Western Allies Killed More Innocents in 1941-1945 Than Butcher Stalin Did

4 million to Stalin's 2 million. The only reason we think of them as moral is because the Nazis were even far worse

There was unfortunately nothing particularly moral about the allies. The German-Japanese Axis merely made them look good by comparison

Editor’s note: There is no doubt that the Nazi Reich was a magnitude more lethal than either the Soviets or the Anglo-Americans, but here is the rub; the one time in history of mankind we could have fought a noble global war of good vs evil — we didn’t. Moscow and London and Washington were all perfectly willing to soak their hands in innocent blood, albeit not quite to the same mind-boggling extent as the Nazi racial planners.

Also while this is perfectly understood in regards to Stalin (often paired with laughable Cold War era exaggerations of an impossible 60-80 million victims), there is far less understanding that Western Allies were unfortunately right there with him — and even ahead.


Originally published in June 2018.

According to the best available study on the subject Germany lost 5.3 million military men to World War II. Of these, 340,000 were lost in Western Europe, 150,00 in Italy, 16,000 in Africa and up to 225,000 on the seas and in the air over Germany. Additionally the Germans lost 1,230,000 dead in the final battles in Germany of 1945, of which Overmans estimates about one third or 410,000 were inflicted by the Western Allies. Taken together the Germans lost just under 1.2 million military men to the Western Allies, chiefly the Anglo-Americans.[1]

Meanwhile in the course of the war between 360,000 to 460,000 German civilians died in the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against German cities and towns. For every three German soldiers the Anglo-Americans also killed one German civilian (or sometimes a forced foreign laborer or an allied prisoner of war). Nor is this the complete tally of Anglo-American bombing in WWII Europe. An estimated 60,000 civilians were killed in the bombing raids over France and just as many in Italy. 20,000 more were killed in allied bombing raids in the Low Countries.

Theoretically the campaign against German cities was “strategic”, but the raids over German-occupied territories were only “tactical”. According to the architects of Combined Bomber Offensive, civilian deaths in Germany were a positive outcome of the raids. They would diminish German morale and aid the Allied cause. On the other hand any civilian deaths caused in German-occupied countries were only tangential to what the strikes were supposed to accomplish. In practice it did not make a whole world of difference. Altogether the Anglo-American bombs took the lives of roughly 550,000 civilians across German-run Europe.

In Japan the USAAF killed 100,000 people in the March 9-10th 1945 raid on Tokyo alone, and then 120,000 people in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and a further 60,000-80,000 in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Altogether the strategic bombing campaign against Japan likely killed between 400,000 and 500,000 people. Taken together, the American and British bombing campaigns over Japan and German-occupied Europe killed about 1 million non-combatants.

Now, how easy or how difficult is it to argue that a force which ⁠— mainly in the space of just over a year (between mid-1944 and mid-1945) ⁠— burns to death or collapses under the ruble 1 million civilians, children and women included, is a force for good?

In the course of the Second World War the Anglo-Americans actually inflicted more enemy civilian deaths than the loathed Stalin did. Around 1 million Germans and Japanese perished under Anglo-American bombs. Meanwhile the Soviets chiefly caused German civilian deaths in the expulsion of millions of Germans from parts of eastern Germany that were annexed to Communist Poland and the USSR. Nearly 500,000 of these expellees died in various circumstances.[2]

Additionally, in the course of the Soviet-German conflict about 1.5 million of the Soviets’ own citizens perished as a result of Soviet state repression. Of these about 1 million in the gulag, 0.3 million from in the ethnic-based deportations of “enemy peoples” and 0.2 million executed by civilian courts, the secret police and military tribunals.

In that very same timeframe the British Empire callously presided over the deaths of about 3 million of its colonial subjects in the banal and avoidable Bengal Famine of 1943. In 1942 the weather and the Japanese capture of neighboring Burma ensured there would be some manner of food crisis in Bengal. In of themselves, however, the Japanese and a severe cyclone were not sufficient causes for the catastrophic famine that would follow.

