Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg

Immediately after the end of the war, the Allies attempted to research the extent of German losses in the Second World War. However, to date it has not been possible to arrive at anything approaching reliable results. The reasons for this are the collapse of the Wehrmacht and thus of the registration system from mid-1944 and the lack of knowledge about the fate of millions of missing persons. Overmans now analyses data from the 'Deutsche Dienststelle', which was founded in 1939. To this day, its task is to trace the fate of the soldiers of the Second World War in accordance with the Geneva Conventions of 1929. Using empirical social research methods, a sample was drawn from the organisation's register of around 17 million people. This provided information on the losses of the Wehrmacht, differentiated not only according to Wehrmacht branches and theatres of war, but also according to social-historical characteristics such as origin, age, time of enlistment and length of survival.