WW2 Deaths as 100 people.
If the WW2 deaths were just 100 people, what would it look like? This visualization tries to show the war impact and injustice.
Each dot represents 850,000 lives lost.
As in all wars, it is the innocents who suffer most.
The conflict took the lives of 58,5 million civilians. 30,5 million due to direct military activity or crimes against humanity and 28 million due to famine or diseases caused by the war.
Most of the civilian losses occurred on the Allies side.
This is mainly due to the harsh offensive with cruel occupation carried out by the Axis and the countless war crimes committed by them.
The biggest number of military deaths was from the USSR due to Operation Barbarossa.
On 22 June 1941 Germany invades the Soviet Union with three million German troops supported by Italian, Hungarian, Romanian and Finnish allies.
Stalin was taken by surprise and the Soviets were forced to retreat. The Germans used Blitzkrieg tactics and one week the Soviets suffered 150,000 casualties. The operation took the lives of more than 1 million Axis troops and 5 million Soviet soldiers.
When we consider all deaths, new countries emerge.
Some countries suffered great civilian losses despite not participating so actively in the war. Poland (6M) suffered heavy losses due to the deliberate and systematic genocide during the Nazi-Soviet occupation (1939–1945). Dutch East Indies (4M) (1942–1945) and French Indochina (2M) (1940–1945) suffered from famine and forced labour ocasioned by the Japanese occupation. India (3M) also suffered from famine due to British policies and scorched-earth aproach.
Some battles turned the tide of war.
A German offensive in August 1942 stalls and the Red Army holds on in Stalingrad until the Russian winter arrives. It is one of the bloodiest battles in history with nearly two million military and civilian casualties. House-to-house fighting drags on until 2 February 1943. 868,374 Axis and 1,129,619 Soviets troops died.
On September 8, 1941 the siege of Leningrad begins. The Nazi objective was to destroy the city and its population. The siege lasted two and a half years and more than 1 million civilians died due to diseases and starvation.
In comparison, D-day deaths are less than 10,000
Absolute numbers cannot tell the whole story.
Poland lost about 6 million citizens, nearly 17% of Poland's population, between 1939 and 1945. The Polish citizens also suffered forced labour in concentration and extermination camps where 3 million Jews lost their lives. Over 90% of the deaths were non-military losses. Most polish civilians were deliberately targeted in various actions which were launched by the Germans and Soviets including a process of Germanization.
Each dot represents 348,500 lives.
Byelorussia lost one in 4 citizens.
The Soviet republic of Belarus lost 25% of its 9 million population due to bloody encirclement battles during the fighting and German occupation. The population was exterminated for German colonization or deported to slave labour camps. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all their inhabitants killed and more than 600 villages were annihilated with their entire population.
Each dot represents 90,000 lives.
The Holocaust.
Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically massacred 6 million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
Paramilitary death squads, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms between 1941 and 1945. By mid-1942 until 1945, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where they were gassed, worked or beaten to death, or killed by disease or during death marches.
Each dot represents 850,000 lives lost.
The real size of 85 million deaths.
Only numbers are not able to pass the magnitude and the real impact of such a tragedy. The graph shows the area needed to bury the 85 million bodies compared with the area of Paris. If the coffins were placed side by side they would give 22.7 laps around the earth.
Each dot represents 1.7km² considering that each coffin occupies 2m².
Each dot represents 850,000 lives lost and 1.7km².
The price of war.
We must remember those who fell. They show us that war is unjust, war is ugly, war is futile, war is stupid, war is hell, and above all, war is a mistake. A mistake paid with lives. A mistake that we need to ensure is not repeated.
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein