This is a list of wars and human-made disasters by death toll. It covers the Lowest Estimate of death as well as the Highest Estimate, the name of the event, the location, and the start and end of each war. Some events overlap categories.
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These figures of one million or more deaths include the deaths of civillians from diseases, famine, etc., as well as deaths of soldiers in battle and possible massacres and genocide.
Where only one estimate is available, it appears in both the low and high estimates. This is a sortable table. Click on the column sort buttons to sort results numerically or alphabetically.
| Lowest Estimate | Highest Estimate | Event | Location | From | To | See also |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40,000,000[1] | 72,000,000[2] | World War II | Worldwide | 1939 | 1945 | World War II casualties and Sino-Japanese War[3] |
| 33,000,000[4] | 36,000,000[5] | An Shi Rebellion | China | 756 | 763 | Medieval warfare |
| 30,000,000[6] | 100,000,000[7] | Mongol Conquests | Asia, Central- and Eastern Europe, Middle East | 1207 | 1472 | Mongol invasions and Tatar invasions |
| 25,000,000[8] | 25,000,000 | Qing dynasty conquest of the Ming Dynasty | China | 1616 | 1662 | Qing Dynasty |
| 20,000,000[9] | 30,000,000+[10] | Taiping Rebellion | China | 1851 | 1864 | Dungan revolt |
| 15,000,000 | 65,000,000 | World War I (High estimate includes Spanish flu deaths)[11] | Worldwide | 1914 | 1918 | World War I casualties |
| 15,000,000[12] | 20,000,000[12] | Conquests of Timur | Middle East, India, Central Asia, Russia | 1369 | 1405 | [13] |
| 8,000,000[14][15] | 12,000,000 | Muslim Rebellion | China | 1862 | 1877 | Panthay Rebellion |
| 5,000,000[citation needed] | 9,000,000[16] | Russian Civil War | Russia | 1917 | 1921 | Russian Revolution (1917), List of civil wars |
| 3,800,000[17] | 5,400,000[18] | Second Congo War | Democratic Republic of the Congo | 1998 | 2003 | First Congo War |
| 3,500,000[citation needed] | 6,500,000[citation needed] | Napoleonic Wars | Europe, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean | 1804 | 1815 | Napoleonic Wars casualties |
| 3,000,000 | 11,500,000[19] | Thirty Years' War | Holy Roman Empire | 1618 | 1648 | Religious war |
| 3,000,000[citation needed] | 7,000,000[citation needed] | Yellow Turban Rebellion | China | 184 | 205 | Part of Three Kingdoms War |
| 2,500,000[citation needed] | 3,500,000[20] | Korean War | Korean Peninsula | 1950 | 1953 | Cold War |
| 2,495,000[citation needed] | 5,020,000[citation needed] | Vietnam War | South East Asia | 1959 | 1975 | Indochina War |
| 2,000,000 | 4,000,000[21] | French Wars of Religion | France | 1562 | 1598 | Religious war |
| 2,000,000[22] | 2,000,000 | Shaka's conquests | Africa | 1816 | 1828 | Ndwandwe–Zulu War |
| 1,500,000[23] | 2,000,000[24] | Afghan Civil War | Afghanistan | 1979 | present | Saur Revolution |
| 400,000[25] | 2,000,000[26] | Iran–Iraq War | Iran, Iraq | 1980 | 1988 | Al-Anfal Campaign and Invasion of Kuwait |
A list of court cases where persons known or unknown have been found guilty of one or more crimes against humanity which caused a substantial loss of life.
| Lowest Estimate | Highest Estimate | Case | Perpetrators | Date of crime | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~8,000 | ~8,000 | ICTY, Prosecutor, Vidoje Blagojevic & Dragan Jokic | Dragan Jokic | 1995 | Bosnia | Dragan Jokic was found guilty, of extermination as a crime against humanity, for his part in supporting the Srebrenica massacre, and on appeal was found to have been "integrally involved in the murder operation, spanning multiple mass killing sites"[27][28] |
The CPPCG defines genocide in part as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".
Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide, therefore, will almost always be controversial.
The following list of genocides and alleged genocides should be understood in this context and not necessarily regarded as the final word on the events in question.
| Lowest Estimate | Highest Estimate | Event | Location | From | To | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5,830,000[29] | 7,000,000[30] | Genocides of Nazi Germany | Europe | 1941 | 1945 | With around 6 million Jews murdered, many scholars define the Holocaust as a genocide of European Jewry alone. Broader definitions include the genocide of the Romani: most estimates of Romani deaths are in the 200,000-500,000 range but some estimate more than a million..[31] A broader definition includes political and religious dissenters, 200,000 handicapped, 2 to 3 million Soviet POWs, 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, 15,000 homosexuals and small numbers of mixed-race children (known as the Rhineland bastards), bringing the death toll to around 10.5 million. The number rises to 14 million if the deaths of approximately 2 million more ethnic Poles are included. See Holocaust, Consequences of German Nazism |
| 2,500,000 | 10,000,000[32] | Holodomor, famine, political repression | Ukrainian SSR | 1932 | 1933 | Famine in Ukraine caused by the government of Joseph Stalin, a part of Soviet famine of 1932-1933. Holodomor is claimed by contemporary Ukrainian government to be a genocide of the Ukrainian nation. |
| 2,000,000[33] | 100,000,000[34] | European colonization of the Americas | The Americas | 1492 | 1900 | Heavily disputed as genocide, but many Marxist and Structuralist historians consider deaths caused by disease, displacement, and conquest of Native American populations during European settlement of North and South America. The genocidal aspects of this event are entwined with loss of life caused by the lack of immunity of Native Americans to diseases carried by European settlers and their livestock (see Population history of American indigenous peoples).[35][36] |
| 1,700,000[citation needed] | 3,000,000[37] | Famine, political repression | Cambodia | 1975 | 1979 | As of September 2007, no one has been found guilty of participating in this genocide, but on 19 September 2007 Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He will face Cambodian and United Nations appointed foreign judges at the special genocide tribunal.[38] |
| 500,000[39] | 3,000,000[39] | Expulsion of Germans after World War II | Europe | 1945 | 1950 |
With at least 12 million[40][41][42] Germans directly involved, possibly 14 million or more, it was the largest movement or transfer of any single ethnic population in modern history[41] and largest among the, post-war expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe (which displaced more than twenty million people in total).[40] The events have been usually classified as population transfer,[43] or as ethnic cleansing.[44] Martin Shaw (2007) and W.D. Rubinstein (2004) describe the expulsions as genocide.[45] Felix Ermacora writing in 1991, (in line with a minority of legal scholars, considered ethic cleansing to be genocide)[46][47] and stated that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was genocide.[48] |
| 500,000[49] | 1,000,000[49] | Rwandan genocide | Rwanda | 1994 | 1994 | Hutu killed unarmed men, women and children. Some perpetrators of the genocide have been found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but most have not been charged due to no witness accounts. |
