Which war killed the most people

Wars have been a part of human history since the dawn of time. The earliest recorded evidence of human warfare suggests that the first conflict took place around 13, years ago along the Egypt-Sudan border. It is believed that this conflicted erupted as a resulted of competition over resources — in this case, water.

However, there are many reasons a war can develop: poverty, poor governmental leadership, civil unrest, religion, territory disputes, resources and a plethora of other factors are all responsible for most of the wars throughout human history. With that said, here is a look at the deadliest wars in history. As John F. The last large-scale war, World War II, was responsible for the deaths of nearly 70 million people.

With the ever-advancing technology in the modern world and a booming population, the next war will undoubtedly bring about an unprecedented amount of deaths. Let history be a teacher so that we can avoid committing the same mistakes, and put an end to conflict once and for all.

Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China and in early conflicts against the Soviets. Both the Germans and Japanese tested such weapons against civilians and sometimes on prisoners of war. The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22, Polish officers and the imprisonment or execution of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army.

The mass-bombing of civilian areas, notably the cities of Warsaw, Rotterdam and London, included the aerial targeting of hospitals and fleeing refugees by the German Luftwaffe, along with the bombings of Tokyo and the German cities of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne by the Western Allies.

These bombings may be considered war crimes. The latter resulted in the destruction of more than cities and the death of more than , German civilians. However, no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II. The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately 6 million Jews, 2.

About 12 million, mostly Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced laborers. In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags labor camps led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war POWs and Soviet citizens who were thought to be Nazi supporters. Of the 5. Soviet ex-POWs and repatriated civilians were treated with great suspicion as potential Nazi collaborators, and some were sent to the Gulag upon being checked by the NKVD.

Japanese POW camps, many of which were used as labor camps, also had high death rates. While 37, prisoners from the UK, 28, from the Netherlands, and 14, from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number of Chinese released was only The human cost of the Civil War was beyond anybody's expectations.

The young nation experienced bloodshed of a magnitude that has not been equaled since by any other American conflict. The numbers of Civil War dead were not equaled by the combined toll of other American conflicts until the War in Vietnam.

Some believe the number is as high as , The American Battlefield Trust does not agree with this claim. New military technology combined with old-fashioned tactical doctrine to produce a scale of battle casualties unprecedented in American history. Even with close to total conscription, the South could not match the North's numerical strength.

Southerners also stood a significantly greater chance of being killed, wounded, or captured. This chart and the one below are based on research done by Provost Marshal General James Fry in His estimates for Southern states were based on Confederate muster rolls--many of which were destroyed before he began his study--and many historians have disputed the results.

The estimates for Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas have been updated to reflect more recent scholarship. Given the relatively complete preservation of Northern records, Fry's examination of Union deaths is far more accurate than his work in the South.

Note the mortal threat that soldiers faced from disease. A "casualty" is a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, capture, or through being missing in action. In practice, officers would usually be responsible for recording casualties that occurred within their commands. If a soldier was unable to perform basic duties due to one of the above conditions, the soldier would be considered a casualty. This means that one soldier could be marked as a casualty several times throughout the course of the war.

Most casualties and deaths in the Civil War were the result of non-combat-related disease. For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died of disease. The primitive nature of Civil War medicine, both in its intellectual underpinnings and in its practice in the armies, meant that many wounds and illnesses were unnecessarily fatal. Our modern conception of casualties includes those who have been psychologically damaged by warfare.

This distinction did not exist during the Civil War. Soldiers suffering from what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder were uncatalogued and uncared for. Approximately one in four soldiers that went to war never returned home. At the outset of the war, neither army had mechanisms in place to handle the amount of death that the nation was about to experience.