in 1941-1945 (Remember that this does not include the losses of the Navy, internal and border troops of the NKVD of the USSR.)

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

Thus, during the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders killed, missing, died from wounds, diseases and in captivity.

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

Finally, we note another new trend in the study of the demographic results of the Great Patriotic War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to estimate human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate amount of 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 - “Demographic losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War: history of calculations”, “New Historical Bulletin”, No. 16, 2007)

Second World War to this day, it is rightly considered the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind, the victims of which were tens of millions of people around the world, and especially in Europe. The Soviet Union, as one of the largest powers of that time, suffered enormous losses during this war.

If you search carefully, you can find a variety of data about how many people the Soviet Union lost. The fact is that even in our time information technologies and developed documentation is not always possible to calculate the number of victims of the war, and then it was quite difficult to accurately count the population, not to mention the fact that a significant part of the information collected was never published. In 1946, Stalin spoke about 7 million dead citizens of the Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians), and a decade and a half later, Khrushchev named the figure at 20 million. In our time, it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union lost about 27 million people during the war years, of which 8 million were Soviet soldiers, and the rest died due to various reasons related to the war.

But here it is even more difficult to calculate the number of losses. There are at least three reasons preventing such a calculation. First, it is not always possible to accurately determine the nationality of a particular deceased person. Secondly, in the pre-war Soviet Union it was a common custom to register as Russian even citizens who were not Russians. Finally, the third, which many Russian historians really don’t like to mention, is the fact that the Russians fought not only for the Soviet Union, but also against it, and it is precisely the losses of the opponents of the Soviet Union that are extremely difficult to calculate, because The best way destroy the enemy - do not mention him.

According to the most common opinion, more than 5.5 million Soviet soldiers of Russian nationality died during the Second World War. The German occupation did not affect most of the territory of Russia, so casualties among civilians are somewhat lower here - for example, Ukraine, which has a much smaller population, lost the same amount of population only among civilians. As for the Russians, who were opponents of the Soviet Union, they fought mainly as part of the so-called Russian Liberation Army, the number of which in Russian sources is usually listed as 120-130 thousand people, and in foreign sources the number of 600 thousand volunteers is mentioned.

The other day, parliamentary hearings “Patriotic education of Russian citizens: “Immortal Regiment” were held in the Duma. They were attended by deputies, senators, representatives of legislative and supreme executive bodies of state power of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the Ministries of Education and Science, Defense, Foreign Affairs, Culture, members of public associations, organizations of foreign compatriots... There were, however, no those who took part in the action came up with journalists from Tomsk TV-2, no one even remembered them. And, in general, there was really no need to remember. The “Immortal Regiment,” which by definition did not have any staffing schedule, no commanders or political officers, has already completely transformed into the sovereign “box” of the parade squad, and its main task today is to learn to march in step and maintain alignment in the ranks.

“What is a people, a nation? “This is, first of all, respect for victories,” the chairman of the parliamentary committee, Vyacheslav Nikonov, admonished the participants when opening the hearing. — Today, when there is a new war, which someone calls “hybrid,” our Victory is becoming one of the main targets for attacks on historical memory. There are waves of falsification of history, which should make us believe that it was not us, but someone else who won the victory, and also make us apologize...” For some reason, the Nikonovs are seriously confident that it was they, long before their own birth, who won the Great A victory for which, moreover, someone is trying to force them to apologize. But those weren’t the ones attacked! And the aching note of the ongoing national misfortune, the phantom pain of the third generation of descendants of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War is drowned out by a cheerful, thoughtless cry: “We can repeat it!”

Really - ​can we?

It was at these hearings that a terrible figure was mentioned casually, but for some reason no one noticed, and did not make us stop in horror as we ran to understand WHAT we were told after all. Why this was done right now, I don’t know.

At the hearing, the co-chairman of the “Immortal Regiment of Russia” movement, State Duma deputy Nikolai Zemtsov, presented a report “Documentary basis of the People’s Project “Establishing the fate of missing defenders of the Fatherland,” within the framework of which studies of population decline were conducted, which changed the understanding of the scale of losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.