| 400,000[50] | 400,000[50] | Russian conquest of the Caucasus | Caucasus | 1817 | 1864 | During the last decade or so, especially after the two First and Second Chechen Wars, pro-Chechen groups started to investigate the history of the Caucasian War and came to label the Caucasian exodus as a "Circassian ethnic cleansing", although the term had not been in use in the 19th century. They point out that the exodus was not really voluntary but rather was a matter of what is today called ethnic cleansing – the systematic emptying of villages by Russian soldiers[51] and was accompanied by Russian colonisation.[52] They estimate that some 90 percent of the Circassians estimated at more than three million[53] had relocated from the territories conquered by Russia. During these events, and the preceding Caucasian War, at least tens of thousands of Circassians perished in a "programme of forced expulsion, deportation and massacre at the hands of the Russian government".[54] See also: Muhajir (Caucasus) |
| 300,000(pro-Turkish) | 1,500,000 (pro-Armenian)[55] | Armenian Genocide | Ottoman Empire | 1914 | 1918 | Usually called the earliest genocide of the 20th century, at least 300,000 were killed in the event. The word genocide has been a controversial title and many countries including Turkey refuse to call the incident a genocide, but some twenty countries have deemed it a genocidal act. |
| 275,000[56] | 750,000[56] | Assyrian genocide | Ottoman Empire | 1915 | 1918 | Disputed, but some consider it a genocide. |
| 270,000[57] | 655,000[58] | Ustashe massacres of Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croats | Croatia | 1941 | 1945 | No academic consensus if this was persecution or genocide during period of Independent State of Croatia |
| 200,000[59] | 1,000,000[59] | Greek genocide | Ottoman Empire | 1915 | 1918 | Disputed, but some consider it a genocide. |
| 100,000 | 300,000 | Nanking Massacre | Nanking | 1937 | 1938 | The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was an infamous genocidal war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on 13 December 1937. |
| 225,000 | 650,000[citation needed] | Depopulation of Australian aborigines[60][61] | Australia | 1788 | 1888 | No academic consensus that this was a genocide, see Australian genocide debate |
| 200,000 | 400,000[62] | Darfur conflict | Sudan | Early 2003 | present | See International response to the Darfur conflict |
| 130,000[citation needed] | 200,000[citation needed] | Massacres of Mayan Indians | Guatemala | 1962 | 1996 | Genocide according to the Historical Clarification Commission.[63][64] |
| 117,000[65] | 500,000[65] | Revolt in the Vendée | France | 1793 | 1796 | Described as genocide by some historians. See also French Revolution |
| 150,000[citation needed] | 300,000[citation needed] | Political repression of East Timorese | East Timor | 1975 | 1990s | Commonly referred to as genocide by media, scholars.[citation needed] |
| 100,000[citation needed] | 400,000[citation needed] | Political repression of West Papuans | Indonesia | 1961 | present | Genocide according to some sources, see Genocide in West Papua |
| 100,000[66] | 200,000[67] | Al-Anfal Campaign | Iraq | 1986 | 1989 | Ba'athist Iraq destroys over 2,000 villages and commits genocide on their Kurdish population. |
| 50,000[68] | 100,000[68] | Massacres of Hutus | Burundi | 1972 | 1972 | Tutsi government massacres of Hutu, see Burundi genocide |
| 50,000[citation needed] | 50,000[citation needed] | Massacres of Tutsis | Burundi | 1993 | 1993 | Hutu government massacres of Tutsi, see Burundi genocide |
| 26,000[69] | 3,000,000[69] | 1971 Bangladesh atrocities | East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) | 1971 | 1971 | Atrocities in East Pakistan by the Pakistani military, leading to the Bangladesh Liberation War and Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, are widely regarded as a genocide against Bengali people, but to date no one has yet been indicted for such a crime. |
| 24,000[70] | 75,000[71] | Herero and Namaqua genocide | Namibia | 1904 | 1908 | Generally accepted. See also Imperial Germany |
| 8,000[72] | 17,000[73] | Massacres during Zanzibar Revolution | Zanzibar | 1964 | 1964 | Thousands of Arabs and Indians were massacred during the revolution. |
| 8,000 | 8,000[74] | Srebrenica massacre | Srebrenica | 1995 | 1995 | A genocidal massacre according to the ICTY. See also Bosnia war. |
This section includes famines that according to some scholars were caused or exacerbated by the policies of the ruling regime.
