Stats about WWII Part 1 White (2012) provides a list of the 100 most horrific mass killings, and refers to them as “multicides.” He attributes about 10% of these 100 multicides (47 million out of 455 million killed) to religious fanaticism. Economic factors, however, were responsible for many more deaths, about 34%. Two of the ten worst killers in history were Mao Zedong (responsible for 40 million deaths) and Joseph Stalin (20 million deaths). Adolf Hitler, of course, is number one when it comes to multicides; he was responsible for 66 million deaths. One name on White’s list is not well known, King Leopold II of Belgium, who was responsible for the deaths of 10 million innocent people in the Congo. Under Leopold, the population of the Congo plummeted from 20 million to 10 million. Leopold was responsible for the death of 10 million people (from Conscious Capitalism vs. Rapacious Capitalism: Lessons from King Leopold II) The Second World War was not won or lost solely on the Ostfront, but it was the key—while the scale of fighting there dwarfed anything in the west. In retrospect, the disproportional nature of the Ostkrieg is striking: roughly eight of every ten German soldiers who died were killed in the east; from June 1941, in no single month of the war did more Germans die in the west than in the east, and the only month that came close was December 1944 (when during a “quiet” period over ten thousand more Landsers fell in the east than on all other fronts); the Red Army, at the cost of perhaps 12 million dead (or approximately thirty times the number of the Anglo Americans), broke the back of the Wehrmacht; total German and Soviet deaths (military and civilian) numbered around 35 million compared with less than 1 million for Great Britain and the United States. At times, indeed, the Ostkrieg often seemed more murder than war.