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I'm not sure this even exists, but I'd like to give it a shot - what I'm looking for is number of casualties on the Eastern Front between '41 and '45 by country by week (or at least by month), and also, territorial changes (in a format X km2 went to Germany from USSR at time Y or Z km2 went to USSR from Germany at time W) in a similar temporal granularity. Is this available somewhere online?

EDIT: In reply to a comment, what I did so far to get this data was googling but I haven't found anything substantial.

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    We usually expect questions to detail the research already conducted. This helps to reduce duplication of effort. There's nothing more frustrating to present an answer and be told that the information has been seen before and rejected as deficient in some way.
    – Steve Bird
    Dec 15, 2021 at 17:04
  • I see. I edited my question.
    – Benjamin Márkus
    Dec 15, 2021 at 17:06
  • Thanks, but this is for WW I and it's totals, not by week or month or anything like that.
    – Benjamin Márkus
    Dec 15, 2021 at 17:16
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    If you have access to a large library, Die geheimen Tagesberichte der deutschen Wehrmachtsführung im Zweiten Weltkrieg edited by Kurt Mehner might be useful. Or maybe not, I have never looked into one of these volumes.
    – Jan
    Dec 15, 2021 at 20:22
  • Obviously these books would not be a good source for Soviet casualties.
    – Jan
    Dec 15, 2021 at 20:24

2 Answers 2

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For territorial changes, Wikipedia is a sufficient source. They happened in 1939-1945, and looking at every involved country you can trace them exactly.

For casualties, there is a unique book:

Micheal Clodfelter, Warfare and armed conflicts. A statistical reference. Volume 2 1900-1991. McFarland &Co, Inc. Jefferson, NC and London, 1992.

This book (2 volumes) is a unique source where all conflicts from 18 century to 1991 are covered, and the author did his best to estimate casualties. This is a highly non-trivial matter, as all specialists who tried to do this know. The casualties are divided by battles, campaigns etc. And either do not include civilian casualties, or least count them separately.

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Eventually what I did was:

  1. for the casualties I made a screenshot of the relevant part of The Fallen of World War II by Neil Halloran and wrote a script to make counts of pixels,
  2. for the territorial changes did basically the same with World War II - Eastern Front (1941-1945) - Every Day.

The result is this visualization:

enter image description here

Red is USSR, black is Nazi Germany. The highlighted section of each curve shows a timespan of about one month.

Caveats: this data has not been validated, it's literally just reading in the number of pixels of the above vids then making a wild assumption about the numbers they represent in terms of deaths and territory, which means what the plot shows might be very far from the reality. Also, this shows total deaths (all fronts + civilian) which in the case of Germany evidently means this is not from just the Eastern Front, while territorial changes are only from there. So this is more like trying out an idea. But if I can get reliable data, this can be made realistic and the visualization itself I quite like as it turned out. And as far as I can tell, it does show the general trends relatively correctly.

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  • Sweet visualisation!
    – fgysin
    May 20, 2022 at 9:53

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