Title: How Many People Died in WW1? - History
Headings: How Many People Died in WW1? A Look at the Numbers
How Many People Died in WW1?
How Many People Died in WW1? A Look at the Numbers
Military and Civilian Deaths on Both Sides
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Content: In the Ottoman Empire, there were also the genocides that killed thousands of people. The Spanish flu also killed a lot of people, but historians often left these figures out of accounts. Finally, there are even more indirect deaths caused by the wars that are not accounted for in such reports. The Armenian Genocide, which left 1.5 million dead in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, was precipitated by the Ottoman political leadership believing that the Armenian people would side with Russia in World War One, leading to the empire’s ruin. To secure their borders, they put Armenian men in work camps, which became extermination centers, and forced marched the elderly, women, and children to Northern Syria, which became a death march. The war, beyond battlefield deaths, without exaggeration, can be called the war that made the modern world. It was the war that set the boundaries of the modern Middle East out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It was the war that saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had held together Mitteleuropa. It was a war that rewarded nationalism, which, perversely, had been the war’s original cause. It was the war that ended the Second Reich in Germany and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.