“The total decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people,” Zemtsov said, citing declassified data from the USSR State Planning Committee. — ​Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of war factors are ​more than 19 million military personnel and about 23 million civilians. The total natural mortality of military personnel and civilians during this period could have amounted to more than 10 million 833 thousand people (including 5 million 760 thousand deaths of children under the age of four). The irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of war factors amounted to almost 42 million people.

Can we... repeat?!

Back in the 60s of the last century, the then young poet Vadim Kovda wrote a short poem in four lines: “ If there are only three elderly disabled people walking through my front door, / does that mean how many of them were wounded? / Was it killed?

Nowadays, due to natural reasons, these elderly disabled people are noticeable less and less. But Kovda understood the scale of losses absolutely correctly; it was enough to simply multiply the number of front doors.

Stalin, based on considerations inaccessible to a normal person, personally determined the losses of the USSR at 7 million people - slightly less than the losses of Germany. Khrushchev - 20 million. Under Gorbachev, a book was published, prepared by the Ministry of Defense under the editorship of General Krivosheev, “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed,” in which the authors named and in every possible way justified this very figure - ​27 million. Now it turns out that she was also untrue.

Calculating the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War remains one of the scientific problems unsolved by historians. Official statistics– 26.6 million dead, including 8.7 million military personnel – underestimates losses among those who were at the front. Contrary to popular belief, the bulk of the dead were military personnel (up to 13.6 million), and not the civilian population of the Soviet Union.

There is a lot of literature on this problem, and perhaps some people get the impression that it has been sufficiently researched. Yes, indeed, there is a lot of literature, but many questions and doubts remain. There is too much here that is unclear, controversial and clearly unreliable. Even the reliability of the current official data on the human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War (about 27 million people) raises serious doubts.

History of calculation and official state recognition of losses

The official figure for the demographic losses of the Soviet Union has changed several times. In February 1946, the figure of losses of 7 million people was published in the Bolshevik magazine. In March 1946, Stalin, in an interview with the Pravda newspaper, stated that the USSR lost 7 million people during the war: “As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost in battles with the Germans, as well as thanks to the German occupation and the deportation of Soviet people to German hard labor about seven million people." The report “The Military Economy of the USSR during the Patriotic War” published in 1947 by the Chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee Voznesensky did not indicate human losses.

In 1959, the first post-war census of the USSR population was carried out. In 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to the Prime Minister of Sweden, reported 20 million dead: “Can we sit back and wait for a repeat of 1941, when the German militarists launched a war against the Soviet Union, which claimed the lives of two tens of millions of Soviet people?” In 1965, Brezhnev, on the 20th anniversary of the Victory, announced more than 20 million dead.

In 1988–1993 a team of military historians under the leadership of Colonel General G. F. Krivosheev conducted a statistical study of archival documents and other materials containing information about human losses in the army and navy, border and internal troops NKVD. The result of the work was the figure of 8,668,400 casualties security forces USSR during the war.

Since March 1989, on behalf of the CPSU Central Committee, a state commission has been working to study the number of human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. The commission included representatives of the State Statistics Committee, the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Defense, the Main Archival Directorate under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the Committee of War Veterans, the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The commission did not count losses, but estimated the difference between the estimated population of the USSR at the end of the war and the estimated population that would have lived in the USSR if there had been no war. The commission first announced its figure of demographic losses of 26.6 million people at the ceremonial meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on May 8, 1990.

On May 5, 2008, the President of the Russian Federation signed a decree “On the publication of the fundamental multi-volume work “The Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.” On October 23, 2009, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation signed the order “On the Interdepartmental Commission for Calculating Losses during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.” The commission included representatives of the Ministry of Defense, FSB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosstat, and Rosarkhiv. In December 2011, a representative of the commission announced the country’s overall demographic losses during the war period 26.6 million people, of which losses of active armed forces 8668400 people.

Military personnel

According to the Russian Ministry of Defense irrecoverable losses during the fighting on the Soviet-German front from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945, there were 8,860,400 Soviet troops. The source was data declassified in 1993 and data obtained during the search work of the Memory Watch and in historical archives.

According to declassified data from 1993: killed, died from wounds and illnesses, non-combat losses - 6 885 100 people, including

• Killed - 5,226,800 people.
• Died from wounds - 1,102,800 people.
• Died from various causes and accidents, were shot - 555,500 people.

