The hidden victims: civilian casualties of the two world wars
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to LSE. It's really great to have you all here. My name is Eric Schneider and I'm a professor in the Economic History Department here at LSE.

It's my distinct pleasure tonight to introduce our speaker, Cormac Ograda, who will be speaking about his newly published book, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties in the Two World Wars. And I have a copy here. I read a couple of chapters last night and really enjoyed it. Highly recommended.

Before I properly introduce Cormac though, I want to go over a little bit the kind of rules of the game here. So this is a hybrid event, which means that it's being recorded and it will be on YouTube. So keep that in mind when you're asking questions, right, at the end.

You can also feel free to post things on social media. The hashtag is just #LSEevents, as you can see there. So feel free to do that. But please silence your phones now so that Cormac's talk won't be disrupted.

After the talk's finished, there will be some time for questions, both from in the room and online. So please be thinking of questions and have some ready to go. For those of you in the room, it'd be really helpful if you waited for the microphone to get to you to ask a question because otherwise people in the room and certainly people online might not hear you. So please just wait till you have the question or the microphone to ask a question.

All right, and then also there will be a reception afterwards to which all of you are invited. So please come along and have a drink. You can badger Cormac and ask him all sorts of follow-up questions. I'm sure he'd be very keen to hear that. So on to the main event. It's really our pleasure to welcome Cormac, who's Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin and really like one of the leading economic historians in Europe.

Cormac has published very important books and articles on a wide range of topics in economic history from the causes and consequences of famine to the Industrial Revolution to the causes of bank panics. So covered a really wide range of things.

For me, I think Cormac, his research embodies the great strength of an interdisciplinary approach to historical topics. He definitely applies the tools of historians, economists, and demographers to painstakingly reconstruct the past, in turn revealing things that each of those groups couldn't really understand on their own. So it's really valuable. Tonight, Cormac will be discussing his latest book on civilian casualties during the two world wars.

And while this is a grim and sad topic, I think it's really important that we consider this today. As Cormac mentions in the epilogue, we've seen civilians severely affected by wars being fought in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan.

And there's also a lot of talk among commentators highlighting the similarities between where we are right now and the 1930s. So I think a careful look at the tremendous suffering caused by the two world wars reinforces how important it is to promote peace and defuse conflict. And so I think there's a real value in this research. So Cormac, over to you and welcome. Thanks for those kind words, Eric. It's great to be here.

I've been on LSE many times before, but not at an event like this. And I should say, too, that this is the first event connected to the book, so I'm glad of the opportunity to get a little bit of free publicity for the book. The book is different to anything I've done before. I'd have to say maybe...

little embarrassment that there's less economic history in the book than some of you might like. It's more an exercise in demographic arrhythmia, if I can call it that, combined with some straight history and also some moral philosophizing.

There is some economic history too, of course, as you'll see. Now, the talk is based on these notes I have in front of me, but I also have lots of slides to show, and the slides consist of figures and tables and some images, some mainly photographic images, and they're all in the book with one or two exceptions.

Now the book is called The Hidden Victims and the title here is a bit different and the reason I chose this for the talk is that this was the title that I suggested to the publishers and they thought that potential readership might find it a bit obscure so we went with The Hidden Victims instead. But the idea of this was

I suppose civilian casualties is a bit of a cliché, but the hidden victims has a double meaning. One is the dark character of the topic and the other is that in the social sciences, dark figures has the connotation of numbers that can't be established with accuracy.

as with, say, the size of the black economy or the crime rate. You know, one guesses, guesses are valuable, but getting at the truth is a challenge. So I'm going to begin with a quote, and this comes from Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, a classic play about the Thirty Years' War. Its eponymous heroine,

After much suffering in her struggle to survive, complaints towards the end of the play, and I'm quoting her, in general, it's fair to say that both victory and defeat cost us common people dearly. Now, in the play, Mother Courage survives, but many of her family did not. They were the victims of a war which it is reckoned was

wiped out a quarter, now that's again a very rough estimate, of the population of abroad Germany in the first half of the 17th century. Now some of these died in sectarian atrocities like the sack of Magdeburg, but most of them were the victims of disease and famine. Now you might say that the Thirty Years' War was exceptional

and that most wars spare civilians in the past because in the words of the late President Ronald Reagan, and here I'm quoting him, "War is an ugly thing, but we have rules in which we made sure that soldiers fought soldiers but didn't victimize civilians."

Now, that claim feeds into the modern distinction between old wars and new wars, whereby in the 20th century the ratio of military to civilian victims in wars was reversed, as reflected, for example, in the claim of the Human Development Report in 1998 that

"Civilian fatalities have climbed from 5% of war-related deaths at the turn of the century to more than 90% in the wars of the 1990s." Now, would that that were so? But in truth, civilians were never safe during wartime. Brecht's play was meant to be a play for the ages.

and it is. The notion that civilians were spared in the past is really make-believe and that applies especially of course to World Wars I and II. General Sherman of marching through Georgia fame once remarked, "War is cruelty and you cannot define it." You can not refine it, sorry, refine it, you can't refine it, that's true, but you can attempt to measure

it in terms of fatalities. And at a time of increasing political uncertainty and tension across the globe, and Eric alluded to this, we need to be reminded, I think, of the catastrophic human cost of war. My book is an attempt to measure the civilian death toll resulting from the two world wars of the 20th century.

In the case of World War I, the earliest attempt at estimating mortality in what it described as civil populations of the belligerent countries, this is in 1923, didn't get very far beyond, and I quote, "It must be reckoned in millions." But perhaps more surprisingly, a recent estimate proposes three sets of numbers, dubbing them all but suppositions,

In the case of World War II, over three decades ago, the eminent historian Mark Mazower cautiously proposed a combined total of about 40 million for combatants and civilians combined. Far more than, Mazower writes, even the millions killed in the First World War and the Russian Civil War.

