For Civilian Losses A Doctor of History Viktor Zemskov said farewell to an old myth also shared by general Krovisheev may be excluded if regarded as WP BLP that civilian losses outnumbered military casualties He labels as an absurd an idea of the so called special nature of the Great Patriotic War in which civilian casualties are far superior than the military ones Victor Zemskov On Scale of Human Losses in Great Patriotic War Seeking Truth a head of his coauthored book Having Washed with Blood Lies and Truth about Losses in Great Patriotic War Moscow 2012 ISBN 978 5 699 58297 6 p 251 The dead soldiers of course prevailed among direct losses of human lives writes Victor Zemskov He doubts the data of the Extraordinary State Commission of 1946 which defined the number of those killed and tortured by the Nazis civilians as being 6 8 million Victor Zemskov maintains these victims were over 3 million as they included refugees and evacuated persons who later returned home The author also calls a concoction reports that more than 2 million Soviet citizens deported to work in Germany died there Ibid p 253 He believes an acceptable figure is 200 000 the sum derived from German monthly reports on mortality of Eastern laborers Victor Zemskov permits the minimal civilian losses as being 4 5 million including dead combatants of volunteer units minutemen s units not turned into regular ones vigilante groups of the cities extermination squads combat groups of the Communist Party and the Young Communist League special units of various civilian ministries and their departments with casualties of the partisans to be included in the overall statistics of victims in the occupied territories