Obviously the Cold War highly skewed the Western worlds perception of the Soviet Union and its participation/motives in WW2. But i think i remember reading that Stalin did everything he could to keep the enormous number of soldiers & civilians the Russians lost in WW2 a secret because he was embarrassed and didn’t want the Western powers to think the USSR was vulnerable (and he didn’t want the Americans to think his generals were incompetent). I also think it was only JFK in the early 60s gave a speech at American University letting the the audience know that the USSR lost over 20 million lives in WW2 and did the most to defeat Hitler and it was a shock to most in the audience (they had never contemplated so many dead). Obviously the Americans were not trying to glorify the ussr in the years after the war and therefore the public probably did not know much about the eastern front.
People in general seldom know much about things that don’t directly affect them, sometimes not about things that do.
But if asking what knowledgeable people in the West knew about Soviet casualties in the 1950’s and 60’s, they had German estimates which weren’t that far off. For example “Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East” by Earl F. Ziemke was published only in 1968 but it footnotes a German govt report from 1953 giving total Soviet military losses in the war as 13.6mil including 1.75mil permanently disabled. The general standard now (though not universally accepted in all particulars) is Krivosheev’s “Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses” of 1997. His bottom line figure was 8.9 mil military dead in 1939-45 (so including smaller losses in the Nomonhan, Polish and Finnish wars). But 11.4 mil ‘operational losses’ including missing, not credited for those eventually returned alive (some of whom were then sent off to die in gulags, but anyway). And not counting permanent disability among wounded. So it’s not vastly different, and the German estimate if anything higher.
Neither of those sets of figures includes civilians. But an overall total of all deaths in a brutally invaded relatively poor to begin with country is inherently fluid. It would also overlap in part with Holocaust deaths. 20 million itself was a later Soviet era number the Soviets still wouldn’t break down. The total including civilians can still be debated over a fairly wide range. My point is just that Soviet military deaths, what relates most directly to strength and competence of the Red Army, were fairly accurately estimated by the Germans. The West just couldn’t be sure those figures were correct.
Excellent points listed above.
If you want to research this yourself. Go the the google news archive and find a representative newspaper during the war.
The war is covered including the eastern front with surprising detail but the losses by both the germans and the soviets are severely under reported.
I thought Stalin used his loses to encourage FDR and Churchill to begin the invasion of France. But that doesn’t mean FDR would give the New York Times an interview about it.
Glancing through an “Encyclopedia Britannica” copyright 1951 they are vague about casualties in general. You would think they have tables with estimated killed, wounded and missing for the belligerent countries but no. But on page793C Volume 23 there is some information
“Both German and Russian casualties in the first two years of fighting were heavy. In June 1943, the Russians claimed their own losses in dead and wounded were 4,200,000 and German in dead and captured at 6,400,000. In November, the Russians asserted that the Germans had lost an additional 2,700,000 men in the four months of fighting the started with the Russian offensive in July 1943. German claims of Russian casualties, issued periodically by the reich propaganda ministry, soared extravagantly. One German claim put Russian losses at 20,000,000 dead, wounded or captured.”
Quite frankly, there is relatively little written on the Eastern front in the article: about 3 out of 33 pages.
This part deserves repeating.
I’m mostly just tacking on with a different example. Heinz Guderian, German Chief of Staff of the Army at the end of the war, had the first English edition of his book “Panzer Leader” published in 1952. It’s not like the Germans weren’t telling their story. As you pointed out they had pretty good estimates too.
There was some motivation to tell their story that we might not fully think of in a post Cold War era. Otto Carius’ “Tigers In The Mud: The Combat Career of German Panzer Commander Otto Carius” was first published in 1950. Mixed in with his memoirs is a recurring theme that a major motivation was anti-communism not pro-Hitler/Nazism. Obviously, there’s a pretty strong personal benefit to that spin. The Nazi connection was already in the public consciousness. That created some motivation to tell their stories in order to point fingers to the growing threat as justification. “Sure, Nazism was bad… but let me tell you about the dirty, no good, rotten Commies we were fighting!”
I am pretty sure that other allied powers would have known roughly the number of casualties even before thevwar was over. America was supplying the Soviets with arms and logistical supplies, and would have had a sense of attrition from that. They also had spies on both sides and had cracked German communications.
That’s what governments do during a war, for the most part.
The “Spanish” flu of 1918 is called Spanish not because it started there but because the neutral Spanish government reported its effect. The number of soldiers who were sick in the other countries was a military secret.
I don’t recall the exact extent of the casualties in Russia being a surprise in the '60s.