6 Million Jewish people, though recent studies i believe think that number is an absoulute low estimate.

Around 12 million people overall.  More then just the Jewish were killed by the Nazis.  Others included gays, gypsies, the disabled, Jehovahs Witnesses and more. 

More if jewish and other lives have been "Undertracked" as is suspected.

Undertracked as in VG Chartz?

Violent Genocide Chartz, that is.

/Godwin's law, /thread 

The numbers are largely irrelevant. Many atrocities were committed by both sides, and the fact that one side committed atrocities doesn't absolve the other side for also committing atrocities.

If anything good came out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's that the emerging nuclear powers were given an example of the kind of devastation nuclear war could bring. If the world hadn't seen the aftermath of those bombs, I wonder if some fool might have been tempted to push that button, not really understanding the consequences. The cold war might have been a lot less cold...

As horrible as the the whole thing was, I think you have to recognize there was a tremendous amount of good that came out of it. Beyond saving more lives than they killed I think the sobering effect it had on the world leaders of the time probably served..and still serves as a reminder that we are all human. And I believe that has saved more lives in the past 60 years than any other single action in the history of the world. No way to prove it of course, but then again thats sort of the idea....

PS - Kwaad your stats are WAY off. Just think about how prepostrous what you said was. Germany was involved in the war in Sept '39 when they invaded Poland. The US didn't get involved for another 26 months in Dec of '41 as you I'm sure are aware. Aside from all of that I am unaware of any data that attributes kills to a given country. Instead the data is organized by country suffering the loss. So your position seems made up to me, of course if you have sources for this information I would be happy to retract that statement.

Edit: wow this thread is way off topic 

Play Call of Duty 2 or 3. You play most of the time as a Brit or Russian.

@Mummelmann,

I hate to be the one to tell you this but the US was the biggest reason the Allied Forces won the war. By no means did the US do it alone, but as far as any single nation having an impact on the outcome, the US hands down has the biggest impact on that war.

(Red countries are Allied or Allied-controlled, Blue denotes Axis or Axis controlled countries, and the Soviet Union is colored Green prior to joining the Allies in 1941)

Watch this animated gif I got from Wikipedia, keep in mind the two important dates for when the US started giving support to the Allies. Dec '41 and June '44, the first date is obviously the 8th of Dec when the US formally joined the Allies and initial supply support was initiated. The second date is obviously Operation Overlord (aka Battle for Normandy) Which started on the 6th of June with the precursor invasion known as Operation Neptune (some of you played through this operation a bit in the BIA series). Both dates coincide with huge allied advancements in the months following that point. This should be a stark contrast to the constant Allied defeats happening prior to the the US joining the Allies.

There are a number of huge victories the US wasn't very involved with however. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Operation Crusader (Nov/Dec '41) where the British 8th Army headed up by Allen Cunningham (not the poker player) finally defeated Erwin Rommel or some of you may remember him as the "Desert Fox". He had a legendary status amongst the troops in Africa and many thought he was unbeatable. It was in large part due to the cunning leadership of Cunningham that they were able to defeat him, another big factor was that the Allies were very effectively cutting Rommel's supply lines. But this was still before the US entered the war so no credit to them on this one.

There are countless situations involving every country where impacts were made. But the bottom line is that once the US entered the war the overall tide began to turn and it stayed turn.

PS - I am by no means a "History Buff", I have only read through the Wikipedia WW2 info a couple of times and I watch a large amount of the History Channel is all.

Eh, don't you think this off topic thread is a little bit too big?...

Exactly undertracked like VG Chartz might undertrack sales.  There are no exact numbers in how many people were around then, we only have estimates.  Let alone estimates for who left, who stayed, who died during a time of war.  Heck we don't even know for sure how many people are alive now.  Histoirans and the like guestamate via "sources" just like VGchartz. 

It's definitly morbid, but it's what is done.

@SQRL

Don't forgot that the Russians were coming from the east and that a lot of German troops were fighting over there.

In fact without the Russians coming from the East I think the war would be a whole different story, I even believe that Normandy could be a big big failure.

I think in the first place it were the Civilians who change the occur of the war.

In fact the most civilians died not when Germany attacked those countries and conquered them but when the countries get liberated and fought back.

So many civilians lost so much, their house, their familymembers and wanted to die for their country.

Really strange in fact that America and russians were in fact two friends and just some years later after WOII the cold war started X_X.

PS:  Don't forgot the Canadians they were there to!!!

 http://forums.epicgames.com/showpost.php?p=24968274&postcount=7

 "I continue to be disappointed that folks on the internet treat any positive thing we say about one platform as some sort of critique of another platform. We're a multi-platform company folks please come to grips with that. We like the PC. We like the 360. We like the PS3. We like the Macintosh. We like Linux. We will deliver UT3 for all of these platforms and it will rock on every one.

The simple facts state that the optical disc on the PS3 holds more data than the optical disc on the 360. If we exceed size of the 360s optical disc then we'll have to find alternative ways to get the content to 360 users such as making it downloadable. Adding a second DVD to a game like UT3 would be a challenge because when playing online you might not know exactly what map you're going to be playing next and we have to be able to accommodate users of the core system. So does that mean the disc on the 360 might have a map or two less? Possibly although it is too early to tell for sure. People love Unreal Tournament because we always ship it with tons of great content but that also makes it a bit of a disc hog - in a good way

Obviously, and as is true with most major games on 360 and PS3, you're going to be putting your hard drive to good use if you want to experience the full richness of content that UT3 will have to offer over the lifetime of the game. the fact that you can do this is a good thing.

I don't know the exact numbers but I suspect the version of Gears of War that most of our customers play today on their 360s, when you combine the downloadable content with the content on the disc, is larger than what we could fit on the 360's optical disc alone. So clearly there are perfectly good strategies to cope with this situation. We're all very used to downloading extra content for console games and with UT3 there will be lots of it for all supported platforms. In fact the cool thing about our engine is that when you make content for one platform it can run on all of them. If history is any indication, the vast majority of UT3 content won't even come from Epic - it will come from some very brilliant end users with lots of cool and innovative ideas.

When it comes to user created mods on the 360 - we will work with Microsoft to find a way to support them. We just don't have all the answers today and it isn't our chief priority at this very moment because we already have our hands completely full shipping UT3 on PC and PS3 as well as shipping Gears of War on PC. When we get those out of the way, and get a little time to spend with our friends and families, then we'll get back on this issue and figure it out." - Mark Rein

 I suppose the 360 version is inferior in that it's possible some of the content will be harder to get than simply popping the disc in the drive, but there's no indication that it will have less content than the PS3 version.

I think the point of the thread is that blu-ray's additional size is starting to show it's convenience.  For consumers it means less disk-swapping or downloading and for developers it means a smaller challenge in figuring out how to deliver the extra content.