Roberto wrote:viriato wrote:Medorjurgen wrote:
Soviet civilians (other than Jews and Gypsies)
Shooting, hanging, burning, torture, etc.: 1,000,000
Starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, ill-treatment, etc.: 5,000,000
Could you give those numbers (approximative?) by ethnicty/republic of origin?
Polish civilians (other than Jews and Gypsies)
Shooting, hanging, burning, torture, etc.: 500,000
Starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, ill-treatment, etc.: 1,500,000
Does this number (that again I think is only approximative) includes only poles or does it also includes ukrainians, belorrussians, germans, lithuanians and others, living in the pre-1939 Poland?
Viriatus,
All figures are very rough estimates of mine based on various sources I’ve had a look at.
The upper figure for Soviet civilians is from Richard Overy,
Russia’s War, page 151:
Hundreds of ruined villages and a death toll that passed an estimated one million bore terrible testimony to the price paid for Hitler’s ‘kind of terror’.
Overy’s source is Maslov, A.A. ‘Concerning the Role of Partisan Warfare in Soviet Military Doctrine in the 1920s and 1930s’ ,
Journal of Slavic Military History, 9 (1996). How the figure is broken down by the various Soviet Republics I don’t know. The figure for Belorussia, according to the recent study
Kalkulierte Morde by German historian Christian Gerlach, is ca. 345,000. The figure of ca. one million victims of anti-partisan warfare in all occupied territories of the USSR is also mentioned in Alexander Werth's classic
Russia at War.
For the deaths by starvation, etc. my sources are the following works referred to by R.J. Rummel in his book
Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder, Transaction Publishers New Brunswick & London, 1992:
Inside the USSR:
Gil Elliot,
Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, 1972 Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London, pages 54-58:
6,500,000 to 7,500,000 (“from famine disease, exposure; 0.5 million assumed to have died after the war and are not included”)
Roy Medvedev,
Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, translated by Colleen Taylor, 1972 Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 140:
5,000,000 (“famine/disease; from Soviet demographer M. Maksudov")
It does not become clear from Rummel’s references if the figures include the victims of the siege of Leningrad, so I assumed that they do. Most estimates on the death toll of that siege are in the order of ca. 1,000,000 victims. See e.g. Harrison E. Salisbury,
The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad, Avon Books, New York, 1970, pages 590 and following:
Estimates of the Leningrad death toll as high as 2,000,000 have been made by some foreign students. These estimates are too high. A total for Leningrad and vicinity of something over 1,000,000 deaths attributable to hunger, and an overall total of deaths, civilian and military, on the order of 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 seems reasonable.
Forced labor deportees:
Mark R. Elliot,
Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in Their Repatriation, 1982 University of Illinois Press, page 23:
750,000 to 800,000 (“Eastern workers; context and reference to Dallin, 1957, pp. 451-2, imply these were Soviets”)
("Dallin" is Alexander Dallin,
German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 1957 Macmillan, New York. It was long considered the standard work on the topic, and I would be grateful to anyone who can tell me where I may find a copy.)
Nikolai Tolstoy,
Stalin’s Secret War, 1981 Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, New York, page 282: 500,000 (“in Germany”)
Making an allowance for exaggerations and/or civilians who fell victim to the consequences of Stalin’s “scorched earth” policy during retreat in 1941/42, I assumed a total of ca. 5,000,000 victims of starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, ill-treatment among the Soviet population, including those of the siege of Leningrad. That this figure is by no means on the high side is shown by the following passage from an online article by German historian Wigbert Benz that I recently transcribed and translated on the thread
Operation Barbarossa
http://thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/viewt ... 63a2c24a5a
of this forum:
Current research, for example Hans-Heinrich Nolte, Eastern Europe historian at Hannover University, estimate the Soviet human victims of "Operation Barbarossa", taking into account recent Russian research, at ca. 27 million - thereof seven million starvation dead behind the front line alone.
