<P> The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths . A quarter of the people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed . Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany . </P> <P> Of the total number of deaths in World War II, approximately 85 per cent--mostly Soviet and Chinese--were on the Allied side . Many of these deaths were caused by war crimes committed by German and Japanese forces in occupied territories . An estimated 11 to 17 million civilians died as a direct or as an indirect result of Nazi racist policies, including mass killing of around 6 million Jews, along with Roma, homosexuals, at least 1.9 million ethnic Poles and millions of other Slavs (including Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), and other ethnic and minority groups . Between 1941 and 1945, over 200,000 ethnic Serbs, along with gypsies and Jews, were persecuted and murdered by the Axis - aligned Croatian Ustaše in Yugoslavia . Also, over 100,000 Poles were massacred by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volhynia massacres, between 1943 and 1945 . </P> <P> In Asia and the Pacific, between 3 million and more than 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese (estimated at 7.5 million), were killed by the Japanese occupation forces . The most infamous Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which fifty to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered . Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Sankō Sakusen . General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung . </P> <P> Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons . The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China (see Unit 731) and in early conflicts against the Soviets . Both the Germans and Japanese tested such weapons against civilians, and sometimes on prisoners of war . </P>

What was the course of world war 2