A key aim of the book is to show that one can do better even with suspect numbers accompanied by doubts and warnings, never mind worries, and I'll mention them as we go along, about the dangers of moral relativization. So let me start with the bottom line.

I propose an estimate of about 100 million lives lost during World War I and World War II, so more than twice as many as Mark Mazower. Embodied in this horrific total, there are two further startling statistics, namely that 60 million of the dead were civilians.

and that over half of these civilians died of famine and hunger. In both wars, hunger and famine were the single most important cause of death. During World War I, as you see here, famine cost between 12.5 and 13 million civilian deaths, while during World War II they accounted for a further 20.5 to 21.5, that's the guess.

So somewhat less than half the total. The greatest uncertainties here surround civilian deaths in Asia, meaning mainly China, and in the Soviet Union. Sometimes deaths, fort de mure, can only be estimated as a residual. Now, these estimates come with a health warning. They're not definitive.

They are best guess estimates of civilian suffering in its many forms: famine, mass killings, aerial bombing, genocide, and inevitably they involve a good deal of discussion of the numbers. However, the book is not, and it must not be, just about numbers. Even before the counting begins, there are tensions about who are civilians and who are victims.

The dividing line between civilians and victims in total wars such as World War I and World War II is problematic. Now, you will have noticed, most of you perhaps, that LSE economic history has as its logo Rosie the Riveter. And during the two world wars, and particularly during World War I, this begins, you have

women called in French and to some extent in English to munitionettes or munitionettes or canary girls who were singled out as a group without whom the World War would have been lost or won. So you see this in a propaganda poster and you also see this in this pretty dramatic poster.

image from Munitions Factory somewhere in Nottinghamshire in 1917. And then there's this quote from Marshall Joffe and you'll find it's equivalent from other political and military leaders at different points during World War I. Still, I follow the definition of a civilian as accepted in international humanitarian law. Someone who is not a member of the armed forces and doesn't take part in hostilities.

But even after accepting that definition, there remains the emotive issue of how victimhood should be measured and described, and indeed whether all civilians should be considered victims.

In Germany and elsewhere, describing the civilian victims of aerial bombing and sexual violence and mass expulsion during and at the wake of World War II as victims was very controversial and very problematic a few decades ago. Think of the female army operator who confided to the Nobel laureate, Svetlana Alekseevich, and I'm quoting her.

Now I feel shame, but I didn't feel shame back then. Do you think it was easy to forgive the Germans? We hated to see their clean, undamaged white houses with roses. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to see their tears. Decades had to pass until I started feeling pity for them.

It's only a decade ago since a very hostile critic of Richard Overy's The Bombing War juxtaposed the fatalities resulting from the firebombing of Hamburg in late July 1943, which Overy condemned,

and the achievements of the infamous reserve police battalion 101, also from Hamburg, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews in eastern Poland four months after the firebombing. So there is this issue of moral equivalence, which I suppose haunts the book to some extent.

But anyway, a key aim of this book is to show that one can do better, even with suspect numbers, accompanied by doubts and warnings. And also, one can search for biases and omissions and point to numbers that are glaringly inaccurate, either prejudice, exaggeration or evasion.

So, ballpark approximations of lives lost are important, even at the risk of some statistical numbing and the inevitable hand-waving.

Spurious or implausible numbers such as those suggested for the bombing of Dresden in late February 1945 by David Irving or the rapes by Soviet troops in that same year by Anthony Beaver have a habit of taking on a life of their own. As Greg Clark, I think he's going to be the only economic historian I'm going to quote, remarks,

Among modern economists, there is a hunger by the credulous for numbers, any numbers, however dubious their provenance, to lend support to their model of the moment. Nevertheless, I think there is a role for cautious estimates presented with suitable caveats, if only to rule out more far-fetched numbers.

So, let's begin with famines, and I'm going to go through the various causes, what make up the total in succession. Now, this is a topic that I've worked a lot on myself, and in fact, the book began as a long essay on the famines of the two world wars, and that essay was prepared for a conference that was cancelled because of COVID-19.

Now, I had done that work, so in a way I was all dressed up with nowhere to go, and the issue was what should I do? So instead of writing a short book about those famines, I decided to include the discussion of famine in a bigger book about civilian deaths from all causes. So it's really a COVID project. A lot of the hard slogging was done in the COVID years.

So, when it comes to famines, in some places, as in Bengal in 1943-44, in Vietnam in 1944-45, and in Moldova in 1946-47, harvest deficits greatly exacerbated the challenges caused by war and its aftermath. In several other cases, blockades were partly or mainly responsible.

Examples are Lebanon in 1915-1916, Germany in 1917-1919, Leningrad in 1941 to really 1944, and Greece in 1941-1943. And we'll touch a bit on all of those famines. Relatively well-off countries, and this is important, and places were not spared by

as the cases of Greece and the Netherlands during World War II testify. Broadly speaking, the causes of death varied according to how developed the economy in question was. In Leningrad, Greece and the Netherlands during World War II, few died of infectious diseases.

Whereas in Bengal, in Java, in Vietnam and in China, most of the deaths were due to such diseases. So I've made the distinction in the past between modern famines and, if you like, traditional historic famines. And that applies there. But let me talk first about preventing famine.

This was an era of total war and all the warring parties actively sought to maintain food supplies. They did so with mixed success during World War I and they fared better during World War II. I should have maybe shown you this first, but very quickly, this is how the totals are made up. And you see that in both cases, Russia or the Soviet Union is the place that suffers most.

