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Comment by thanatos519 | Hacker News Reader

Nearly nine-tenths of US adults are probably unaware that 20m Russian soliders died in WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Human_... has military deaths for the Soviet Union at between 8 and 11M - bad but some way short of 20M.

For soldiers, that’s correct. However, if you include civilian deaths you do hit the 20 million number. And that’s the lower estimate.

Yes, but the original statement specifically said 20M soldiers, not "soldiers and civilians".

Who are you going to believe? An anonymous poster on Wikipedia or an anonymous poster on HN?

The anonymous poster(s) on Wikipedia do include links to sources, including, e.g., http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/SovietLosses.pd... which has the 11M estimate and seems reasonably well researched.

and probably close to 100% dont know about 22K Polish officers murdered (shot in the back of the head) and further ~150K killed in concentration camps by Russians directly during and after WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Btw Russians have a funny way of counting WW2 casualties, they include Poles killed by Russians as Russian victims due to annexation of Poland by Russia post ww2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_Pol...

More to the point:

    Casualties (source: Wikipedia)
    3,436,066 USSR, Battle of Leningrad
    1,129,619 USSR, Battle of Stalingrad[1]
    1,076,245 US, all battles (europe + pacific)

[1] a crucial battle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23612474

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