Civilians in World War II

Civilians 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 show only part of that history. Behind the front lines, civilians faced persecution, deportation, hunger, forced work, imprisonment and the destruction of their communities, and in occupied eastern Europe the same people could suffer several of these within a few years.

In the east Nazi German policy linked the Holocaust, forced labour and the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and each left its own administration, victims and records. Reprisals, famine, bombing and expulsion arose from other decisions, taken by other governments and armies.

Each form of violence reached civilians at a different time. Nazi persecution of Jews began in 1933, and the bombing of cities opened with Guernica in 1937. From September 1939 German occupation spread across Europe, bringing reprisals and forced labour, and Japanese occupation brought its own regimes of coercion in China and Southeast Asia.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, millions of Soviet soldiers entered German captivity, and more than half of them died. Famine followed in besieged Leningrad, in Greece, in Bengal and in the Netherlands between 1941 and 1945. When the fighting ended, millions of people were still moving, and expulsions and the camps for displaced persons carried the upheaval into the first postwar years.

The causes differed. German authorities organised the murder of Jews and held Soviet prisoners in conditions that killed more than half of them. Air forces chose their targets under changing military, economic and political aims. Famines grew out of war, requisition and administration in different proportions from one region to the next, and expulsions followed from new borders and postwar settlements.

The evidence is spread across many archives and memorial institutions. Because no single German document accounts for every death in the Holocaust, researchers combine hundreds of thousands of pages of German records with deportation lists, Jewish documentation, 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 the countries affected.

Casualty estimates differ because historians use different dates, borders and categories. Some counts come from named victims, others from demographic reconstruction or wartime records. The National WWII Museum gives about 45 million civilian deaths for the war as a whole and notes that China's civilian toll alone may exceed 50 million.