Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs were killed by the German armed forces and other special units between June 1941 and February 1942, mainly through deliberate starvation and exposure to the elements.
By the end of Barbarossa, the largest, deadliest military operation in history, Germany had suffered close to 775,000 casualties. More than 800,000 Soviets had been killed, and an additional 6 million Soviet soldiers had been wounded or captured.
The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians. This represents the most military deaths of any nation by a large margin. Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.
For the campaign against the Soviet Union, the Germans allotted almost 150 divisions containing a total of about three million men. Among those units were 19 panzer divisions, and in total the Barbarossa force had about 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft.
The battle took its toll on both sides, however. Around 81,000 Soviet Union soldiers were killed and another 280,000 were wounded. Around 92,000 German soldiers were killed with another 220,000 wounded. The city of Berlin was reduced to rubble and around 22,000 German civilians were killed.
Nazi Germany had lost its chance for a quick victory. German losses during the Battle of Moscow totaled 250,000–400,000 dead or wounded, and the Red Army suffered 600,000–1,300,000 dead, wounded, or captured.
The Axis forces suffered 850,000 casualties and the Soviets 750,000. Stalin considered his losses necessary. The surrender of the city would have been an irreversible victory for the Nazis. Millions of victims of the German invasion were noncombatants.
they were ruthlessly hunted down and killed soviet female soldiers were also targeted for death the germans portraying them as degenerates.
The Battle of Stalingrad was the deadliest battle to take place during the Second World War.
The Most Deadly Battle In History: Stalingrad
The figures for the Battle of Stalingrad battle are shocking even by the standards of the other campaigns on this list. Running from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943, Stalingrad led to 633,000 battle deaths.
Russians also point to the fact that Soviet forces killed more German soldiers than their Western counterparts, accounting for 76 percent of Germany's military dead.
More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union.
China is estimated to have endured the second-highest number of total casualties in WWII. As many as 20 million people died in China, including up to 3.75 million military deaths and 18.19 million civilian deaths.
Be careful about superlatives, that is, until you're talking about Operation Barbarossa, the surprise German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and the nearly four years of war that followed on what the Germans called “the Eastern Front.” With some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops ( ...
That count includes hundreds of thousands of deaths due to drowning, disease and starvation after the Chinese nationalist army breached massive holes in dikes holding back the Yellow River to stymie the Japanese advance in 1938.
The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
The bloodiest single day in the history of the United States military was June 6, 1944, with 2,500 soldiers killed during the Invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The second-highest single-day toll was the Battle of Antietam with 2,108 dead.
Antietam, the deadliest one-day battle in American military history, showed that the Union could stand against the Confederate army in the Eastern theater. It also gave President Abraham Lincoln the confidence to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation at a moment of strength rather than desperation.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956.
Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor.
The large number of dead was due not just to irresponsible neglect by German officers but also to mass shootings. The Germans shot severely wounded Soviet soldiers to free the German army of their care.
The Battle of Stalingrad, with its five months of fierce fighting, began exactly 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1942. An estimated 750,000 Soviets died defending the city, delivering an enormous blow to the seemingly unstoppable German war machine, a psychological turning point of World War II.