And then there are, during World War I, there are a series of, if you like, smaller famines. In World War II, again, you have the USSR, and then there's Java, India. That's mainly Bengal, but there's deaths elsewhere. The number for China is very approximate. And then USSR, that includes Moldova. About a million people died in the Soviet Union then.

and then in descending order, Greece and so on. We'll at least give passing mentions to all of those places. Now, the first thing that governments did was to try and maintain the food supply in time of war. And this was not easy because you're missing a lot of the main labor force. You're also short of horses.

you're short of fertilizer. So maintaining output was a challenge. And this is what happens. I'm focusing here on cereals and potatoes. You can see in Germany there's a falling off.

During World War I. During World War II it fares somewhat better. And then you have Great Britain, which does okay during World War I. And then there is a much more, I'd say, forceful campaign of compulsory tillage during World War II. And that's why you get this big increase. Now that's necessary because, I guess, Britain is very dependent on imports in normal times. And imports are more of a problem during World War II.

During World War I, for example, Britain relied, not to an inconsiderable extent, on places like Ireland. And then you have France, which doesn't do well in either war,

Neither does Italy, particularly during World War II. And then in the Soviet Union, you can see the very important role played by the potato. And there's no question, but for that role, far more, probably millions more, would have died in the Soviet Union. Then you get these...

images, the first three emphasize the role played by the Pareto. The first says the mobilization of the Pareto, "Vir halten durch" that means we soldier through. This relates to England and then you see an image from France.

Then the image of the cabbages from the Soviet Union. And then above again, I think this is from Britain. And I put it there because it emphasizes the increased role women play in agriculture in wartime.

And again, not just do they try to maintain food supply, but there's a good deal of experimentation with substitute foods and ersatz food as in Germany here with the so-called K-bread, which I guess as food wasn't terrible, but it tasted awful. And it says here in German, as long as we have our K-bread,

bread and Germany will not go to ground, Germany will survive. Now the image here I got it's from a library in northeast of Italy which had a very serious famine towards the end of World War I to the extent that these rats and mice were for sale and they were used as a substitute. To what extent I don't know

But a kind librarian in the city of Belluno sent me that. That's where that comes from. And then, of course, there was a concerted effort. There was a great deal of philanthropic endeavour during both wars. And war does, wartime spirit, war does that to people. And this image here is from Germany in the wake of the war when there was still a lot of hunger. But I could have produced many more images like that.

And then the next thing that is done during the two world wars, and this is something not entirely new. I'm talking here about food rationing. There are examples, precedents for food rationing. For example, during the Sepoy mutiny in India in the late 1850s, you get it through the communion in Paris. And there is also some...

organized food rationing in South Africa during the Boer War. But it takes considerable state capacity to do it because in order for rationing to work you have to control both supply and demand. You have to instill trust in the population that you are doing it in a fair way. So this is not easy. You also have to focus on commodities that suit rationing.

So bread is better suited, potatoes, than say meat, where you have issues with quality and people will say, oh, they're all getting the good meat and I'm left with the rubbish. So there are issues like this that are central to rationing. Again, I suppose this is a little bit of economic history, history of economic thought. I found out in doing this that the word rationing is a brand new word in this sense.

during World War I. And it's been used in lots of cases in inverted commas. So you have Peehoo using it in his well-known book, and then Maurice Bond, I think this is in a review of Peehoo's book actually, he again uses it in inverted commas, and the Edwards

does the same again in a review of that book. So this comes from the Commune. And two more examples. There are many more in the book. This is from Leningrad. And this is from Trier. This, I guess, is very more of a war. And this is from Davos.

So, did it work? I think one would have to say that it worked much better during World War II than World War I, and that probably in some countries lives were saved, famine was prevented through rationing. I said that rationing does not mean that everybody gets the same amount of food.

There has to be a sense of an entitlement that's based on fairness. So people, adults get more than kids, males get more than females, people involved in hard physical work get more than people in white collar jobs. So that is reflected here. This refers to Germany during World War II, but something similar you get in the Soviet Union. There are very good data on rationing.

So to summarise here, this is what I've already said. And another aspect to rationing and I suppose getting people on board is that people had to have some confidence that a lot of the food wasn't being abused and ending up with a black market. So this here is an example of

black market contraband, food that had been maybe originally rationed and then ends up on the black market, being handed out. These are propaganda photographs. No, this one is not. This is a propaganda photograph by the Milis, which is the pro-Nazi force in the emphasis of Roman powers. And this is in Brussels. And this is another one I like. So this is now a sense of how rationing worked.

first during World War I and then down here during World War II. So you see that here, these are pretty decent rations and they're not that different to pre-war. So in the main fighting countries, regardless of the pressure they were under, they managed to maintain calories anyway. I mean, the calories come in food that's less pleasant, but they keep people alive.

And then of course there's a falling off here, the situation becomes very serious in Germany and Japan. So this is the situation in Germany during World War I, so it's far more troublesome. There is rationing but it doesn't really work as well. So towards the end of World War I there is literal starvation in

Okay.

And then, I don't want to push this too far, but economic historians, when they can't get information on death rates, they often use birth rates as a measure of how bad malnutrition is. And the idea here is that women suffer from famine amenorrhea, and therefore they're not capable of bearing children.

Or you might also say that the sex urge goes down or whatever. But it's a common habit during famine. And you can see that this happens a lot during World War I. You might say, oh, well, maybe there's spousal separation. The men are all fighting, so you can't have births. There may be something to that, but I

We can talk about it if you like. This is the situation in World War II which is different and it reflects what I had to say about food supply. Now of course there is a twist to the tale in the case of Germany and that is that unlike the other religions, the Germans relied on and benefited from expropriating food from captured territory.

