All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [418]
Italy lost over 300,000 military dead, and around a quarter of a million civilians. More than five million Poles died, 110,000 in combat, most of the remainder in German concentration camps, though the Russians could also claim a substantial tally of Polish victims. France lost 567,000 people, including 267,000 civilians. Thirty thousand British troops perished in conflict with the Japanese, many of them as prisoners, out of an overall death toll of 382,700. Britain’s total war loss, including civilians, was 449,000. Indian forces fighting under British command lost 87,000 dead. Total United States war losses were 418,500, slightly fewer than those of the UK, of which the US Army lost 143,000 in Europe and the Mediterranean, and 55,145 in the Pacific. The US Navy lost a further 29,263 men in the East, the Marine Corps 19,163. It is inconsistent to account the estimated twenty million people who died of starvation and disease under Axis occupation as victims of Germany and Japan, without making the same computation on the Allied side: between one and three million Indians under British rule perished in wartime famines.
Many other nations suffered large numbers of fatalities, though all statistics should be considered suggestive rather than exact, because they remain disputed: 769,000 Romanians, many of them Jews; up to 400,000 Koreans; 97,000 Finns out of a population of less than four million; 415,000 Greeks from a population of seven million; at least 1.2 million Yugoslavs from a population of 15.4 million; more than 343,000 Czechs, 277,000 of them Jews; 45,300 Canadians; 41,200 Australians; 11,900 New Zealanders from a population of 1.6 million – the highest proportionate toll of any Western ally. The most noteworthy aspect of these statistics is that the heaviest burden fell upon nations which suffered enemy occupation, or whose territories became battlefields. One in four of the world’s twenty million military dead perished in German or Japanese captivity, most of them Russians or Poles.
Combatants fared better than civilians: around three-quarters of all those who perished were unarmed victims rather than active participants in the struggle. The peoples of western Europe escaped more lightly than those of eastern Europe. The best recent research suggests that 5.7 million Jews of all nationalities – out of a pre-war Jewish population of 7.3 million in lands occupied by Hitler – were killed by the Nazis in their attempt to achieve a ‘Final Solution’. Hitler’s agents also murdered or allowed to die some three million Soviet PoWs, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, five million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 150,000 mentally handicapped people, and 10,000 homosexual men.
Most Germans considered that their shattered cities, wrecked industries and millions of dead paid their dues for the crimes of Nazism. The young felt mingled bewilderment and rage that their elders whom they trusted had brought them to such a pass. ‘I wasn’t quite sure what I ought to feel,’ said Helmut Lott, a teenager in 1945. ‘A certain world – a world I’d grown up in and believed in – was destroyed.’ Many Germans colluded in allowing former Nazis to meld unpunished into their post-war society. ‘No one believes a decent German nowadays,’ said former SS officer’s wife Hildegard Trutz bitterly in 1947, ‘but anything those dirty Jews say goes for gospel.’ South America became a popular destination for irreconcilables and the most heinous war criminals, some of whom were given sanctuary by the Catholic Church during their passage from Europe.
Only a tiny fraction of those guilty of war crimes were ever indicted, partly because the victors had no stomach for the scale of executions, numbering several hundreds of thousands, that would have been necessary had strict justice been enforced against every Axis