Stalingrad was such hell on earth.
Mentioning it to my grandfather would break him and he would just walk away.
He stabbed dead Germans and fellow Russians with his bayonet to make sure they were dead. It's messed up.
Mentioning it to my grandfather would break him and he would just walk away.
He stabbed dead Germans and fellow Russians with his bayonet to make sure they were dead. It's messed up.
Just to give one example: the male/female ratio post-war was 3:4, and has never exceeded 9:10 ever since. It had a profound effect on gender dynamics, which persists to this day.
That's one of the reasons mail-order brides often hail from ex-USSR countries: it's to escape not only the economic conditions, but the social ones too.
The Soviet Union, of course, inherited Imperial Russia's participation in WWI (~3 million dead), as well as the Russian Civil War that immediately followed (Another ~8 million dead).
If you're ever wondering why Russia is so paranoid about maintaining buffer states, and foreign encirclement, look no further than those numbers.
Another difference is the death rate in terms of the proportion of men 18-60. Losing that population is more catastrophic than if the deaths are more evenly distributed.
For example, in France after WW1 it became normal for women to marry old men and crippled men. Men who survived WW1 and later WW2 in Germany had their pick of wives, and women tended to not marry at all (WW1) and married foreigners (WW2).
I.e. both rate of deaths and the demographics of the deaths matter a great deal.
It's true that the demographic impact of the death toll was more skewed, depending on whether or not the war was happening right on your doorstep, and on whether or not the Nazis were actively trying to liquidate people of your ethnicity.