And in this case here you have data on transfers from France to Germany and from the USSR to Germany. And then in red that summarizes what this does and in terms of it's what the economist Derdra McCloskey would refer to as its oomph. These are pretty boring numbers but then on the right you can see that in fact they do make in aggregate a big difference.

Now, I mentioned modern famines and historical kind of famines, and this is an example of a modern famine, and what you have here is the main causes of death. And you'll notice here that violent deaths, that is the categorization for starvation.

And that is the single biggest cause. In other words, people literally fading away and dying. And you'll notice also that there is an increase in a few other causes, but when it comes to infectious diseases, they don't play much of a role.

And that is in sharp contrast to this situation. This is in Bengal, and this is due to work by the Indian historical demographer Arup Maharat, and Tim Dyson has also, later of LSE, has worked in this field. But what you see here is that cholera and smallpox and fever and malaria explain most of the excess deaths. Now, these are people who are dying

dying during a very real famine, but what kills them is not literal starvation, it's these diseases to which they have lost immunity. Now, this is still a problem, not so much in Western Europe during World War I, but it's a real problem in the East. And so you have, this is soldiers' kit being deloused,

I think that is in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is DDT being used in one of the Nazi camps in Poland. This is a cleanup, a kind of a compulsory cleanup in Leningrad. I think this must be in the spring of 1942.

The authorities were really worried that with the thaw, people would start dying of infectious diseases. So they made it compulsory for everybody to get out there, so there's this mass effort. And Leningrad was spared, even though there was very little in the way of healthcare and so on. You do not find people dying of infectious diseases. And this then is a quote I like. This is from Lenin.

As far as I'm concerned, World War I lasts into the 1920s in eastern and southeastern Europe. In Greece and Turkey it lasts until the evacuation and the transfer of populations after Smyrna.

and in the Soviet Union it lasts until basically until the Bolsheviks have won. So Lenin anyway is very, very worried about the impact of typhus on his troops, but of course that typhus is killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians at the same time. Again, I should watch my time here.

This is a bit of demography, famine demography if you like. Famines always place males at greater risk than females. The reason for that is probably physiological. Some people say it's cultural. But that is born out here and it's also born out here. It's less here and that's because Leningrad during the siege

It's not an entirely female city, obviously, but a lot of the men are off on the front. So there are fewer men there to die. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super-rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSEIQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. So I put this up because these graphs describe two cases of very serious famines in Java and in Vietnam. And the argument here is that certainly had there not been a war going on,

lots of the deaths that occurred would not have occurred. There's no question about that. But at the same time, what you do see here is that across provinces or regions within these countries, the greater the FAD, is food availability decline, the greater the reduction in the food supply, the greater the death rate.

And like these, I mean this is down and this is up. And the reason for that is here I have the death rate and here I have the change in population. So maybe I'm being a bit lazy. So they're not contradicting each other in other words. Now there is another category that I include here. And it's one that is less well known. And that is that in many countries there is very serious excess mortality in mental institutions

during World War II and to some extent also during World War I. There is work done recently on England. This really surprised me, it was an eye-opener to me, but this work suggests that something like 17,000 people died in psychiatric mental institutions during World War I in England. This did not happen in Scotland for some reason. And the reason given is inadequate food, as you see there.

people not being cleansed properly and so on. And of course the big issue here is that these people lack agency. People who are mentally ill, they're not very good at raising their voices and so they die

And that's why in a book that came out here you see by this guy Max Laffont who brought this issue to public attention in France. He describes what happened as l'extermination douce or the sweet extermination. You know, people die away quietly and nobody knows. Again, you have this big number for Germany and

uh and for belgium too and then this is this is now uh work on uh world war ii and there's a lot of this work going on and um it's um it raises issues that that are still pretty sensitive uh for example in the netherlands the issue is highly contested uh there is the issue

Did people die in numbers? And then there is the issue, why? Is it because people were neglected or is it because simply the resources were not there and everybody was suffering? And that, like I discuss this in some detail in the book and talk about, you know, the contesting parties. And then in France,

Laffont's estimate is that something like 40,000 died of hunger-related diseases. And then this is where the controversy arises. He refers ironically to l'extermination douce, but then there are others who refer to la génocide des fous, the genocide of the mad. So you can give the numbers, but you also have to think of

of what's behind them. So these, I don't have time to go into these in detail, but there is a section of several pages which deals with Norway, Finland, Scandinavia, and of course Germany, they simply let, the Nazis let tens of thousands, at first they started to experiment with gas, portable gas fans to kill,

people they thought no longer worth keeping alive. But then there was protest about that and then during the war they simply allowed people to die just from malnourishment. Now I

Part of me hesitates to show this kind of image, but I think it's necessary because you need to know how awful famine is. And famine is worse than this because this is in one dimension. There's no noise here. There's no smell. But this is taken from Greece during World War II. And Greece is a...

It's a relatively well-off developed economy with a good health system and so on, but it's a blockade that causes this in large part. And then you get this, this is in a church in the Netherlands during what they call the Hunger Winter. And these images here refer to Russia, the Soviet Union.

during World War I. These are from a very rich photographic archive kept by the Red Cross, and that's where I got these. They're very graphic, they're hard to take. But, you know, we're very far removed from those days when you see this kind of a statement by the Dutch foreign minister, and it's almost like this is something that's

you know, unforgivable and unimaginable. But it's really not that long ago. Now, these are images from a very well-documented famine. This is Leningrad. And so this is the so-called road of life.

During the winter, it was possible to help people escape across Lake Lagoda to an unoccupied part of the Soviet Union. It was extremely dangerous to do this because you were being shot at by German planes, and sometimes the ice would give in and lots of people would drown. But there was something heroic about it.

And then this is after a bombing, as you can see, and these are dead people being dumped by these guys. And so that speaks for itself. Again, these images are from Leningrad. And this is an image of people simply emerging after the blockade is over. I find it fascinating.

