Theory 2 Action Podcast
Theory 2 Action Podcast
MM#433--The Forgotten Toll: Civilian Deaths in WWII
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The staggering scale of World War II's devastation remains difficult to comprehend even decades later. In just six years and one day, humanity's deadliest conflict claimed between 60-65 million lives—roughly 3% of the world's 1939 population and more deaths than occurred in three centuries of warfare combined.
Drawing from Victor Davis Hanson's masterful "The Second World Wars," this episode explores the uncomfortable truth that most Americans overlook: approximately 40 million of these deaths were Chinese and Russian civilians killed by German and Japanese forces. For the first time in history, a major war saw civilian casualties vastly outnumber military deaths, as populations became legitimate targets for elimination under the cloak of conflict.
What made this war uniquely lethal? Seven critical factors converged: a larger global population, industrially advanced combatants, unprecedented technological lethality, totalitarian ideologies that justified mass killing, military technology favoring offense over defense, the war's extended duration, and the deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Beyond combat, over 20 million people starved to death or perished from treatable illnesses. The capitulation of trapped armies sent approximately 10 million into prisoner-of-war camps, where more than half died—deaths often forgotten in conventional accounts.
At its core, this catastrophic human toll stemmed from the fundamental failure to see others as fellow humans deserving dignity. Perhaps most chilling was what Hanson identifies as the "willful blindness" and "general indifference" that enabled atrocities on an industrial scale. As Jews disappeared from communities across Europe, most neighbors chose not to question how or where they had gone.
Understanding this history isn't merely academic—it serves as a vital reminder of our fallen human nature's darker potential and how quickly radical, dehumanizing ideologies can create hell on earth. Take time today to remember, to learn from history, and to recognize the profound importance of viewing every person as your neighbor.
Key Points from the Episode:
• Most Americans fail to understand that 40 million of the 60 million deaths were Chinese and Russian civilian casualties
• Seven factors made WWII uniquely devastating, including population size, technological advances, and ideological extremism
• For the first time in history, civilian fatalities far outnumbered military deaths in a major conflict
• The war's horrors stemmed from dehumanization and widespread indifference to the fate of targeted groups
• Over 20 million people starved to death or died from treatable illnesses during the conflict
• Of the 10 million sent to prisoner-of-war camps, more than half perished
Let us read history and always remember. We owe it to generations past to understand the philosophies that led to these horrific killings, and to keep fighting the good fight.
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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.
Speaker 2:Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Over the last two weeks we have talked about how and why both Germany and Japan lost the Second World War. Mostly this was because this past year we've passed the 80th anniversary of the formal surrenders in the European and Pacific theaters, and these past two weeks we have found some great nuggets of wisdom and of history. So we're going to continue with the fantastic help and heavy lifting of one of our favorite historians today, victor Davis Hanson and his book the Second World Wars. Now, for we Americans, we always talk about the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and the use of those atomic bombs, or we talk about the industrial bombing of Dresden in Germany, or the firebombing of Tokyo in Japan, 1944 and 1945, respectively. But today I want to do what we Americans almost never do and which, again, victor Davis Hanson forces us to do, and that is to look critically at ourselves, and not from our point of view but from another's point of view, and this is not going to be what the hate America crowd does from the radical left. This will be real, self-scouting, if you will. A real objective analysis of how things look from a different perspective, to get closer to the truth of things, essentially, especially the truth of the events of World War II. And so with that, let's go to our book of the day, victor Davis Hanson's the Second World Wars, and we will start with our first pull quote. We will find this pull quote in the 19th chapter, where VDH writes this the noun and adjectives World War II are synonymous with mass death as never before envisioned.
Speaker 2:The six years and one day of World War II September 1st 1939 to September 2nd 1945, witnessed somewhere between 50 to 85 million deaths. Perhaps a figure of 60 to 65 million killed is the most likely guess. Or to put it another way, about 3% of the estimated 2 billion people alive in 1939 would die by force by 1945. During the combined three centuries of conflict between 1700 and 1988, roughly 100 million are estimated to have died in some 471 wars. Well over half that number perished in just the six years of World War II. The toll may have been even greater, given that the exact number of fatalities cannot be known due to poor wartime record keeping, due to poor wartime record-keeping, especially in the former Soviet Union and China, the locales of over half of the war's fatalities. Stop and ponder that number Roughly 60 to 65 million people died in six years of fighting in World War II. And really remember this key nugget a dreadful nugget of wisdom, but remember it Between 60 to 65 million people died in six years of fighting. During the combined three centuries of conflict, between 1700 and 1988, roughly 100 million people died in some 471 wars. Really stopped to ponder that? For me that was very, very hard to wrap my mind around. Gosh, the amount of fallen of World War II is beyond, beyond comprehending. Let's keep going with our book of the day. Let's keep going with our book of the day.
