The Yugoslav government estimated the number of human losses during World War II in Yugoslavia at 1,706,000.
The results of this research were demographic losses, encompassing deaths during the war, declining birth-rates, and migration, of around 1,700,000.
The 1964 victims census was conducted for the purpose of negotiating war reparations for human losses and damage to infrastructure with West Germany.
[3] The census was requested by Germany as its government did not agree with negotiations on the basis of the official Yugoslav estimate at the time.
Estimates and calculations of the wartime population losses of Yugoslavia from Ivo Lah, a Slovene statistician, Croatian demographers Ivan Klauzer and Vladimir Žerjavić, and Serb statistician Bogoljub Kočović, ranging between 900,000 and 1,150,000, showed that the official Yugoslav government's figure was highly exaggerated.
The differences between them were very small, the calculated total number of victims for the pre-war territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by Kočović was 1,014,000, and 1,027,000 by Žerjavić.
[8] The post-war borders of Yugoslavia included an additional 8,262 square kilometers of territory that was ceded from Italy.
[11] Kočović's and Žerjavić's research showed that the highest war losses, compared to the expected population number in 1948, were in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia.
[12] The highest relative losses among ethnicities were among the Jews and Roma,[15] and in absolute terms among Serbs and Croats.
[30] Dragan Cvetković of the Belgrade Museum of Genocide Victims estimates that between 499–530,000 civilians lost their lives in the NDH.
The estimate is based on a partially revised victims list from the 1964 Yugoslav census, excluding casualties that occurred after the formal end of the war.
[38] According to Žerjavić, 70,000 Croats from the NDH died as "civilians, casualties of direct terror and camps": 33,000 in Croatia, 25,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2,000 in Srijem, and 10,000 abroad.
[38] The civilian casualties of the Bosnian Muslims were 36,000, based on Žerjavić's research; 20,000 were killed by the Chetniks, 7,000 by the NDH armed forces, 4,000 by the Germans, 3,000 by the Italians, and 2,000 by the Partisans.
He estimated that 50,000 Croats and 11,000 Bosnian Muslims died as members of the Yugoslav Partisans, both in the country and abroad.
13,000 Muslims died as civilians, members of Axis forces, or as Yugoslav Partisans, and 5,000 were Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, and others.
[47] Based on the published results as of 2015, until the formal end of the Second World War, 60,847 civilians lost their lives.
[53] Kočović provided a similar death toll as Žerjavić for the Drava Banovina of 35,000, of which 30,000 were Slovenes, 3,000 were Germans, 1,000 were Jews, and 1,000 were Roma.
[56] The Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana launched in 1995 an ongoing research on the war losses in Slovene Lands from April 1941 to January 1946.
[57] The published data as of 2012 showed that around 97,700 people died in the territory of present-day Slovenia in that time period.
[60] After the end of the war, the areas of Istria, Slovene Littoral, the cities of Rijeka and Zadar, and several islands were ceded from Italy to Yugoslavia, and its republics of Slovenia and Croatia.
For Istria and the islands of Cres and Lošinj, the war losses included 14,000 Croats, 9,000 Italians, and 1,000 Slovenes.