German casualties in World War II

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Statistics for German World War II military casualties are divergent. The wartime military casualty figures compiled by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (the German High Command, abbreviated as OKW) through 31 January 1945 are often cited by military historians in accounts of individual campaigns in the war. A study by German historian Rüdiger Overmans concluded that total German military deaths were much higher than those originally reported by the German High Command, amounting to 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria and in east-central Europe. The German government reported that its records list 4.3 million dead and missing military personnel. Air raids were a major cause of civilian deaths. Estimates of German civilians killed just by Allied strategic bombing alone have ranged from around 350,000 to 500,000. Estimates of civilian deaths due to the flight and expulsion of Germans, Soviet war crimes and the forced labor of Germans...

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