Civilian casualty ratio
Some 7 million combatants on both sides are estimated to have died during World War I, along with an estimated 10 million non-combatants, including 6.6 million civilians. The civilian casualty ratio in this estimate would be about 59%. Boris Urlanis notes a lack of data on civilian losses in the Ottoman Empire, but estimates 8.6 million military killed and dead and 6 million civilians killed and dead in the other warring countries. The civilian casualty ratio in this estimate would be about 42%. Most of the civilian fatalities were due to famine, typhus, or Spanish flu rather than combat action. The relatively low ratio of civilian casualties in this war is due to the fact that the front lines on the main battlefront, the Western Front, were static for most of the war, so that civilians were able to avoid the combat zones.
German casualties in World War II
Civilian deaths, due to the flight and expulsion of Germans and the forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union, are sometimes included with World War II casualties. During the Cold War, the West German government estimated the death toll at 2.225 million in the wartime evacuations, forced labor in the Soviet Union as well as the post war expulsions. This figure was to remain unchallenged until the 1990s when some German historians put the actual death toll in the expulsions at 500,000 confirmed deaths listed in a 1965 German Red Cross study. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 dead; they maintain the figure of 2 million expulsion deaths cannot be supported. However, the position of the German government, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education and the German Red Cross is that the death toll in the expulsions is between 2.0 and 2.5 million civilians. The German historian Rüdiger Overmans maintains that there are more arguments for a lower figure of 500,000 rather than the higher figures of over 2.0 million. He believes that the previous studies by the German government should be subject to critical revision and new research is needed to establish the actual number of expulsion deaths.