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The Fallen of World War II – An Interactive, Data-Driven Documentary

147 points by vincentdm 11y ago

rdudekul 11y ago
Well done visualizations of the number of military & civilian deaths occurred during second world war. The video version was a bit long, yet rich in details. The interactive vis. in the middle of the video was useful. Though most of the video deals with the number of deaths, towards the last 10% of the video, the focus is on the PEACE we are enjoying today. The comparison between how bad the world was in the past to how good it is now, is staggering. One nice twist was, towards the end of the video (17:30 mins), the time line zooms in based on your computer's local time.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  > Though most of the video deals with the number of deaths, towards the last 10% of the video, the focus is on the PEACE we are enjoying today. The comparison between how bad the world was in the past to how good it is now, is staggering. Indeed. What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was, and of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointed to the possibility that World War 3 could be even worse. Several times during that long peace the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of war, only to be pulled back by leaders on both sides who remembered the horrors the war unleashed and didn't want to see them unleashed again. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for instance, had both seen the war first-hand -- Kennedy in a PT boat in the Pacific, Khrushchev as a political commissar in the struggle against the Germans on the Eastern Front. When the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, Khrushchev explicitly called on Kennedy to let those experiences guide him to step back (http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/cuban-missiles.html http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/cuba...): Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. So the question is -- what happens when everyone who carries those memories is long dead? When the leaders only know what war, real war, is from dusty history books and rah-rah action movies? Will they be as willing to swallow their pride in order to pull back from the brink as those who already lived through it once were?
  - gizmo686 11y ago
    Even WWII was started on the assumption that it would be a quick and relatively painless war. I suspect that modern missile technology makes this assumption flatly invalid.
    - jann 11y ago
      Actually, is there some analysis on that? I always suspected that, with all the high-tech equipment, after the initial stockpile is gone (and a few hundred planes is not a lot if you look at WW2), it's much harder to scale up production (if one country alone even produces all the necessary parts like semiconductors, rocket engines, etc.).
      - ido 11y ago
        It's probably not going to be a free for all but a 2-3 sided conflict with alliances of several countries on either. US+EU+allies can probably manufacture all the war machines they need, as does China+allies.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    What you get is the current middle eastern situation. Everyone believed invading Iraq would be quick and easy, which it was, and that the reconstruction would be like the post-WW2 reconstruction of Europe, which it really wasn't.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was I worry about the same thing, and not just policymakers but the public too. I hypothesize that a few behaviors are connected to it: * The disregard for the importance of the multilateral international institutions built after WWII: The UN, the EU, the WTO, the Geneva Conventions, and the general rules-based international order. Many conservatives seem to describe these as naive, idealistic and unrealistic, but these institutions were built by the survivors of WWI and WWII. They knew far more of war than we do; if anyone is naive, it's us. * The war-mongering: Within a large segment of U.S. political arena, people compete to show who is most aggressive with the use of the military, as if to prove that they are not 'liberal'. War is not a last resort for them, but almost a first choice. * The embrace of ideology and nationalism: It seems to me that a lesson of the World Wars is that nationalism and dogmatic ideology leads inexorably to war, and integration with your neighbors and pluralism prevents it. But now xenophobic nationalism and extreme ideologues, unmoderated by skepticism, are mainstream, from the U.S. to Europe to East Asia to the Middle East. We all know where that ends. * The civilian-military divide and the glorification of the military: Also a product of the move to an all-volunteer force, few Americans have experience in the military or know someone who does, a far remove from the days of WWII or the draft. The results (based on what is written about more and more): Civilians that recklessly send people to the horrors of war (see "war-mongering", above); a military that resents the burden they carry for the civilians; and a highly partisan military. Another result is the recent glorification of the military: Around WWII (and other wars during the draft era), when a large portion of the public had military experience, the military was associated with terms like SNAFU and Catch-22, a bureaucratic disaster that soldiers had to overcome. Now, from a distance, with so few having familiarity with its realities, the military is glorified by civilians. It's almost unpatriotic to criticize it (which incidentally creates a lack of accountability that endangers the personnel we claim to care so much about).
- Ollinson 11y ago
  Anyone looking for more information on the topic of the peace we live in today might be interested in the book The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker: Why Violence Has Declined http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243 http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
jonahx 11y ago
This is just beautifully done. It blends art, documentary, data visualization, and history in a way I've never seen before. It must have taken quite a lot of work. I'd love more info on the technologies used to produce it.
Hermel 11y ago
Once again illustrates that it basically was the Russian winter that stopped the nazis.
- olegious 11y ago