Quite a moving picture. This is taken from a diary by a young kid, he was maybe 12 or 13. The authorities in Leningrad urged people to keep a diary of the famine. Some people worried about this and worried about self-incriminating themselves.

But nevertheless, a lot of diaries have survived and a lot of academic work has been done on them. And I found this one of the most moving because it refers to, it's an example of how during famines you get the occurrence of what Primo Levi, whom we'll mention, calls the grey zone. Famines make people behave in ways that people normally would not behave.

They do awful things to each other. And he's worried about his mother. And like he's saying, the rest of us have given in to these base kind of attitudes and deeds. And the mother struggles on. But in fact, this guy, as you see here-- I got his age a little-- put him a little younger than he was. He died during the famine. Again, this is an image from the Great Bengal Famine.

mainly 1943 but into 1944 and again this is Gray's own material if you like you can you can read it for yourselves but it's it's a way about ways in which people change behavior and do things which would be unconscionable normally you know they wouldn't be reduced to doing them but

and the anthropologist who wrote the book says it may be said with any fear of contradiction that the destitutes of Calcutta belonged to one caste and that was the caste of the have-nots.

That is all I have to say about famine, which is, as I said, the single biggest cause. Now, I'm going to move on to genocides. And I include the Armenian genocide here and the Holocaust on the basis that both of those and the deaths that occurred during them were made much more likely by World War II. Had World War II not occurred...

I'm not saying it wasn't a just war, but I'm just saying had it not occurred would all these people have died? The answer is probably not. So they are civilian casualties of the war I think.

What World War I did for the young Turks who were running Turkey at this time was it gave them, they could act with impunity. They could do what they liked. Before the World War, the Allies, in fact, and both the future people on both sides of the war, stopped them from massacre of Armenians. But during the war, they could do what they liked.

And that's because wars limit minority rights, they lead to violence, and then they also create a fog caused by misinformation. So things happen and you don't really know about them. And that's why this letter here from Morgenthau is important. He's representing a country which is neutral at the time, but he's saying, look, there are these awful things going on and something must be done about them. And this is an image of...

you know, Armenians being hunted out and just being shot on the road. Moving on to the Jewish Holocaust,

I have to say here that these are totals 5.7, 5.8 given by Vadya Shem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. And they're pretty close. So the number that Raoul Hilberg had of around 6 million, that holds, you know,

And then I've simply given you the numbers by country and then also by proportion of the Jewish population who perish in the Holocaust. So you can see it is very, very high in Lithuania, Poland, Greece, and then down here. It's still, of course, very significant, but it's smaller. Oops, sorry.

Okay, so I want to like there's in a way there's very little new you can say about the Holocaust and there's the literature is phenomenal it's vast so I rely on some of that but like I suppose there's one aspect that I thought is worth maybe spending a little bit of time on and that is this question that Primo Levi raised in the the Drowned and the Saved and

Why didn't people leave? Why did they hang around when the Nazis are clearly up to no good? And the answer is that in fact a lot of people did leave. And you can see this, like this is reflected in this photograph here from Berlin. These are guys wanting to get out and being helped by a Jewish immigration committee.

This is a family portrait of people who went over to North America on this ship to St. Louis and were not allowed land. So they, in fact, they had to come back and they disembarked in, I think it was Antwerp. This is Jews from Germany being whelped in Haifa in the 1930s. And then this here is from Lisbon, I guess.

where the Portuguese actually played a kind of a heroic role in allowing people out. They allowed them to stay. They allowed them into Portugal and then stay until they get shipped out. And quite a few... You had to have money to do that, but quite a few used that route. And then this photograph comes from Coba in Japan, where some...

I think they were Lithuanian Jews, managed to make their way. So this is a portrait of them in 1941. So these are people who used escape in various guises. Now the numbers in one sense are not huge. You see the countries receiving Jewish refugees,

both in terms of the absolute numbers and then in terms of proportion per million of population. So it's interesting actually, three of those groups we have information on age and gender. You see here these Polish refugees to Vilnius and

they're documented and my suspicion is that most of those perished eventually anyway but they did make it and so you see that men are more likely to go than women and now and these are these are young people the modal age here is something like 20. these are in five year intervals so 2025. uh here

the modal age is older and you could infer that from the photograph I showed you and these are wealthier people and then among these Polish Jewish refugees in Koba again the modal age is a bit old a bit higher and these are mostly businessmen you know they somehow organized together to get out and then you can see the effect of this to some extent here and the contrasting

outcome for German and Vienna Jewry on the one hand and Hungarian and Dutch Jewry on the other. And the point here is that a lot of German Jews got out in the 1930s with the result, and this is a kind of a paradoxical, an ironic result, fewer German Jews as a proportion of the Jewish population before the Nazis perished

So in the epicentre of Nazism, the proportion of Jews who perish is quite low compared to other places. It's about 3 in 10. Now in Austria, it's something similar. They start getting out later because Hitler doesn't after all take over. The Anschluss is getting pretty close to World War II. But nevertheless, they get out in big numbers so that, you know,

Fortunately, there are fewer left for the Nazis to murder by the time the borders are closed. And you can see then, you see, with Dutch Jewry, they had not left for the most part. And not only that, in fact, some others had moved as refugees to the Netherlands. So the proportion of Dutch Jews who perished in the Holocaust is much, much higher than German and Austrian. And the same is true for Hungarian Jewry.

And then again, in terms of graphic images, these are two I use and they're really rather well known and there are some others in the book as well. We won't dwell on them, they're just awful. So another point to be made I suppose about the emigration, I suppose it's partly got to do with this emigration I talk about, but not only that.

