During World War II, Germany and its allies (Italy, Romania, Finland, etc.) suffered the greatest losses on the Eastern Front - according to various estimates, from a third to a quarter of all killed and wounded - during the war with the Soviet Union. However, their specific numbers are still the subject of debate among historians, so there is no single generally accepted figure.
Propaganda and archives
As you know, the authorities of any country during a war are inclined for propaganda purposes to underestimate their own losses and exaggerate the damage inflicted on the enemy, therefore, the data on losses from different sides of the front differ significantly. Another problem in establishing true losses is the poor preservation of the archives - some of them fell prey to fire during hostilities, while others were deliberately destroyed before the arrival of the enemy, the surviving documents were for many years in the archives of two different states, the FRG and the GDR, which made it difficult to coordinate work with them. And, finally, when calculating German losses in the Great Patriotic War, it must be borne in mind that among the Wehrmacht's servicemen were not only Germans, but also soldiers and officers called up from the annexed before the war (Austria,Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia) and the territories occupied by Germany at the beginning of World War II.
To calculate real losses, historians use not only official data from the times of the war on both sides, but also indirect information such as the ratio of killed and wounded during hostilities and demographic data. An important source for establishing the number of killed and wounded on the Eastern Front of the Germans are also the diaries of the chief of staff of the Wehrmacht ground forces Franz Halder, which he waged throughout the war, and the numbers in which significantly differed in a large direction from those that were announced by official German sources.
Real losses and approximate estimates
In the late 1980s - early 1990s. A group of Russian historians and military personnel led by Colonel-General Grigory Krivosheev calculated that 3,604,800 German servicemen died on the Soviet-German front during the entire period of hostilities, and another 442,100 people died in captivity. According to the Krivosheev group, in 1941-42. the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front lost (killed, wounded and captured) an average of 3,600 people (against 11,500 in the Red Army), and in 1943-45. - 7700 each (against 5500 for our troops).
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The most authoritative German researcher of this issue, Colonel Rüdiger Overmans, by analyzing personal cards of military personnel and demographic data, came to the conclusion that by the end of 1944 (when the hostilities on the Eastern Front were conducted mostly on the territory of the USSR) 2,743,000 German soldiers and officers had died. And in 1945, already on the territory of European countries, 1,230,000 German troops were killed, about two thirds of which were in battles with Soviet troops. Of the three and a half million prisoners in the USSR, about 360,000 people did not live to see the release.
According to the official German statistics given in the appendix to the Federal Republic of Germany's law "On the preservation of burial sites", according to data at the beginning of the 1990s, there were 2,330,000 graves of German servicemen in the USSR, and another 896,000 in other Eastern European states). However, over the past years, search engines have discovered about 400,000 more graves. In addition, it should be borne in mind that during the war and immediately after it, in the territories liberated from the Nazis, the new cemeteries created by the occupiers for their military were sometimes destroyed, and in subsequent years some German burials simply disappeared without leaving and were forgotten. According to various sources, there are also about 400,000 of them.
Thus, according to the lowest estimates, no less than 3,100,000 Germans died on the territory of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War and in the first post-war years. The real numbers, apparently, are approaching three and a half million. The exact number of those killed and died in captivity will probably never be known.