Disaster struck when the British, sensing a crisis, intervened to secure food for the colonial administration, troops and industries in the cities, that is the sectors of society which they they deemed vital for the war effort. First they tried price controls and forced requisitions, but quickly abandoned both and instead issued local merchant companies with vast quantities of newly-printed fiat currency and authorized them to buy up as much food as humanly possible for British stocks. British policy filled up state granaries (where some of the food would end up rotting away), but drove up prices and sucked out food from the countryside. The landless peasants of Bengal could not compete with the purchasing power of the British (who could issue new currency) and were left unable to procure even enough food to keep their families nourished.[3]

Even once the extent of the disaster became clearly visible the British continued to export food from India as a whole and never contemplated a relief effort, though there was food enough in the Empire to continue to build-up food stocks in Britain and the eastern Mediterranean.

In the course of the Second World War both the British and the Americans on the one hand, and the Soviets on the other, carried out unjust and collectivist policies that extinguished the lives of millions of non-combatants.

What is more, both sides, the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans, caused the deaths of innocents on roughly the same order of magnitude. If anything in this particular timeframe the Soviets (2 million) lagged somewhat behind the Western Allies (4 million).

Naturally, neither of them can hold a candle to Nazi Germany. In the course of World War II the Germans killed 5.7 million in the Holocaust, nearly 1 million in the Siege of Leningrad, 0.6 million in anti-partisan reprisals in the Soviet Union and caused up to 8 million intentional deaths of malnutrition and disease in the USSR. An additional 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German custody most of whom after being intentionally left to starve to death. Massive losses were further inflicted in occupied Yugoslavia, Poland and Greece.[4]

Most shockingly the Third Reich had intended much worse than it had accomplished. Had they succeeded in rapidly conquering the European portion of the USSR, the Nazis had planned to starve tens of millions of its inhabitants in the first year of the occupation alone. German victory in World War II would have spelled the death of incomparably more people than did its defeat at the hands of the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans.

It is only natural to breathe a sigh of relief that Nazi Germany did not come out victorious from the Second World War. This, however, does not mean there was anything particularly exalted or praiseworthy about those who did come out as the victors from the global slaughter of the 1940s. They too were perfectly willing to carry out collectivist policies that were utterly contemptuous of human life and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of “enemy civilians”, their own citizens and their colonial subjects in terror bombings, forced labor camps and avoidable, man-made famines.

The only saving grace of the objectively downright terrible Soviets and Anglo-Americans was that Germany under the Nazis somehow succeed in being even far worse. That is, they only looked good by comparison, but on its own their track record was also horrendous.

That is the great tragedy of the biggest armed conflict that had ever struck human kind: after so much human sacrifice and losses the victory still did not belong to morality, humanity and freedom, but to frightening state powers with the deaths of millions of innocent individual human beings on their conscience. On the one hand there was Stalin’s USSR of which little needs to be said here. On the other there were the British Empire and the United States which taken together in terms of killing innocents and presiding over mass death over the course of World War II easily kept up with and even exceeded Stalin.


1 According to Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche Militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999).

2 Ethnic Germans were also expelled from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia but this had comparably little to do with Moscow. An older estimate of 2.2 million deaths due to the expulsions of the Germans also exists, but since new research by German scholars such as Ingo Haar and Rüdiger Overmans this figure is no longer tenable. It has been shown the 2.2 million figure actually represents the total demographic loss of German speakers and German citizens from the affected areas. The 2.2 million figure for example presupposed there were 270,000 dead among Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia. In fact a joint German-Czech commission of historians found there were actually 15,000-30,000 such deaths. The difference is made up of categories such as Germans from Sudentenland who died in the German armed forces (160,000), the Sudetenland German victims of Nazi repression against Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and gay men, the Sudetenland Germans murdered in the Nazi euthanasia programs and so on. Ingo Haar estimates total deaths resulting from the expulsions at between 500,000 and 600,000.

3 Some 8.5 million families in Bengal owned too little land to be able to feed themselves from what they produced. They supplanted by buying food from what they earned working for wealthy landowners. For an excellent account of the famine and its context see Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Here is my review and summary of the book.