  You think the 20 million Soviet war dead had anything to do with it?
  - Hermel 11y ago
    Here's some scientific evidence of the Russian winters 1940 - 1942 being particularily harsh: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/wea.248.04/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/wea.248.04/pdf Of course, it did not help that Hitler thought he could advance much faster and did not even prepare for winter. Those two winters weakened the Germans significantly.
    - tP5n 11y ago
      Here's some scientific evidence of the Russians throwing over 20 million human lifes [1] into german gun barrels: take a look at the original post. You mentioning the winter twice seems quite cynical in context. [1] I've recently read a newish book about the casualties on the eastern front which suggests (based on research by western scholars) that the actual numbers were probably well over 32 million people and due to political reasons had been down played a lot by soviet sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Estimates_of_Soviet_war_dead_by_Western_scholars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
      - ptaipale 11y ago
        My father was in the Finnish army (which suffered too small losses to even fit in the presentation) fighting the Soviets, and was wounded in a Russian counter-attack north of Petrozavodsk in October 1942. The battle diary of his brigade says "we suffered bad losses". A Russian division-strength attacking force pushed a Finnish brigade-strength force back about 400 m on a fraction of the front which was about 800 m wide. The "bad losses" were 49 men killed on the Finnish side. The Russian losses in this two-day battle were estimated about 1400 men killed. And as a result the Finnish commander remarked that "the Russians have changed; they are no longer throwing human life away completely mindlessly and they actually try some sensible military attack tactics". A ratio of 30 Russians killed in attack to grind down 1 enemy was "sensible" compared to what the Russians had been doing before that. Of course, eventually it worked, they had the 31st soldier as well.
yzh 11y ago
Who else noticed the flag of China? It should be called ROC or Taiwan if you use that flag.
- fishywang 11y ago
  ROC is still "China".
- seszett 11y ago
  Not at all. During WWII, that was already the flag of the Republic of China, which happened to be the only "China" in existence at the time. No other flag was used then, so it would be anachronistic to use communist China's flag here, and Taiwan was not part of China at the time so it would be even worse to talk about Taiwan fighting the war.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    Quite right. Also the flags of other countries are shown as they were at the time. Nazi and Soviet flags are obvious, as is the case for Yugoslavia which existed then and is no more, but the flags of Greece and Burma are contemporary as well.
gknoy 11y ago
This is just stunningly beautifully presented, and yet very sobering to think of so many deaths. Also ... Thank you, Russia, for doing so much more. I'd read the 20M deaths, but never seen the larger picture before.
- gpvos 11y ago
  Well, if they had fought smarter, and hadn't been so cruel to their own citizens, there could have been many fewer casualties on their side. But still, thank you, Russia.
bluenose69 11y ago
Notice the inflation-adjusted deaths in the American slave trade.
- iwwr 11y ago
  The North-American slave trade was less than 10% of the American slave trade. Abut 40% went to the Caribbean and the remainder 50% to South America (mostly Brazil).
alexkk 11y ago
I don't get why he calls all german soldiers nazis, as if every german soldier was a nazi back then ...
- alexkk 11y ago
  anyway, i like the project
- gpvos 11y ago
  Yeah, that's a really unfortunate simplification.
guiomie 11y ago
I always knew the russian front had a much bigger impact on the war then we are taught in our western history classes, but this video made me see the scale of the loses on the soviet side. Incredible. The video is really well done. Great job, a good change from the usual black and white documentary.
PedroBatista 11y ago
This guy should receive an award of something. The end is amazing.
- methodover 11y ago
  He really should. I paid the ticket price at the end. And I'm hoping everyone else does too.
bd 11y ago
BTW in addition to amazing content, this documentary is also technically interesting: this is not a video created in some motion graphics production software. It is a hand-written JavaScript code, rendered realtime in WebGL using three.js (if you select "interactive" option, "video" option is a capture of this WebGL rendering).
dieg0 11y ago
Awesome visualization. Would love to see more
milesf 11y ago
Absolutely amazing achievement, and sickening all at the same time. I never realized the scale and magnitude of WWII, or how distorted the view of our world is according to mainstream media. Well worth the ticket price to support future work like this.
vijayr 11y ago
Beautifully done, though the subject matter is depressing. Must've taken a lot of time and effort. Looks like he is also working on U.S budget viz http://visualbudget.org/ http://visualbudget.org/ corresponding video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qd_VTT1cSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qd_VTT1cSU
methodover 11y ago
I grew up in the United States. In school, when I was educated about the war, Germany is construed as this bully that no one stands up to. I remember having the impression that the rest of Europe just lacked the courage to fight back, opting for appeasement instead. I remember being taught that Nazi Germany only appeared strong -- but that inside was a crumbling, weak core. Like a bully who would crumple in a real fight. I remember being taught that countries that are evil cannot be also strong. I remember being taught that the Soviet Union was similar -- it was evil, and therefore weak, and that's why it ultimately collapsed. Thinking back, I was obviously indoctrinated. The truth was, Germany was strong. Evil, and strong. Just look at the numbers. All the other theaters of the war pale in comparison to the Eastern Front. It seems like such a massive mistake of Hitler to attack the USSR. I wonder what the world would look like today had he not...
gpvos 11y ago
This should be a compulsory part of education everywhere.

147 points by vincentdm 11y ago

Well done visualizations of the number of military & civilian deaths occurred during second world war. The video version was a bit long, yet rich in details. The interactive vis. in the middle of the video was useful. Though most of the video deals with the number of deaths, towards the last 10% of the video, the focus is on the PEACE we are enjoying today. The comparison between how bad the world was in the past to how good it is now, is staggering. One nice twist was, towards the end of the video (17:30 mins), the time line zooms in based on your computer's local time.

smacktoward 11y ago
> Though most of the video deals with the number of deaths, towards the last 10% of the video, the focus is on the PEACE we are enjoying today. The comparison between how bad the world was in the past to how good it is now, is staggering. Indeed. What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was, and of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointed to the possibility that World War 3 could be even worse. Several times during that long peace the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of war, only to be pulled back by leaders on both sides who remembered the horrors the war unleashed and didn't want to see them unleashed again. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for instance, had both seen the war first-hand -- Kennedy in a PT boat in the Pacific, Khrushchev as a political commissar in the struggle against the Germans on the Eastern Front. When the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, Khrushchev explicitly called on Kennedy to let those experiences guide him to step back (http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/cuban-missiles.html http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/cuba...): Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. So the question is -- what happens when everyone who carries those memories is long dead? When the leaders only know what war, real war, is from dusty history books and rah-rah action movies? Will they be as willing to swallow their pride in order to pull back from the brink as those who already lived through it once were?
- gizmo686 11y ago
  Even WWII was started on the assumption that it would be a quick and relatively painless war. I suspect that modern missile technology makes this assumption flatly invalid.
  - jann 11y ago
    Actually, is there some analysis on that? I always suspected that, with all the high-tech equipment, after the initial stockpile is gone (and a few hundred planes is not a lot if you look at WW2), it's much harder to scale up production (if one country alone even produces all the necessary parts like semiconductors, rocket engines, etc.).
    - ido 11y ago
      It's probably not going to be a free for all but a 2-3 sided conflict with alliances of several countries on either. US+EU+allies can probably manufacture all the war machines they need, as does China+allies.
- pjc50 11y ago
  What you get is the current middle eastern situation. Everyone believed invading Iraq would be quick and easy, which it was, and that the reconstruction would be like the post-WW2 reconstruction of Europe, which it really wasn't.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was I worry about the same thing, and not just policymakers but the public too. I hypothesize that a few behaviors are connected to it: * The disregard for the importance of the multilateral international institutions built after WWII: The UN, the EU, the WTO, the Geneva Conventions, and the general rules-based international order. Many conservatives seem to describe these as naive, idealistic and unrealistic, but these institutions were built by the survivors of WWI and WWII. They knew far more of war than we do; if anyone is naive, it's us. * The war-mongering: Within a large segment of U.S. political arena, people compete to show who is most aggressive with the use of the military, as if to prove that they are not 'liberal'. War is not a last resort for them, but almost a first choice. * The embrace of ideology and nationalism: It seems to me that a lesson of the World Wars is