WW 2 Numbers

From Wikipedia:
"World War II casualties"

World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history in absolute terms of total dead, but not in terms of deaths relative to the world population^. Over 60 million people were killed, which was over 3% of the 1939 world population (est. 2 billion). The tables below give a detailed country-by-country count of human losses. World War II fatality statistics vary, with estimates of total dead ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million. The higher figure of 80 million includes deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilians killed totaled from 38 to 55 million, including 19 to 25 million from war-related disease and famine. Total military dead: from 22 to 25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. Recent historical scholarship has shed new light on the topic of Second World War casualties. Research in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union has caused a revision of estimates of Soviet war dead. According to Russian government figures USSR losses within postwar borders now stand at 26.6 million.In August 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers estimated Poland's dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million.The German Army historian Rüdiger Overmans published a study in 2000 that estimated German military dead and missing at 5.3 million. War dead totals in this article for the British Commonwealth are based on the research of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

 ^ I know many people can not fully understand the people who died during World War 2 by simply hearing the number. That's why I added the picture. The link below has the full article and does a good job of breaking down the number of deaths in each country by: military (ie soldiers) deaths, civilian deaths (including the Jews and Gypsies killed during the Holocaust) and breaks down the Soviet Union's death-toll into each of the 16 Soviet Republics. It's important - especially since this is the 70th anniversary of the end of the war - to remember that WW 2 wasn't just a war our grandparents or great-grandparents fought, but that it was the deadliest war in history. Men, women and children around the world were affected through: military occupation, as collaborators, as resistance fighters, as forced laborers, as concentration camp inmates, as POW camp prisoners, as death camp victims or survivors, as victims of the Blitz, as victims of massacres, as internment camp inmates, as people on the homefront. The majority of people living around the globe in 1939 to 1945 were impacted in one form or another because of World War 2 and all most everyone was directly affected or knew someone who was directly affected by the war. ^

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties