World War II Data
World War II is the deadliest conflict in recorded history of Earth. An estimated 70 to 85 million people died, approximately 3 percent of the world population at that time.
It was a global conflict involving most countries of the world. At the end of World War II, there were probably very few people alive who didn't personally know someone who died in the war.
But the world has chosen to remember it as "a bunch of Jews were murdered."
The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.
That is the introduction of the Wikipedia article about The Holocaust. The Holocaust is specifically genocide against the Jews in World War II and not, you know, damn, three percent of everyone died.
Approximately 6 million Jews died.
So Jews represent half of the people murdered intentionally by Nazis. That's a lot and I'm aware that entire neighborhoods were exterminated and places where Hebrew was once a living language saw it cease to be spoken.
But it's not one hundred percent of everyone the Nazis murdered. It's not even like the vast majority and, you know, a few other unfortunate souls got caught in the crossfire.
They were US allies during World War II and then after the war, we had an extended Cold War with them while the US rebuilt Germany and Japan, our conquered enemies. But FUCK YOU, you Russian bastards who helped us win the war!!!
Years ago, I tried to talk on TAGMAX -- hypothetically, that's a hyper smarty pants highly intellectual discussion space -- about something along the lines of "Hitler was such a rat bastard the entire PLANET agreed he needs to GO." And I would talk about the fact that concentration camps had an assortment of Romani and Gay and disabled people in them.
It wasn't just Jews. The Nazis were going after a number of "undesirable" groups.
Inevitably, someone who was Jewish would jump up and shriek about how bad the Jews had it and, yes, a FEW other people also got hurt, but you need to understand how terrible and extreme it was for the Jews.
My own mother grew up in Nazi Germany and watched foreign soldiers rape her mother and an older sister and a beloved brother of hers died in the war.
BUT that's irrelevant. The suffering of anyone NOT JEWISH is a fucking paper cut compared to OUR suffering, you antisemitic little BITCH, how DARE you try to say "We were all in it together and everyone had reason to want this shit stopped." You are THE MOST evil hateful person ever for not bowing down and worshiping at the altar of ONLY the Jews suffered in that war.
Excuse the hell out of me for trying to build bridges. My bad.
The Jews suffered. They absolutely suffered. It was terrible.
But pissing on the "paper cuts" of the millions of other people with dead immediate family members isn't exactly a chapter in the book How To Win Friends and Influence People.
FYI, Pink Triangle is an LGBTQ symbol because it's the patch on the uniforms of gays in Nazi concentration camps who generally died at higher overall rates than other groups and were largely overlooked in the immediate aftermath of the war by a generally homophobic planet that cared deeply about the pain of the Jews and gave no voice at all to the gay community and how the war impacted them.
After World War II, the divided city of Berlin was a haven for things like cross dressing stage acts. I've read some things that suggest that prior to the rise of the Nazis, Germany was an unusually enlightened haven for trans individuals and other members of the LGBTQ community and if this is true, a lot of the evidence is probably permanently lost due to the war.
I'm someone with a long-standing interest in LGBTQ history and German culture and blah blah blah and I have picked up a few tidbits and I'm not readily finding much about that aspect of what the war likely cost the planet in that regard.
Footnotes
Some of the below quotes are AI response and some are quotes from various sources that I tried to link below. I was looking for hard numbers and I did a terrible job of trying to keep track of where I pulled stuff from.
The first German concentration camps were established in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, primarily to detain political opponents such as Communists and Social Democrats.
Over time, the camps expanded to include Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other groups deemed “undesirable” by the Nazi regime.
Initially, conditions were harsh but not always lethal; however, as World War II progressed, overcrowding, malnutrition, forced labor, and systematic killings caused mass fatalities
By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor; for the most part, only those working in armaments production were spared.
Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor. The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish and they were the worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews.[300] Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died.
Around six million Jews were killed,[401][402][403] with a conservative estimate being 5.7 million Jews killed by the Germans and Romanians, of which 5.4 million were killed under Nazi occupation.[404] Of the six million victims, the vast majority of those killed were from Eastern Europe, and with half from Poland, and 2.6 million within the 1941 Soviet borders.[405][406][404] Around 1.3 million Jews who had once lived under Nazi rule or in one of Germany's allies survived the war.[407] One-third of the Jewish population worldwide, and two-thirds of European Jews, had been wiped out.[408] Death rates varied widely due to a variety of factors and approached 100 percent in some areas.[409] Some reasons why survival chances varied was the availability of emigration[410] and protection from Germany's allies—which saved around 600,000 Jews.[411] Jewish children and the elderly faced even lower survival rates than adults.[412] It is considered to be the single largest genocide in human history.[413][414][415]
Death Toll World War II
The death toll of World War II is estimated to be between 70 to 85 million, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. This includes approximately 30 million military deaths and 50+ million civilian deaths from various causes such as bombing, genocide, famine, and disease. The Soviet Union suffered the most, with roughly 27 million deaths, while China and the United States also had significant casualties. The war's impact was profound, reshaping global politics and the human conception of war's limits.
World War II (1939–1945) was the deadliest military conflict in human history and the defining catastrophe of the 20th century. An estimated 70 to 85 million people died — approximately 3% of the world's entire population at the time — making it the single largest loss of human life in any conflict before or since. Unlike World War I, where military casualties dominated, WWII killed more civilians than soldiers: bombing campaigns, deliberate genocide, famine, forced labor, and population displacement drove the civilian death toll above 50 million.
Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 6 million Jewish people (two-thirds of European Jewry) were murdered in gas chambers, mass shootings, and concentration camps. An additional 6 million Romani, disabled people, Soviet prisoners, and others were killed in the same apparatus.
Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals; around 50,000 of these were sentenced by civilian courts, 6,400 to 7,000 by military courts [de], and an unknown number by special courts. Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and between 5,000 and 6,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps. The death rate of these prisoners has been estimated at 60 percent, a higher rate than those of other prisoner groups. A smaller number of men were sentenced to death or killed at Nazi euthanasia centres. Nazi Germany's persecution of homosexuals is considered to be the most severe episode in a long history of discrimination and violence targeting sexual minorities.
After the war, homosexuals were initially not counted as victims of Nazism because homosexuality continued to be illegal in Nazi Germany's successor states. Few victims came forward to discuss their experiences. The persecution came to wider public attention during the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, and the pink triangle was reappropriated as an LGBT symbol.
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