that nationalism and dogmatic ideology leads inexorably to war, and integration with your neighbors and pluralism prevents it. But now xenophobic nationalism and extreme ideologues, unmoderated by skepticism, are mainstream, from the U.S. to Europe to East Asia to the Middle East. We all know where that ends. * The civilian-military divide and the glorification of the military: Also a product of the move to an all-volunteer force, few Americans have experience in the military or know someone who does, a far remove from the days of WWII or the draft. The results (based on what is written about more and more): Civilians that recklessly send people to the horrors of war (see "war-mongering", above); a military that resents the burden they carry for the civilians; and a highly partisan military. Another result is the recent glorification of the military: Around WWII (and other wars during the draft era), when a large portion of the public had military experience, the military was associated with terms like SNAFU and Catch-22, a bureaucratic disaster that soldiers had to overcome. Now, from a distance, with so few having familiarity with its realities, the military is glorified by civilians. It's almost unpatriotic to criticize it (which incidentally creates a lack of accountability that endangers the personnel we claim to care so much about).
Ollinson 11y ago
Anyone looking for more information on the topic of the peace we live in today might be interested in the book The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker: Why Violence Has Declined http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243 http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...

jonahx 11y ago

This is just beautifully done. It blends art, documentary, data visualization, and history in a way I've never seen before. It must have taken quite a lot of work. I'd love more info on the technologies used to produce it.

Hermel 11y ago

Once again illustrates that it basically was the Russian winter that stopped the nazis.

olegious 11y ago
You think the 20 million Soviet war dead had anything to do with it?
- Hermel 11y ago
  Here's some scientific evidence of the Russian winters 1940 - 1942 being particularily harsh: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/wea.248.04/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/wea.248.04/pdf Of course, it did not help that Hitler thought he could advance much faster and did not even prepare for winter. Those two winters weakened the Germans significantly.
  - tP5n 11y ago
    Here's some scientific evidence of the Russians throwing over 20 million human lifes [1] into german gun barrels: take a look at the original post. You mentioning the winter twice seems quite cynical in context. [1] I've recently read a newish book about the casualties on the eastern front which suggests (based on research by western scholars) that the actual numbers were probably well over 32 million people and due to political reasons had been down played a lot by soviet sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Estimates_of_Soviet_war_dead_by_Western_scholars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
    - ptaipale 11y ago
      My father was in the Finnish army (which suffered too small losses to even fit in the presentation) fighting the Soviets, and was wounded in a Russian counter-attack north of Petrozavodsk in October 1942. The battle diary of his brigade says "we suffered bad losses". A Russian division-strength attacking force pushed a Finnish brigade-strength force back about 400 m on a fraction of the front which was about 800 m wide. The "bad losses" were 49 men killed on the Finnish side. The Russian losses in this two-day battle were estimated about 1400 men killed. And as a result the Finnish commander remarked that "the Russians have changed; they are no longer throwing human life away completely mindlessly and they actually try some sensible military attack tactics". A ratio of 30 Russians killed in attack to grind down 1 enemy was "sensible" compared to what the Russians had been doing before that. Of course, eventually it worked, they had the 31st soldier as well.

