The Evening Star (December 19, 1945)
Document shows Nazis lost 3,544,284 men up to Ardennes battle
NUERNBERG (AP) – A captured Nazi document shows that the German Army high command admitted just before the Ardennes counteroffensive in December 1944 that Germany had lost 3,544,284 men killed or missing during more than five years of war.
The report, prepared for Adolf Hitler’s headquarters, did not include wounded, but an attached note stated that 729,031 Wehrmacht wounded and sick were hospitalized in the Reich at that time.
Hitler told the truth about the low number of German casualties in the Poland campaign, but was an inveterate liar in his accountings of casualties in subsequent battles, the report indicated.
Casualties on the Eastern Front up to November 30, 1944, were listed as 1,410,728 dead and 907,050 missing. Accepting the usual military ratio of four mm wounded for each man killed, these figures would place total German casualties on the Eastern Front through November 30, 1944, at approximately 8,000,000.
Soviet estimates placed German casualties in the east at 12,000,000.
The Wehrmacht statistics showed 701,734 army, navy and air force dead as of August 11, 1942. On that same date, Hitler announced that only 350,000 Germans had been killed.
The report also listed these casualties:
POLISH CAMPAIGN: 16,843 dead, 320 missing.
AFRICA: 10,013 dead (this figure is blurred on the photographic copy of the German records), 90,052 missing.
WESTERN FRONT: Up to June 1, 1944, six days before D-Day, 66,106 dead, 3,218 missing. From June to December 1, 1944, 54,764 dead, 338,033 missing.
ITALY AND SICILY: 47,873 dead, 97,153 missing.
THE BALKANS AND GREEK ISLANDS: 24,207 dead, 12,060 missing.