Source of original German text:
http://www.wk-2.de/unternehmen_barbarossa.html
A breakdown by ethnicity is harder to come by. I found the following in chapter 1 of Rummel’s
Democide:
Besides Jews, the Germans murdered near 2,400,000 Poles, 3,000,000 Ukrainians, 1,593,000 Russians, and 1,400,000 Byelorussians, many of these among the best and brightest men and women. The Nazis killed in cold blood nearly one out of every six Polish or Soviet citizens, including Jews, under their rule
.
This chapter can be read online under the link:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM
The term “under their rule” suggests that Rummel’s figures do not include the victims of the siege of Leningrad, while it does not become clear from the text whether they include prisoners of war. A comparison with the above mentioned figures, however, suggests that the figures refer only to civilians in the occupied territories.
Soviet historian G. Kumanev, in his essay "The German Occupation Regime in Occupied Territory of the USSR (1941-1944)", published in the collection
A Mosaic of Victims: Non Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, edited by Michael Berenbaum, 1990 New York University Press, pages 128-141, gave the following breakdown of occupation victims in the main Soviet republics:
Russia 1,700,000
Belorussia 2,500,000
Ukraine 4,000,000
So far for the USSR. As to Poland, the figure of two million non-Jewish dead is in line with the following information provided at my request by our fellow poster Hetman (then DPWES):
Some figures quoted by the Polish government in 1947
The total death toll was 6 028 000, or 22% of the pre-war population.
644 000 were killed as a direct result of the war.
http://www.holocaustforgotten.co...shgirl.jpg
3 577 000 died in death camps, executions and German army actions against civilians.
1 286 000 died in the camps as a result of epidemics and malnutrition.
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/wojcik.jpg
521 000 died outside of the camps as a result of forced labor, beatings and torture.
590,000 people were disabled during the war.
200,000 Poles were forcibly shipped off to Germany to work there. Most survived.
During the Warsaw uprising, the Germans killed 23,000 Home Army soldiers and 180,000 civilians. 50,000 civilians died during the initial siege of Warsaw in 1939.
So just after the war it was thought that about 3,000,000 non-Jews died in Poland. But recently, that figure has been revised by Polish historians to about 2,000,000. (I don't have much info yet on why they did this, or how. See this link: fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holoca...MMPOL.HTM)
According to the 1947 Polish government figures, as a result of the German efforts to kill off the Polish intelligentsia, 43% lawyers (5610 people), 39% doctors(7500), 27% priests (2647), and 40% of university professors (700) were executed.
(Most of those who survived either emigrated or were sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan by the Russians. Some have since come back, others died, while some still remain.)
A website on the subject (Poland's Holocaust) says this: During the war, Poland lost 45% of her doctors, 57% of her attorneys, 40% of her professors, 30% of her technicians, more than 18% of her clergy, and most of her journalists. Poland's educated class was purposely targeted because the Nazis knew that this would make it easier to control the country.
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/polen.jpg
See the thread
Polish casualties during WWII (for Roberto)
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... =196.topic
Hetman/DPWES also provided the following passage from the USHMM website:
In the past, many estimates of losses were based on a Polish report of 1947 requesting reparations from the Germans; this often cited document tallied population losses of 6 million for all Polish "nationals" (Poles, Jews, and other minorities). Subtracting 3 million Polish Jewish victims, the report claimed 3 million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi terror, including civilian and military casualties of war.
Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) were victims of German Occupation policies and the war. This approximate total includes Poles killed in executions or who died in prisons, forced labor, and concentration camps. It also includes an estimated 225,000 civilian victims of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, more than 50,000 civilians who died during the 1939 invasion and siege of Warsaw, and a relatively small but unknown number of civilians killed during the Allies' military campaign of 1944—45 to liberate Poland.
http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/poles/poles.pdf
Neither of these sources contains a breakdown by ethnicity, but it must be assumed that they refer to all civilians living on the territory of the former Polish Republic who were not Jewish. The difference between the figures first provided by Hetman/DPWES and those mentioned on the USHMM website may be due to the fact that the Soviets also killed a large number of Polish citizens during their occupation of the Eastern part of the country between 1939 and 1941.
I would like to give you more detailed figures, but it seems that research on many of these issues, long dormant behind the Iron Curtain, has not progressed much so far.
Regards,
Roberto