Speaker 2:World War II was also the worst human-caused disaster in human civilization's history, more deadly than the Mongol invasions, the forced collectivization of farmland and reordering of rural life ordered by Joseph Stalin between 1930 and 1932, and perhaps even more catastrophic than the later mass starvations caused by the various internal revolutions spawned by Mao Zedong. On the other hand, at war's end, the armies of the victorious allies had never been larger. Armies of the victorious allies had never been larger, better equipped and more lavishly supplied, almost as if the more death and destruction that ensued, the more the military grew and the life of the soldier improved. The three major winners alone fielded forces in the aggregate of nearly 30 million combatants, despite the far greater carnage between 1935 and 19, I'm sorry, between 1939 and 1945,. 70 years later, historians rarely write of the political and strategic futility of the Second World War, as they so often do of the first. Apparently losing $60 million for a subsequent general 70-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing $15 to $20 million for a 21-year hiatus was sometimes not million for a 21-year hiatus was sometimes not 70 years later, historians are still struggling with the understanding of some aspects of its futility.
Speaker 2:Of World War II, here's another quote going back to the book the staggering 20 million who perished from the flu pandemic of 1918 were probably less than wartime losses inside the Soviet Union alone between June 1941 and spring 1945. To 79, where approximately 10 million died, proved less deadly than the violence unleashed by the Japanese in China between 1931 and 1945. Even the horrific bubonic plague, the world's or the worst natural catastrophe in human history, which may have killed two-thirds of Europe's population, some 40 to 50 million people between 1346 and 1353, probably did not match the death toll of World War II. World War II Gosh. Even the bubonic plague, the worst natural catastrophe in human history did not reach the staggering numbers of the death toll in World War II. Why? How can this be? That's very hard to believe, why? Well, vdh adds more color to all of this throughout this chapter, chapter 19.
Speaker 2:First, more people were living on the planet by the mid-20th century, some 2 billion people estimated at the time. Largely, the fighting was done with Western powers or westernized powers, with industrially advanced and techn at the time, and its infancy had reached technological zenith in those two decades. And now the world has shrunk drastically. And speaking of technology, let's grab this quote the use of radio guidance and radar have been considered absurd in 1939. But the notion was passe by September of 1945, after months of lethal fire raids on Japan, as the radius of war grew as never before. The radius of war grew as never before. The fourth reason this war was and is still beyond comprehension, with its fallen dead, was the ideological nature of it. Let's hear from VDH, as this is a very important nugget of wisdom Going back to the book.
Speaker 2:Fourth, the World War was an ideological war waged in a new age of secular modernism. There had been centuries of conflicts fueled by religious ideas, revolutionary fervor and ethnic chauvinism. In the West. Revolutionary fervor and ethnic chauvinism in the West. From the Crusades to the Thirty Years' War, to the Napoleonic Wars, that transcended traditional disputes over personalities, succession, territory, resources or politics, but totalitarian ideologies of World War II. But totalitarian ideologies of World War II, often claiming pedigrees from Darwin and Nietzsche to Marx and Engels, re-energize theories of racial superiority, state power, mass participation of civilians, technological determinism and national destinies as never quite seen in the 2,500 years of Western history.
Speaker 2:Modernism had helped to reinvent morality in relevantist terms. The 1930s championed the statist idea that the interest of the strong collective trumped the supposed selfishness of the weaker individual, as dying and killing were easily justified as a necessary means to achieve utopian ends. One of the many reasons why the Eastern Front turned so horrific was the similarly totalitarian nature and morality of the Soviet and Nazi military leadership. Both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht censored all news from the battlefield, both tolerated no dissenting voices and executed their own in vast numbers In the case of the Germans over 25,000 through military courts. They were all court-martialed. Some died For the Red Army, well over 100,000. They conceded that surrender was usually tantamount to death and recklessly suffered enormous losses to protect the hierarchy of the state.
Speaker 2:The world, unlike any other in its time of history, had lost religion in a major, major fashion. Skepticism and modernism ruled the day, unleashed currents of thought unthinkable before the 1930s, bastardized ideas of God, power and religion from the notables like Darwin, nietzsche, wagner, marx, engels gave license to huge swaths of people to justify their killings. And we know, modernism reinvented morality in the relativist terms. Other reasons why World War II had so many deaths is the cycles of technological challenge and response. That cycle would reach its apex, unfortunately, on the offensive side, so the killing was even more lethal. That technological challenge and response, that cycle would not swing back to the defensive side until the advent of very, very effective body armor and Kevlar helmets in the late 20th century. Body armor and Kevlar helmets in the late 20th century.