And that is that women are more likely to perish in the extermination camps than men. And there are two reasons for that. One is some of the men have gone. The emigration is more male than female.

But the other is of course some of the men are kept on as slave labour until the camps are liberated. But these are data, these are online, so I simply spent a good bit of time taking down samples and what struck me was how prominent old people are. So these are people born 1860, 1870, you know the

The mode here is people born between 1870 and 1890, so you're talking about people in middle age. Young people are less inclined to be in there. And then Czechoslovakia, there's a similar source online. So the first three refer to German Holocaust victims, but the story is rather similar. Again,

The victims are disproportionately, one would say, elderly women. I found that interesting, disturbing. Very briefly, there is the Roma Holocaust as well, or Romany Holocaust during World War II. And here the data are terrible.

And you can see these are best estimates. I didn't invent them, I'm just borrowing them from the literature. And the estimates of the numbers perishing is from 131,000 to 286,000. And the average then is something like 20% of the pre-war population is destroyed during the war.

Now, again, because I... Have I got another little bit of time? How much? Good? Yeah, OK, I'll rush through. So, again, these numbers are... You can establish these numbers with greater precision, 1.3 to 1.6 million. The uncertainty has to do with China, and you can see there's a...

range there. I don't have too much time to dwell on this, but there's a chapter about aerial bombing during World War I and World War II. During World War I, there are some thousands who are killed by aerial bombing, but World War I comes too soon for the technology to be properly developed. Again, you get awful images from

The other thing about the bombing I guess is worth pointing out is that attitudes harden and coarsen in the course of both wars. At the beginning of World War I people were saying that would be a terrible thing to do. This is from Punch magazine.

in 1915 when the Zeppelins were attacking England and you have here the Emperor talking to the pilot, no babes, and then the murderer says alas, sir, none, and then the guy says, oh well you're not going to get the Iron Cross. Now, but by the time one was approaching the end of the war, both sides were quite happy to kill people without compunction.

And the same happens before and during World War II. So I skipped those quotes, but I won't give you time to read this, but I will say that they are very, very contrasting. So I call them Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde. So this is Roosevelt just as the war starts, and the US is not involved yet.

but he's saying I hope none of you behave in this inhumane way bombing civilians and so on, it would be terrible if you did. And both sides say no we won't do that. But then you get Mr Hyde in terms of Curtis LeMay saying, I hate quoting stuff, I really have stuff that you can read, but basically he is saying I have no regrets, we killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, we burned them to cinders,

He says in fact we baked to death more people in Tokyo on the 9th and 10th of March than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. So it's not just a statement but the language is terrible.

Okay, so you get this, you know, I look at public opinion insofar as it can be established during war. There are these opinion polls carried out about what's your attitude to the bombing. Again, this is something we don't have time to go into here, but this is Arthur Bomber Harris who justifying carpet bombing of civilians towards the end of the war.

Now another group who don't die for the most part, but who feature hugely during both World Wars as refugees. And so the numbers here, I very roughly 17 million and during World War II you're talking to about 100 million or more. And so there are lots of images from all over the world. These are from a particular group and they're worth considering because

This is, I mean, one of the biggest transplants of populations on record so far. These are the so-called Heimat für Triebene. These are ethnic Germans from the parts of Germany that were ceded to Poland and Germans living elsewhere. So they come to about 12.5 million in the wake of the

World War II. So these are the numbers here and you divide it into the Soviet zone and the West, you add these together and that's where the 12.5 million comes from. Now I'm just showing you two maps here. This is where they settle.

This is in 1946. So they're pushed across the border and you'll see that initially they settle disproportionately in what would become the GDR. But obviously they can't go to Hamburg and Cologne and places like that because they're bombed out. So a lot of them end up in areas where there isn't much work for them, very often in rural areas.

Now I'm showing you this too because you can see why the thing, it had to happen. This area here is that part of Poland and

This year is East Prussia that would no longer be part of Germany. And this is the vote the Nazis got in the last election before. And you can see in those areas, they're getting over 55%. So it would be impossible for those people to stay in those areas after the war. I won't go into this now,

I just mentioned one other group here, the Karelian Finns. They were interesting and there has been some work done on how they fared, which I will leave you to read because Eric says we're short of time. Let me mention for a minute, I talk Anthony Beaver's name in vain. I'm referring here to what he calls the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history and it may well have been, but

The numbers are very, very shaky and without going through them line by line, but in fact it starts with 34 of 804 births, in other words 4.2% of births in this maternity place in Berlin after the war.

4% are fathered by Russians. And then that is used, it's rounded up to 5%, and it's treated like a random sample for the whole of Berlin. That is, you can't do that, but that's what's done. And then you assume that 20% of rapes lead to pregnancies, and that 90% of pregnancies are aborted. Once you have done that, and taken a few other steps along the way,

you say it's similar in the rest of Germany, everywhere else we talk about it, and that gives you 2 million. So the 2 million number though has, it's caught on, it's assumed to be accurate. Now the real number may be less or more, I would assume it's less, but it just, it's not good.

So of course it did happen, these are images which were used as propaganda by the retreating German forces. These are places in East Prussia where women are raped and die horrific deaths. Let me, alright this is where I'm going to end, and I said that there is this issue of

and the problematic exercise of adding numbers together. I gave you 60 million. Now some of those are people who die quietly of starvation. Others are people who die horrific deaths in gas ovens. Can you add them together?

you can see that for a certain purpose you can, but you must always be careful to say, look, this is a difficult thing. There is a purpose to coming up with the 60 million, but the 60 million hides a hierarchy of victimhood. That's very, very important. Now, I suppose those at the bottom of the hierarchy of victimhood would be these people here, about which there is quite literature. These are women who had

let's say, been friendly with German troops during World War I and World War II and who were ostracized in the wake of the war. There was this kind of ritual cutting of hair. You get these kind of images from lots of different places. So if they are victims, there is a sense in which they're guilty victims.