4 The number of prisoners of war who perished in Soviet custody is contentious. Research conducted by the Russian scholar Krivosheev suggests there were 360,000 documented deaths among German prisoners of war and an additional 90,000 undocumented deaths in transit for a total of 450,000. G.F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1997) 276. Overmans meanwhile believes there were many more undocumented deaths for a total of up to a maximum of 1 million German POW deaths in Soviet custody. However since Overmans is not working from Soviet records he is less likely to be right. Since such Soviet records were secret there is no reason for them to be fradulent — to the contrary, to enable POWs to be managed they needed to be at least somewhat accurate. Additionally, there were tens of thousands of deaths among Japanese, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian prisoners of war in Soviet hands. One thing to consider is that German and other POWs were imprisoned during a time when USSR’s own population, including the free population outside gulags and deportee camps, was suffering from famine, which was not the case in Germany. Up to 4 million free civilians perished in unoccupied USSR during the war (due to the German advance cutting it off from its food-surplus areas) and up to 1.5 million during the famine of 1946-47 (in part due to devastation of the physical and human capital by the German invasion in the prior years). The Soviet Union may have prioritized feeding its critical soldiers and workers to its POWs (albeit its gulag inmates were even at a lower rung), however, unlike is the case with Third Reich which carefully planned the mass deaths of Soviet POWs in advance, there is no indication that the USSR would not have fed its POWs had it enjoyed a net food surplus of the kind there was in German-occupied Europe. (In 1946-47 Soviet military and civilian administrators occupying Germany actually argued for increased food shipments to Germany at a time when there was famine in the Soviet Union itself — a food transfer from occupier to the occupied which would have been unthinkable and perverse in the Nazi Reich.)

5 Comments
  1. […] Article originel: Sainted Western Allies Killed More Innocents in 1941-1945 Than Butcher Stalin Did […]

  2. Rowdy-Yates says

    The article is peppered with errors as in this quote:
    Naturally, neither of them can hold a candle to Nazi Germany. In the course of World War II the Germans killed 5.7 million in the Holocaust,
    That number has been debunked from the records at Bad Orelson, to those given by the International Red Cross who visited all the camps throughout the war. In both cases the total numbers show around 290 thousand not the “6 million” .
    Btw Hollywood completely covers up the role of the international red cross in those camps. but the most telling is the use of the word “Nazi” No German used that word with each other. Hitler or the National Socialists never used that word. That word was invented by Konrad Heiden in the 1920s’ as a derogatory word against the National Socialists. He fled Germany but promoted the use of that word. To use the word “Nazi” is like using the N word against blacks and expect to be taken seriously.

  3. charles alban says

    wrong about the “Holocaust”. no organised extermination of jews or anyone else. Hitler and the NSDAP have been thoroughly misrepresented. you could argue that the world would be a much better place had Hitler prevailed. Gen. Patton said we fought the wrong people. We should have supported Hitler against the Bolsheviks.

  4. Black Swan says

    ” Genocide is the reality of Marxism everywhere in the World where it was adopted. You must understand the Bolshevik Communist Jews who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians, they hated Christians, driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered 66 million people without a shred of remorse. It cannot be overstated, Bolshevism committed the greatest slaughter of all time, from 1918-1957. The fact that most of the World is ignorant and uncaring of this horrific crime is proof the Global Media is in the hands of the perpetrators. ” Alexander Solzhenitsyn Author: The Gulag Archipelago

  5. Superbus69 says

    Overmans is innummerate and wrong. The accepted count is 4,3 million dead with about 3 and a half of them Germans. He came up with the larger number from a smaller than useful sample of casualties and posted them to the various fronts without any research. Also there is no way 400,000 Axis soldiers died in the battles for Western Germany unless he meant that they were mostly killed in POW Camps as there was hardly any fighting in the west after the german borders were crossed. That and the fact that the western allies only lost around 40,000 dead in these battles makes that number seem ridiculous.

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