Civilians in World War II
Occupation, genocide, forced labour, famine, bombing and displacement · 1933 to 1950 · Eight subjects
Explore how World War II affected civilians and other people placed outside the protections of ordinary military conflict. These eight sections examine the Holocaust, occupation, forced labour, Soviet prisoners of war, reprisals, famine, bombing and postwar displacement. Each subject is documented separately because the causes, perpetrators and methods of counting were not the same.
Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-268-0154-17A · CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Source
- CIVILIAN DEATHS
- About 50 to 55 millionA broad global estimate including genocide, famine, disease, bombing and other war-related civilian deaths; totals vary by method and geographic boundary
- THE HOLOCAUST
- About six million JewsApproximately two thirds of Europe’s prewar Jewish population were murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators
- SOVIET POW DEATHS
- About 3.3 millionAround 57 per cent of approximately 5.7 million Soviet military personnel captured by Germany
- NAZI FORCED LABOUR
- More than 20 million peopleMore than 13 million worked inside the German Reich and roughly seven million in German-occupied territories
- DISPLACED IN EUROPE
- More than 40 million in May 1945UNHCR’s estimate excludes some additional groups, including Germans already fleeing west and foreign forced labourers still inside Germany
How Did World War II Affect Civilians?
Genocide, occupation, forced labour, famine, bombing, massacre and displacementCivilians made up a large share of those killed during World War II. They died through genocide, occupation violence, reprisals, forced labour, starvation, aerial bombing and mass displacement.
Military campaigns only show part of that history. Behind the front lines, civilians faced persecution, deportation, hunger, forced work, imprisonment and the destruction of their communities. These pages follow those experiences across different countries and theatres of war.
The subjects include the Holocaust, occupation, forced labour, Soviet prisoners of war, reprisals and massacres, wartime famine, bombing and displacement. Each has its own causes, policies, victims and surviving records.
Which Civilian Histories Are Included?
Eight subjects covering persecution, occupation, mass violence and displacementThe section begins with the Holocaust and the bombing of cities, then moves through occupation, forced labour, Soviet prisoners of war, reprisals and massacres, wartime famine and the displacement that continued after the fighting ended.
Each page follows the events chronologically and identifies the authorities involved, the people affected and the evidence used to reconstruct what happened. Dedicated source notes explain where the surviving records come from and how casualty figures have been established.
The Holocaust
Nazi persecution of Jews began with exclusion from public life, law and employment and intensified through dispossession, forced emigration and confinement. During the war, German authorities and their allies and collaborators created ghettos, carried out mass shootings, deported Jews across occupied Europe and operated killing centres.
Approximately six million European Jews were murdered. The dedicated chronology follows the shift from persecution to genocide while keeping deportation records, killing-site evidence, named-victim databases and demographic estimates tied to the institutions that preserve them.
Bombing of Cities in World War II
The air war brought civilians into battles fought far beyond the front line. The section opens with the prewar and Asian-war precedents at Guernica and Chongqing, then follows Warsaw, Rotterdam, the Blitz, Allied area and strategic bombing, the fire raids on Japanese cities and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Each campaign is examined through its own target policy, warning system, weapons, urban geography and casualty record. Military, economic and political purposes changed over time, and the page does not treat every raid as equivalent simply because civilians were killed.
Life Under Occupation and Collaboration
Occupation altered law, policing, food, work, education, movement and access to property. German rule in France differed from the occupation regimes imposed in Poland and the Soviet Union, while Japanese occupation systems in China and Southeast Asia followed their own military and political structures.
The section follows everyday coercion alongside resistance, accommodation and collaboration. Those choices were made under unequal conditions, and postwar trials, purges and political settlements often judged them through categories that had been less clear while occupation was still in force.
Reprisals and Massacres of Civilians
Occupation forces and security units killed civilians in reprisals, anti-partisan operations, hostage shootings, village destructions and campaigns of racial or political terror. The scale ranged from local executions to operations that destroyed entire communities.
