Let’s start by comparing the death tolls of the winning side, the Allies, and the losing side, the Axis.
Jankowski estimates that the Allies lost nearly 48 million people, compared to fewer than 12 million people on the Axis side. It strikes me as astonishing that the winning side would suffer four times as many deaths as the losers.
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Now let’s look at the death count by country in terms of percentage of population killed. Poland, not atypically, suffered the most. It lost an estimated 16 percent of its population.
After Poland comes the Soviet Union, which lost around 14 percent of its population.
Then come Lithuania, Latvia, and Greece, all at between 11.2 and 13.7 percent.
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After that, finally, we come to Germany at 9.4 percent. Thus the chief aggressor, and the loser, is in sixth place.
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What about Japan, the other major aggressor? It lost an estimated 3.8 percent of its population. This puts Japan in 14th place, behind some of its victims (the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina) and just slightly ahead of the Philippines.
Italy, despite some horrific fighting there, didn’t make the top 20.