yzh 11y ago

Who else noticed the flag of China? It should be called ROC or Taiwan if you use that flag.

fishywang 11y ago
ROC is still "China".
seszett 11y ago
Not at all. During WWII, that was already the flag of the Republic of China, which happened to be the only "China" in existence at the time. No other flag was used then, so it would be anachronistic to use communist China's flag here, and Taiwan was not part of China at the time so it would be even worse to talk about Taiwan fighting the war.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  Quite right. Also the flags of other countries are shown as they were at the time. Nazi and Soviet flags are obvious, as is the case for Yugoslavia which existed then and is no more, but the flags of Greece and Burma are contemporary as well.

gknoy 11y ago

This is just stunningly beautifully presented, and yet very sobering to think of so many deaths. Also ... Thank you, Russia, for doing so much more. I'd read the 20M deaths, but never seen the larger picture before.

gpvos 11y ago
Well, if they had fought smarter, and hadn't been so cruel to their own citizens, there could have been many fewer casualties on their side. But still, thank you, Russia.

bluenose69 11y ago

Notice the inflation-adjusted deaths in the American slave trade.

iwwr 11y ago
The North-American slave trade was less than 10% of the American slave trade. Abut 40% went to the Caribbean and the remainder 50% to South America (mostly Brazil).

alexkk 11y ago

I don't get why he calls all german soldiers nazis, as if every german soldier was a nazi back then ...

alexkk 11y ago
anyway, i like the project
gpvos 11y ago
Yeah, that's a really unfortunate simplification.

guiomie 11y ago

I always knew the russian front had a much bigger impact on the war then we are taught in our western history classes, but this video made me see the scale of the loses on the soviet side. Incredible. The video is really well done. Great job, a good change from the usual black and white documentary.

PedroBatista 11y ago

This guy should receive an award of something. The end is amazing.

methodover 11y ago
He really should. I paid the ticket price at the end. And I'm hoping everyone else does too.

bd 11y ago

BTW in addition to amazing content, this documentary is also technically interesting: this is not a video created in some motion graphics production software. It is a hand-written JavaScript code, rendered realtime in WebGL using three.js (if you select "interactive" option, "video" option is a capture of this WebGL rendering).

dieg0 11y ago

Awesome visualization. Would love to see more

milesf 11y ago

Absolutely amazing achievement, and sickening all at the same time. I never realized the scale and magnitude of WWII, or how distorted the view of our world is according to mainstream media. Well worth the ticket price to support future work like this.

vijayr 11y ago

Beautifully done, though the subject matter is depressing. Must've taken a lot of time and effort. Looks like he is also working on U.S budget viz http://visualbudget.org/ http://visualbudget.org/ corresponding video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qd_VTT1cSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qd_VTT1cSU

methodover 11y ago

I grew up in the United States. In school, when I was educated about the war, Germany is construed as this bully that no one stands up to. I remember having the impression that the rest of Europe just lacked the courage to fight back, opting for appeasement instead. I remember being taught that Nazi Germany only appeared strong -- but that inside was a crumbling, weak core. Like a bully who would crumple in a real fight. I remember being taught that countries that are evil cannot be also strong. I remember being taught that the Soviet Union was similar -- it was evil, and therefore weak, and that's why it ultimately collapsed. Thinking back, I was obviously indoctrinated. The truth was, Germany was strong. Evil, and strong. Just look at the numbers. All the other theaters of the war pale in comparison to the Eastern Front. It seems like such a massive mistake of Hitler to attack the USSR. I wonder what the world would look like today had he not...

gpvos 11y ago

This should be a compulsory part of education everywhere.