After a brief look at the numbers, they seem fairly accurate. It is certainly true that Eastern Europe suffered orders of magnitude more death and destruction than Western Europe. My own research focuses on the USSR, and they suffered between 8-9 million military deaths, and around 18-19 million civilian casualties, totalling approx 27 million deaths. That is close to half of all the deaths in WWII. So yes, when we talk about the Second World War, we should be spending more time and focusing more energy on the Eastern Front, because that is where the majority of the human losses were taking place. Getting people to talk more about the USSR when we talk about WWII, particularly violence in WWII, is a motivating factor behind all of my current research, actually. As to how the Germans killed so many Soviet soldiers, the short answer is war crimes. 3.3 million Soviet Prisoners of War died in German captivity. These soldiers were usually not provided with food or water, or even shelter in many cases. POW 'camps' often consisted of nothing more than barbed wire fences put up around a mass of captured troops in an open field. The men (and some women, since the Soviet troops included some female fighters) were then simply left to fend for themselves. With nothing to eat, starvation spread and there were outbreaks of disease. When winter arrived, people froze to death. There were cases of cannibalism. So this was the situation for many. Others were put to work and worked until they died. And still others were selected as the victim of experiments to help the Nazi regime develop new technologies for killing, and so were gassed in camps and in gas vans as these technologies were being prepared (primarily for use on Jews.) This isn't the complete story of the Soviet POW experience, but an overview. Unfortunately, there has been relatively little research done on the topic (certainly a small amount considering the number of people involved), in large part due to the scarcity of sources. The Germans destroyed the evidence they had, and most Soviet people involved didn't live through it to provide their own evidence. Sources: Ivan's War, Catherine Merridale; lots of archival documents from the Military Archives in Freiburg, Germany and various Russian archives