Title: War Losses (Germany) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)
Headings: War Losses (Germany)
Version 1.0
Last updated 08 October 2014
War Losses (Germany)
Table of Contents
German losses in World War One ↑
The Social Consequences of German Losses ↑
The Cultural Consequences of German Losses ↑
Conclusion ↑
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Content: in the First World War, it was above 8 million, and more than 40 million Europeans – half of them civilians – died in the Second World War.” What made the First World War so catastrophic compared to the earlier Franco-Prussian War was not the proportion of combatants killed, but the vast scale of the killing in the Great War. John Keegan’s estimates of the wartime dead are: Germany
2,000,000
France
1,700,000
Russia
1,700,000
Austria-Hungary
1,500,000
British Empire
1,000,000
Italy
460,000
Table 1: War Dead, 1914-1918
Mazower and Keegan actually underestimate the First World War’s death toll; according to Rüdiger Overmans’ definitive calculations, the First World War caused 9 million combat deaths, and 6 million civilian deaths. Approximately 13 million Germans served in the military during the Great War; 2 million were killed, that is, roughly 15 percent. As Keegan notes, this percentage is equally shocking when the numbers of war dead are calculated as a percentage of the relevant male cohort; that is, men born between 1880 and 1899 (prime candidates for service in the war).