Speaker 2:The sixth reason why it was a very long war by industrial and modern measures. Six years in one day is the conventional timeframe and in the modern world those six years in one day, that's very long, very, very long. Yes, we've had the 100 Years War and the 30 Years War after that, and the American Civil War was some four years long. Franco's Prussian War was four years, the four-year horror of that first world war we can think about, but the six years in one day, in the modern sense in our modern world, made this an even more lethal time, more lethal than never before in the history of our world. The final and seventh reason is is and this is the real tragedy, and I had never read this before, but here's the seventh reason that World War II was our most lethal conflict. Let's go back to the book Seventh.
Speaker 2:World War II, as mentioned earlier, was the first major war in which civilian fatalities far outnumbered military deaths, despite improved medical facilities and advances in food storage and preservation. The old 19th century divide between soldier and civilian, obscured but not ended, in World War I, was completely obliterated in World War II. Or rather, the targeting of civilians was considered a legitimate strategy of both diminishing enemy military capability and exterminating ideological and racial enemies under the cloak of war. When Hitler bragged of the collective Volk or Stalin of the masses, enemies apparently took their boast at face value and agreed that their militaries were indistinguishable from their populations. And later on we read this populations, and later on we read this Most of World War II, 60 million victims died off the battlefield I repeat, off the battlefield.
Speaker 2:Well, apart from both bombs and camps. Perhaps, all told, over 20 million starved to death or were weakened by hunger and perished from treatable illnesses and diseases. Yet improved food and water storage and health care, vaccination, medicine, sanitation, hospitalization should have saved more combatants and civilians from hunger, disease and exposure in the field. Nonetheless, there were still massive numbers of civilian deaths due to starvation and infection, largely due to the German and Japanese occupations in the Soviet Union and China respectively. In addition, the capitulations of trapped armies in the Soviet Union and China sent perhaps 10 million into prisoner of war camps where over half of the detainees perished. Over half of the detainees perished Just unthinkable.
Speaker 2:These dead are forgotten by most accounts. When talking of the dead of World War II, we Americans fail to realize and remember that some 40 million of the 60 million deaths were China and Russian fatalities at the hands of German and Japanese soldiers. And these weren't soldiers killing soldiers. These were soldiers killing civilians. Certainly we have done a good job of collectively remembering the horrors of extermination camps, and rightly so. Absolutely no argument there. But the massive, massive numbers of civilian deaths at the hands of this war cannot and must not be overlooked.
Speaker 2:The root causes of this horrific mass killing cannot be found in or can be found in not treating or even viewing other beings, other human beings, as your neighbor. Again, the root causes of this horrific mass killing can be found in not treating or even viewing other human beings as your neighbor, in viewing other human beings as your neighbor. We know of the Germans' view of seeing the Jews as untermenschen, subhumans. That's pure diabolical racism. And here's where VDH nails it again.
Speaker 2:Going back to the book, most Germans and most Europeans under occupation seemed indifferent to the fact that the Jews, by 1943, were out of sight and out of mind, without being bothered by the gory details of exactly how their disappearance had been carried out. Almost by magic, jews had simply gone away to somewhere else, leaving their often valuable property behind. How and where they had gone were not the concern of their neighbors? Admiral Donitz, who ended the war as Hitler's named successor, represented the official attitude of willful blindness when he claimed quote how, we asked ourselves, could such horrors have occurred in the middle of Germany without our having known what the Nazi architects required from the German and European publics was not just scapegoating of Jews, but something more appalling a general indifference to their ultimate fate? And again, this is chapter 19 of EDH's, the Second World War.
Speaker 2:I'd recommend this for every adult and every high school student. It's a must-read. So in today's Mojo Minute and in fact in many of these Mojo Minutes we have ended on World War II we ask for a call to action. At the end, especially the ones in World War II, we ask you to remember, remember. Reading and knowing history is a form of remembering, but we need to always remember. Remember that life is a very fragile thing, remember that we humans, with our fallen human nature, can create hell on earth very, very quickly, and which usually starts with very bad and radical, radical ideas. We owe it to generations past to read and know that history that came before us and know too, those philosophies that led to these horrific killings, a tragedy of all human tragedies, especially that of World War II, the most deadly conflict the world has ever seen. So let us read, let us read history and let us always remember and, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight and, most importantly, today, remember importantly today, Remember.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.