On May 5, 2010, the head of the Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense for perpetuating the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland, Major General A. Kirilin, told RIA Novosti that the figures for military losses are 8 668 400 , will be reported to the country's leadership so that they are announced on May 9, the 65th anniversary of the Victory.

According to G.F. Krivosheev, during the Great Patriotic War, a total of 3,396,400 military personnel went missing and were captured (about another 1,162,600 were attributed to unaccounted combat losses in the first months of the war, when combat units did not provide any information about these losses reports), that is, in total

• missing, captured and unaccounted for combat losses - 4,559,000;
• 1,836,000 military personnel returned from captivity, 1,783,300 did not return (died, emigrated) (that is, the total number of prisoners was 3,619,300, which is more than together with the missing);
• previously considered missing and were called up again from the liberated territories - 939,700.

So the official irrecoverable losses(6,885,100 dead, according to declassified 1993 data, and 1,783,300 who did not return from captivity) amounted to 8,668,400 military personnel. But from them we must subtract 939,700 re-callers who were considered missing. We get 7,728,700.

The error was pointed out, in particular, by Leonid Radzikhovsky. The correct calculation is as follows: the figure 1,783,300 is the number of those who did not return from captivity and those who went missing (and not just those who did not return from captivity). Then official irrecoverable losses (killed 6,885,100, according to declassified data in 1993, and those who did not return from captivity and missing 1,783,300) amounted to 8 668 400 military personnel.

According to M.V. Filimoshin, during the Great Patriotic War, 4,559,000 Soviet military personnel and 500 thousand persons liable for military service, called up for mobilization, but not included in the lists of troops, were captured and went missing. From this figure, the calculation gives the same result: if 1,836,000 returned from captivity and 939,700 were re-called from those listed as unknown, then 1,783,300 military personnel were missing and did not return from captivity. So the official irrecoverable losses (6,885,100 died, according to declassified data from 1993, and 1,783,300 went missing and did not return from captivity) are 8 668 400 military personnel.

Additional data

Civilian population

A group of researchers led by G. F. Krivosheev estimated the losses of the civilian population of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War at approximately 13.7 million people.

The final number is 13,684,692 people. consists of the following components:

• were exterminated in the occupied territory and died as a result of military operations (from bombing, shelling, etc.) - 7,420,379 people.
• died as a result of a humanitarian catastrophe (famine, infectious diseases, absence medical care etc.) – 4,100,000 people.
• died in forced labor in Germany - 2,164,313 people. (another 451,100 people according to various reasons did not return and became emigrants).

According to S. Maksudov, in the occupied territories and in besieged Leningrad About 7 million people died (of which 1 million were in besieged Leningrad, 3 million were Jews, victims of the Holocaust), and another 7 million people died as a result of increased mortality in non-occupied territories.

The total losses of the USSR (together with the civilian population) amounted to 40–41 million people. These estimates are confirmed by comparing data from the 1939 and 1959 censuses, since there is reason to believe that in 1939 there was a very significant undercount of male conscripts.

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

Finally, we note another new trend in the study of the demographic results of the Second World War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to estimate human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate amount of 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.

The greatest losses on the battlefields of the Second World War were suffered by Russians and Ukrainians. Many Jews were killed. But the most tragic was the fate of the Belarusian people. In the first months of the war, the entire territory of Belarus was occupied by the Germans. During the war, the Belarusian SSR lost up to 30% of its population. In the occupied territory of the BSSR, the Nazis killed 2.2 million people. (Data latest research for Belarus are as follows: the Nazis killed civilians - 1,409,225 people, killed prisoners in German death camps - 810,091 people, drove into German slavery - 377,776 people). It is also known that in percentage terms - the amount dead soldiers/number of population, among Soviet republics Georgia suffered great damage. Of the 700 thousand residents of Georgia called up to the front, almost 300 thousand did not return.

Losses of the Wehrmacht and SS troops

To date, there are no sufficiently reliable loss figures. German army, obtained by direct statistical calculation. This is explained by the absence, for various reasons, of reliable initial statistical materials about German losses. The picture is more or less clear regarding the number of Wehrmacht prisoners of war on the Soviet-German front. According to Russian sources, Soviet troops 3,172,300 Wehrmacht soldiers were captured, of which 2,388,443 Germans were in NKVD camps. According to German historians, there were about 3.1 million German military personnel in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps.