At the time of course they were seen not as victims at all. They were seen as people, collaborators. Now there is a tendency to see them more as victims. And I'll leave it to you, should one or should not. Is it simply with time we get softer? There is an issue again of relativity. The other thing about these, and that's the last point I'll make about the numbers, is how many of these women were there?

There are these famous images like Robert Capa, the woman walking down the street with the baby. But how typical were these women? Now one answer I found in the Resistance Museum in Orvis, I was there the summer before last, and they asked, this is my organisation, they say there were about 50,000 women

Danish women in relationship with a German soldier and that there were 5.6 thousand children registered with a biological German father. And then the museum says the true number is probably something like 10,000. You get lots of other places you get numbers like this, in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

the impression you get is that maybe 5% or more of all Berths were, you know, the fathers were German during the war. So on the one hand, you know, these women are ostracized, but it also seems to me

to say that there is a fairly significant minority who are prepared to put up with the occupiers. But that again is just a thought I would leave with you. So these are the totals and I have here at the end a statement by Joseph Biden in the wake of the

Hamas atrocities, he says, yeah, that's why all these institutions were set up after World War II to see that atrocities don't happen again. But can we be sure? The answer is probably not, and that the only way of stopping these atrocities during wartime is not to have wars. Again, that is not to say that you should take a pacifist position and that all war is immoral.

but I think one must always try to, I suppose, emphasize how awful war is and to go the route of diplomacy and negotiation as much as possible. So I use the word, not appeasement, because I don't like it, I use the word appeasement, to just emphasize how awful war is and the virtues of peace. So thanks a lot, there it goes. - Thanks so much, Cormac.

That was interesting and difficult, but important, I think. So do we have any questions from the audience? Yes, please, here in the center. Just wait for the microphone, please. Yeah, thank you.

So first I wanted to thank you so much for this lecture. It was like extremely valuable for me as I'm from Poland and I wanted to ask you how could your findings about civilian deaths in the world wars inform current military actions and policies regarding conflict and genocide zones where civilian casualties are still underestimated or neglected?

Thank you. Can you just ask the question again, please? You were just speaking a little bit quickly. So how could your findings about civilian and deaths in the world wars inform current military actions and policies regarding conflict and genocide zones where civilians' casualties are still underestimated or neglected? Thank you. How do your...

How does your research think about how people would think about civilians in casualty zones today or in war zones today? Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously, I have an epilogue. The publishers wanted me to add an epilogue to give the book more immediacy, if you like. So that set me thinking about ongoing wars and civilian deaths during those wars and

What can one say? There are civilian deaths in all of them. We know least about civilian deaths in Sudan, which of the three wars I'm thinking about, Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, that's the one that's least documented. But it's clearly a very serious conflict. Gaza, of course, again, the numbers are contested. And

There is also about what is permissible, what is not, how much of this would be permissible under international humanitarian law, and that's a very controversial issue. In Ukraine, again, we don't have reliable numbers, I think. But I think most people who look at the situation would argue that military casualties far outnumber civilian casualties in Ukraine.

That would not be the case in Gaza. So yes, of course, what I wrote made me think of these others. But I was very conscious that the more you bring this kind of thing up to the contemporary period, the more controversial it is and the more you're just risking getting into trouble and people finding whatever you say

is going to be controversial or is not going to please everybody. We have some questions online. Sure, so I'll ask the first one online here. So this person says, the largely unmentioned issue here in relation to civilian deaths is social class. Poor working class people are much more likely to perish. Can you say more about that, please? I...

This is something that does crop up in the discussion. Clearly during famines, it's true. There's really good evidence for this from the Netherlands during the hunger winter. Now, that's one of the smallest famines under discussion, but the people who suffered most there were working-class males.

It's quite clear. That's where this would be generally true of famines. For bombing, it's less obvious. Again, I think there is a class aspect even to the Holocaust and to some of these...

other genocides, it was maybe somewhat easier for people who are well-off or professional people to escape. Having said that, only a small minority of those escaped as well. Yes, please, here. Thank you very much for this really interesting talk. And I was just wondering about all these estimates you presented here. I mean, in many countries, especially in Eastern Europe, they are part of the debate, very highly...

polarized debates about who, because these were more kind of a civil war kind of war in these areas. How do you show certain methodological standards here in order not to get into these kind of conflict lines of nationalist historiography? Thank you. - Yeah.

I'm going by what I consider are the best numbers produced by people. I don't start from scratch myself, but you're quite right. In the wake of the war, various countries produced numbers which were inflated, but which scholars since have brought down a bit.

I think you would have to say too that in some of these countries people maybe downplayed the Jewish suffering a bit and maybe, you know, and also being complicit in that. I think you would find that in several, that's an ongoing issue in the Baltic, for example, and in Poland too. I'm sorry, Melanie.

- It was a great talk and I was thinking about your point you had very earlier about the difference between West and East in how likely you had infectious disease during the famine.

I wonder what is your hypothesis on this? I have kind of thought about a few possibilities. One of these would be differences in barrier practice. It's likely that they were just better at burying the debt, which would be a reflection of social capital. But I would be curious to know what you think on this. If you take, for example, you want to contrast

the Netherlands during World War II and say the Soviet Union during World War I, like practically nobody dies of typhus during the hunger winter in the Netherlands. Whereas it's a very, very serious problem in the East. And this has a lot to do with sanitation, wearing clean clothes, boiling water,

Things like that which maybe are possible in more sophisticated, more economically developed countries than like say rural Russia in 1919 or 1920. So it's not necessarily because people had access to say penicillin. Towards the end of World War II, DDT helps a lot.

for example in Italy and so on, it makes a big difference. But I think in rich economies people know and have the capacity to deal with the diseases which would have killed people in earlier generations. Okay, thank you very much. Obviously in World War II genocide was used as a weapon

to exterminate the Jews. Is there any evidence that famine was used as a weapon during either World War I or World War II? I think it's probably fair to say that famine was being used as a weapon in Leningrad at the time of the blockade. I think that would be fair. And then there are other blockades that are...