The section reconstructs documented cases including Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, Kalavryta, Khatyn, Sant’Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto, with wider examples from eastern Europe, the Balkans and Asia. Each case is tied to the units, orders and local records that produced it.
Nazi Forced Labour
Nazi Germany coerced more than twenty million people into labour in the Reich and occupied Europe. Civilian deportees, prisoners of war, concentration-camp prisoners, Jews in ghettos and people compelled to work locally entered different labour systems governed by nationality, racial classification, employer and legal status.
More than thirteen million forced labourers worked inside the German Reich. The page follows recruitment and seizure, transport, identification rules, living conditions, agriculture and industry, company participation, mortality and the long postwar struggle for recognition and compensation.
Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity
About 5.7 million Soviet military personnel fell into German hands during the war. Existing records indicate that roughly 3.3 million died in captivity through starvation, exposure, disease, shootings, forced labour and a deliberate denial of protections extended to many western prisoners.
These men were soldiers, not civilians. They are included in this theatre because Nazi racial policy treated Soviet captivity as part of a wider war of annihilation. The dedicated page follows capture, transit camps, mass mortality, labour, selection, escape, collaboration and release.
Coming soon
Wartime Famine and Hunger
War disrupted harvests, shipping, transport, markets and ration systems. Occupation, military requisition, blockade, inflation and government priorities could turn those disruptions into prolonged hunger or famine, but the balance between causes differed sharply from one place to another.
The section compares Bengal, Vietnam, occupied Greece, the Dutch Hunger Winter and starvation in besieged Soviet cities. It separates deliberate starvation policy from cases shaped by supply collapse, market failure, relief decisions and wartime administration.
Refugees, Expulsion and Postwar Displacement
Liberation and surrender left tens of millions of people away from home. In May 1945, UNHCR’s later historical survey estimated more than forty million displaced people in Europe even before several additional categories were added to the picture.
The page follows displaced-persons camps, repatriation, Holocaust survivors who could not or would not return home, population transfers, the westward movement of Poland, and the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans. It continues into the first postwar years because new borders and destroyed communities kept movement under way after the armies stopped fighting.
Coming soonHow Are Civilian Deaths and Atrocities Documented?
Archives, victim records, official documents, demographic studies and survivor testimonyThe evidence is spread across many archives and memorial institutions. Holocaust research draws on victim records, German documents, deportation lists, survivor testimony and postwar investigations. Records of occupation, forced labour, prisoners of war and reprisals are scattered across German archives and the national collections of countries affected by the war.
Casualty estimates can differ because historians use different dates, borders and categories. Some counts come from named victims, others from demographic reconstruction or wartime records. Where reliable sources produce different figures, the individual page explains how each estimate was reached.
- Holocaust Encyclopedia and research on victims of Nazi persecutionUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and archival collectionsYad Vashem, Jerusalem
- Records of persecution, forced labour, displacement and tracingArolsen Archives
- German occupation, SS and police records and postwar trial evidenceUS National Archives and Records Administration
- Soviet prisoners of war in German captivityBundesarchiv and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Civilian bombing, air raids and home-front collectionsImperial War Museums
- Famine Inquiry Commission report on Bengal and wartime food recordsThe National Archives, Kew
- Forced labour under National Socialism: overview and documentationMuseum Forced Labor Under National Socialism, Berlin-Schöneweide
- The State of the World’s Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, Chapter 1United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
- Wartime mass violence in Asia and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East recordNational Archives and international trial collections
Images and editorial standards. Photographs are used only when their subject and provenance support the history represented by the card. Identifiable victims are shown only where the photograph directly documents that subject; graphic images of bodies, executions or extreme suffering are not used as gateway illustrations. Bundesarchiv captions are treated as wartime records, not neutral descriptions, and are rewritten from the underlying file metadata. Commons File pages provide the licence basis for each image. Casualty and displacement figures retain the categories and boundaries used by the institution or study cited.