The Soviet Union entered the war and then the democratic Western alliance after killing perhaps ten million of its own without foreign intervention or even much global censure during the so-called Red Terror and Great Purge following World War I, and the collectivizations and ensuing famines of 1932-1933. With near impunity, Hitler slaughtered six million Jews in the heart of Eastern Europe—the vast majority of them in occupied territory of the Third Reich as it was collapsing, with the Allies closing in on both fronts and their aircraft with near complete control of the skies. Mao Zedong, who came to power after the liberation of China from the Japanese, systematically murdered and starved to death perhaps forty to seventy million Chinese in concentration camps, purges, famines, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, beginning not long after the war and not ending until the 1970s. World War II and its aftermath were variously linked to these three great holocausts of the twentieth century.
Some sixty million people died in WWII, and many of them weren’t on battlefields. They died in these great massacres of humanity.