The discrepancy is approximately 0.7 million people. This discrepancy is explained by differences in estimates of the number of Germans who died in captivity: according to Russian archival documents, 356,700 Germans died in Soviet captivity, and according to German researchers, approximately 1.1 million people. It seems that the Russian figure of Germans killed in captivity is more reliable, and the missing 0.7 million Germans who went missing and did not return from captivity actually died not in captivity, but on the battlefield.

There is another statistics of losses - statistics of burials of Wehrmacht soldiers. According to the annex to the German law “On the Preservation of Burial Sites”, the total number of German soldiers located in recorded burial sites on the territory of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries is 3 million 226 thousand people. (in the territory of the USSR alone - 2,330,000 burials). This figure can be taken as a starting point for calculating the demographic losses of the Wehrmacht, however, it also needs to be adjusted.

1. Firstly, this figure takes into account only the burials of Germans, and those who fought in the Wehrmacht big number soldiers of other nationalities: Austrians (270 thousand of them died), Sudeten Germans and Alsatians (230 thousand people died) and representatives of other nationalities and states (357 thousand people died). From total number Of the dead Wehrmacht soldiers of non-German nationality, the Soviet-German front accounts for 75-80%, i.e. 0.6–0.7 million people.
2. Secondly, this figure dates back to the early 90s of the last century. Since then, the search for German burials in Russia, the CIS countries and of Eastern Europe continued. And the messages that appeared on this topic were not informative enough. For example, the Russian Association of War Memorials, created in 1992, reported that over the 10 years of its existence it transferred information about the burials of 400 thousand Wehrmacht soldiers to the German Association for the Care of Military Graves. However, whether these were newly discovered burials or whether they had already been taken into account in the figure of 3 million 226 thousand is unclear. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find generalized statistics of newly discovered burials of Wehrmacht soldiers. Tentatively, we can assume that the number of graves of Wehrmacht soldiers newly discovered over the past 10 years is in the range of 0.2–0.4 million people.
3. Thirdly, many graves of dead Wehrmacht soldiers on Soviet soil have disappeared or were deliberately destroyed. Approximately 0.4–0.6 million Wehrmacht soldiers could have been buried in such disappeared and unmarked graves.
4. Fourthly, these data do not include the burials of German soldiers killed in battles with Soviet troops on the territory of Germany and Western European countries. According to R. Overmans, in the last three spring months of the war alone, about 1 million people died. (minimum estimate 700 thousand) In general, approximately 1.2–1.5 million Wehrmacht soldiers died on German soil and in Western European countries in battles with the Red Army.
5. Finally, fifthly, the number of those buried also included Wehrmacht soldiers who died a “natural” death (0.1–0.2 million people)

An approximate procedure for calculating the total human losses in Germany

1. The population in 1939 was 70.2 million people.
2. The population in 1946 was 65.93 million people.
3. Natural mortality 2.8 million people.
4. Natural increase (birth rate) 3.5 million people.
5. Emigration influx of 7.25 million people.
6. Total losses ((70.2 – 65.93 – 2.8) + 3.5 + 7.25 = 12.22) 12.15 million people.

conclusions

Let us remember that disputes about the number of deaths continue to this day.

During the war, almost 27 million USSR citizens died (the exact number is 26.6 million). This amount included:

• killed and died from wounds of military personnel;
• those who died from disease;
• executed by firing squad (based on various denunciations);
• missing and captured;
• representatives of the civilian population, both in the occupied territories of the USSR and in other regions of the country, in which, due to the ongoing hostilities in the state, there was an increased mortality rate from hunger and disease.

This also includes those who emigrated from the USSR during the war and did not return to their homeland after the victory. The vast majority of those killed were men (about 20 million). Modern researchers claim that by the end of the war, of the men born in 1923. (i.e. those who were 18 years old in 1941 and could be drafted into the army) about 3% remained alive. By 1945, there were twice as many women in the USSR as men (data for people aged 20 to 29 years).

In addition to the actual deaths, human losses include sharp drop fertility. Thus, according to official estimates, if the birth rate in the state had remained at least at the same level, the population of the Union by the end of 1945 should have been 35–36 million more people than it was in reality. Despite numerous studies and calculations, the exact number of those killed during the war is unlikely to ever be known.