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The zealousness and brutality with which the Second World War was fought in the Yugoslav areas, as well as the murderous politics led particularly by the Ustasha and the Germans caused a very high number of casualties. While the exact number of victims cannot be established, research of the late 1980s has proposed much more valid estimates than what was initially suggested. Immediately after the war, the new Yugoslav administration stated an official number of 1,706,000 actual Yugoslav victims; that is persons who had been killed or had perished as a direct result of the war, and not including demographic losses such as fallen birth rates. Though the matter was politically sensitive, it was later attempted to confirm or correct this number, but these attempts remained abortive during the communist period. Finally, in the second half of the 1980s, it was convincingly demonstrated by two independent demographic calculations that slightly more than one million people out of a population of a little more than 17 million lost their lives because of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.²³ The total number of victims is the most reliable, whereas calculations according to ethnicity and region are less precise.²⁴ Most of the victims, about 500,000-600,000, fell within the borders of the NDH. Of the Yugoslav peoples, Serbs and Muslims suffered the heaviest losses, around 7-8 % of the populations, while around 5-5.5 % of Croats perished. Montenegrin losses were slightly smaller, maybe around 5 %, Slovene losses around 3 % and Macedonian losses approximately 1 % of the populations. Serbs within the NDH were particularly hard hit: around 300,000, or 15 %, were killed.

The Jewish and Roma minorities suffered even heavier losses: Due mainly to Nazi German extermination policies, between 75 % and 80 % of Yugoslavia’s Jews were murdered, and possibly a third of the Roma population.

The ethnic German population of Yugoslavia was also strongly reduced, partly because of post-war deportations and communist retribution, and partly because of their active participation in German warfare.