World War I casualties
Casualty statistics for World War I vary to a great extent; estimates of total deaths range from 9 million to over 15 million. Military casualties reported in official sources list deaths due to all causes, including an estimated 7 to 8 million combat related deaths (killed or died of wounds) and another two to three million military deaths caused by accidents, disease and deaths while prisoners of war. Official government reports listing casualty statistics were published by the United States and Great Britain. These secondary sources published during the 1920s, are the source of the statistics in reference works listing casualties in World War I. This article summarizes the casualty statistics published in the official government reports of the United States and Great Britain as well as France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Russia. More recently the research of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has revised the military casualty statistics of the UK and its allies; they include in their listing of military war dead personnel outside of combat theaters and civilians recruited from Africa, the Middle East and China who provided logistical and service support in combat theaters. The casualties of these support personnel recruited outside of Europe were previously not included with British war dead, however the casualties of the Labour Corps recruited from the British Isles were included in the rolls of British war dead published in 1921. The methodology used by each nation to record and classify casualties was not uniform, a general caveat regarding casualty figures is that they cannot be considered comparable in all cases.
World War II casualties
Included with total war dead are victims of Japanese war crimes.The total war dead in the USSR includes about 1 million victims of Stalin's regime. The number of deaths in the Gulag labor camps increased as a result of wartime overcrowding and food shortages. The Stalin regime deported the entire populations of ethnic minorities considered to be potentially disloyal. Since 1990 Russian scholars have been given access to the Soviet-era archives and have published data on the numbers of people executed and those who died in Gulag labor camps and prisons. The Russian scholar Viktor Zemskov puts the death toll from 1941–1945 at about 1 million based on data from the Soviet archives. The Soviet-era archive figures on the Gulag labor camps has been the subject of a vigorous academic debate outside Russia since their publication in 1991. J. Arch Getty and Stephen G. Wheatcroft maintain that Soviet-era figures more accurately detail the victims of the Gulag labor camp system in the Stalin era. Robert Conquest and Steven Rosefielde have disputed the accuracy of the data from the Soviet archives, maintaining that the demographic data and testimonials by survivors of the Gulag labor camps indicate a higher death toll. Rosefielde posits that the release of the Soviet Archive figures is disinformation generated by the modern KGB. Rosefielde maintains that the data from the Soviet archives is incomplete; for example, he pointed out that the figures do not include the 22,000 victims of the Katyn massacre. Rosefielde's demographic analysis puts the number of excess deaths due to Soviet repression at 2,183,000 in 1939–40 and 5,458,000 from 1941–1945. Michael Haynes and Rumy Husun accept the figures from the Soviet archives as being an accurate tally of Stalin's victims, they maintain that the demographic data depicts an underdeveloped Soviet economy and the losses in World War Two rather than indicating a higher death toll in the Gulag labor camps.