See also Famine and List of famines
| Lowest Estimate | Highest Estimate | Event | Location | From | To | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20,000,000[82] | 43,000,000[82] | Great Leap Forward famine under the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong | People's Republic of China | 1959 | 1962 | |
| 6,000,000 | 10,000,000[83] | Famine in the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, including Holodomor | Soviet Union | 1932 | 1933 | As of November 2006, the Ukraine government was trying to get this mass starvation recognised by the United Nations as an act of genocide, with Russian government and many members of the Ukrainian parliament opposing such a move.[83] |
| 5,250,000 | 10,300,000[14] | Great Famine of 1876–78 | India | 1876 | 1878 | |
| 4,000,000 | 4,000,000 | Bengal famine in British-ruled India | India | 1943 | 1943 | |
| 1,250,000[14] | 10,000,000[14] | Indian famine of 1899–1900 | India | 1899 | 1900 | famine in India |
| 750,000[84][85] | 1,500,000[86] | Great Irish Famine | United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland | 1846 | 1849 | [87] |
This section lists deaths from the systematic practice of human sacrifice or suicide. For notable individual episodes, see Human sacrifice and mass suicide.
| Lowest Estimate | Highest Estimate | Description | Group | Location | From | To | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 300,000 | 1,500,000 | Human sacrifice | Aztecs | Mexico | 14th century | 1521 | Human sacrifice in Aztec culture |
| 13,000[88] | 13,000 | Human sacrifice | Shang dynasty | China | BC1300 | BC1050 | Last 250 years of rule |
| 7,941[89] | 7,941 | Ritual suicides | Sati | Bengal, India | 1815 | 1828 | |
| 3,912 | 3,912 | Kamikaze suicide pilots, see note [90] | Imperial Japanese air forces | Pacific theatre | 1944 | 1945 | |
| 913 | 913 | Jonestown revolutionary suicide | Followers of The Peoples Temple cult | Jonestown | November 18, 1978 | November 19, 1978 | The event was the largest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the September 11th 2001 attacks. |
| Death Toll | |
|---|---|
|
File:Death Theatrical poster | |
| Directed by | Phenomenon |
| Produced by |
DMX Dan Garcia |
| Written by |
Dan Garcia Anthony Faia III Jason Hewitt |
| Starring |
DMX Lou Diamond Phillips Leila Arcieri |
| Music by | Kane & Abel |
| Cinematography |
Michael Campbell Jerrod Coates |
| Editing by |
Scott Mele Donald Ray Washington |
| Studio |
HK Pictures Most Wanted Films K2 Pictures Films in Motion |
| Distributed by | Spotlight Pictures |
| Release date(s) |
Greece January 30, 2008 United States April 15, 2008 |
| Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3.5 million |
Death Toll is a 2008 action film starring DMX, Lou Diamond Phillips, Leila Arcieri and Keshia Knight Pulliam, written and produced by Daniel Garcia of the rap group Kane & Abel and directed by Phenomenon. Filming was done in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and New Orleans, Louisiana.
A powerful drug dealer has taken control of New Orleans, but as the authorities scramble to stop the bloodshed things only get worse in this violent thriller starring DMX, Lou Diamond Phillips, Leila Arcieri, and Keshia Knight Pulliam. "The Dog" (DMX) is a drug dealer who will stop at nothing to be the number one bad boy in the Big Easy. His ruthlessness is legendary, and his power far reaching. But the authorities are onto "The Dog," and now the time has come to put this pit-bull to sleep. Will they accomplish their mission before any more innocent lives are lost, or could it be that New Orleans' top dog is truly above the law?
Template:Infobox Film Death Toll is a 2008 action film starring DMX, Lou Diamond Phillips, Leila Arcieri and Keshia Knight Pulliam, written and produced by Daniel Garcia of the rap group Kane & Abel and directed by Phenomenon. Filming was done in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and New Orleans, Louisiana.
A powerful drug dealer has taken control of New Orleans, but as the authorities scramble to stop the bloodshed things only get worse in this violent thriller starring DMX, Lou Diamond Phillips, Leila Arcieri, and Keshia Knight Pulliam. "The Dog" (DMX) is a drug dealer who will stop at nothing to be the number one bad boy in the Big Easy. His ruthlessness is legendary, and his power far reaching. But the authorities are onto "The Dog," and now the time has come to put this pit-bull to sleep. Will they accomplish their mission before any more innocent lives are lost, or could it be that New Orleans' top dog is truly above the law?
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