There'd be maybe, it'd be more controversial to say that, like the blockade in Germany towards the end of World War I and into the armistice period. And lots of, some hundreds of thousands of people died at that time due to a blockade. Was it deliberate? I don't know, probably not, but people knew it was happening and it was maybe a price people were prepared to pay at that time.

Then I think there are other blockades where that cause famines and it was maybe

unintentional, like in Lebanon, I don't think, it was the Allied blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean that caused the problem, but I don't think they deliberately wanted the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, the area that was most affected, to perish. In Greece, it was the Allies again who were doing the blockading, but obviously they didn't want all these Greek civilians to die.

But it still went on and that's the tragedy of war, isn't it? That military considerations come first. Yes, so we have a question online from Anthony, an LSE alum. Do your figures include the Spanish flu? Soldiers spread to places like Pacific Islands on return from World War I. How do you deal with that? Yes, I deal with it in a paragraph. LAUGHTER

The long answer is that initially I was going to include the Spanish flu and I have written a long paper which I brought out as a discussion paper, I'm not sure I'm going to go any further. It comes up with numbers which are a bit new on how many died during the Spanish flu.

it's quite clearly linked to the war and you can think for i suppose a number of reasons why the war contributed the numbers one is troop movements and the other is that the authorities allowed people to behave in ways which were necessary for the war effort but which placed them at great risk in terms of uh

contracting the influenza. That was true in London for example, there were issues about people using public transport and working in densely housed places of work. This is where the flu is going to spread very easily, but the authorities said no we can't, there's a war going on and that's the way it's going to have to be.

The answer is yes, it made a difference. Now, it's complicated by the fact that some of the deaths occur after the war is over. And then how do you model what proportion of the deaths are responsible? There have been one or two efforts in doing this and they're not satisfactory. And I wasn't going to come up with one. So I simply, I say, sorry,

I know there's an issue here and I explain why the number would be higher than the number I give if you made due allowance for deaths from the flu. But I don't try to put a number on it. It's a good question. Can I follow up on that? Because in some ways I think that it makes another choice you made difficult in some ways, which is famine, right? Because

So for instance, would there have been a famine in Bengal if the war hadn't been going on? I don't know the answer to that. The answer is almost certainly not. You don't think so? No. But are all of these famines very much that you don't think they would have occurred? I don't think so. There had been harvest failures of the kind that happened in 1943 in Bengal in Bengal.

earlier on in the 20th century and did not result in this kind of mass mortality. The case of Vietnam is probably a bit more nuanced. There might have been a famine of some sort, but relieving the famine was made much more difficult by transport routes being bombed. It was impossible to carry stuff coast-wise from the south, which is much less effective than the north. So wartime conditions made relief

of the harvest shortfall almost impossible. And the same kind of argument has been made about Java. And the added argument made about Java is that there is a harvest failure. That's true. But that...

agricultural output had been declining throughout the war before then because the Japanese had removed all the kind of incentives people had to grow food and ship it and transport it and so on. Thank you Cormac, that was great. It was obviously a huge project and I was wondering as you were talking through all of these slides and so forth, what kind of stopping rule you had because you looked at lots of different numbers from lots of different sources.

And you've talked here at the end of these questions about deciding not to include this or deciding to include that. And I'm reminded of a talk I heard from an anthropologist

And someone said, well, how do you know when to stop looking further for more evidence? And the anthropologist said, well, I've heard exactly the same story three times. I've decided I've got it. And so I'm wondering whether you had a kind of stopping rule of how you decided with all these numbers that you were kind of, you've got the one you're going to present on this slide. I know one stopping rule I had, which it doesn't quite address your question,

question is not to stick to the chronological limits of 1914-18 and 1939-1945. So I mentioned that I included Moldova. I also include the Spanish Civil War or the period after Spanish Civil War, but there is excess mortality in Spain and it's associated with the Civil War. And then again,

you'd have Greece and Turkey and the refugees and so on. So that would be one. For the rest, I think there is in the book a good deal of saying these numbers are shakier than others, you know, and say look you'll never get it precisely and it becomes probably more difficult over time. But yeah, I think

I try to be as honest with the numbers and these, like I try to cover all the bases as I see them. And I'm content with saying some of the numbers are dodgier than others. I think we have time for maybe one more question. Yes, please, here in the front.

Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I was just wondering, because in thinking about England's role or Great Britain's role on the global stage during this time, a lot of the colonies that it still held on to, and I know a lot of merchant ships came and went from the Caribbean specifically up to England, and a lot of

the British-owned colonies in the Caribbean suffered from famine. Anything that England suffered from, a lot of those colonies suffered from it. So you get a lot of people boarding those ships to then come to England that were then targeted and sunken by the Germans and the other Axis powers. And I was wondering if they end up in any counts anywhere or if those numbers are kind of just largely lost or off to the side somewhere.

That is something I had not thought of in detail. There are some numbers in there for drownings. I pay particular attention to Bengal in the sense you're talking about. The people who die in Bengal are victims of a famine which is caused by a war which we would consider just, but in a way they were no part of. They're

So for them it's a kind of a colonial experience and the issues we worried about would probably be far removed from what they were thinking of at the time. - Well, Cormac, thank you so much. I think we'll have to leave it there. Can we give Cormac a big round of applause?

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