These are the deadliest events in human history. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re looking at some events in human history with the highest death tolls.
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00:00People came here to avoid war in Europe.
00:02Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at some events in human history with the highest death tolls.
00:07The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis,
00:11and most of the time humans get it from a flea bite.
00:16The Second Sino-Japanese War.
00:18They collect all the dead bodies from the poor people because very cold, and they were died.
00:29Well, because of too cold, they collect them.
00:32While many think of events in Europe in the lead-up to World War II,
00:35what happened in the East was just as detrimental.
00:38Japan and China had been locked in a series of conflicts with one another
00:41following the 1931 invasion of Manchuria.
00:44Things escalated in 1937 when Japan officially invaded and took Nanjing,
00:49perpetrating a massacre along with it.
00:51In 1889, Meiji constitution specified that the emperor was the commander of the army and navy.
00:58The Second Sino-Japanese War was extremely bloody, leading to an excess of deaths.
01:03Many were caused by chemical and biological warfare,
01:06ranging from gas to fleas infected with the bubonic plague.
01:10Although the exact numbers are not known,
01:12some experts have estimated that 20 million people died during the eight-year conflict,
01:17with the majority on the Chinese side.
01:19One reason he goes for Shanghai rather than North China,
01:23because the focus of the Japanese effort is in North China.
01:30They don't have any business, they really don't want to be fighting in Shanghai.
01:35The Qing Dynasty conquest of the Ming Dynasty.
01:37One group maintaining power for centuries doesn't make them indestructible.
01:41The Ming Dynasty ruled for centuries in China,
01:44but they still eventually fell to the up-and-coming Qing line.
01:47The transfer of power took decades,
01:49with several battles happening in the interim that helped lead to an estimated 25 million fatalities.
01:55Several massacres were carried out, leading to the devastation of whole provinces.
02:00One rebel alone is attributed with killing between 600,000 and 6 million civilians.
02:05Combat wasn't the only contributing factor when it came to fatalities.
02:09Disease and famine also caused it to increase drastically.
02:12Although the Qing ultimately came out on top,
02:15they would meet a similar end in 1912, proving just how cyclical history is.
02:20The Plague of Justinian.
02:21Yersinia pestis has been one of the most insidious killers in human history,
02:26having caused several plagues.
02:28The Plague of Justinian began in 541 A.D. and quickly swept through the entire Mediterranean
02:34Basin, Europe, and both the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires.
02:38One historian, Procopius, claimed that so many were dying in Constantinople that they couldn't
02:43all be buried, leading them to be stacked on top of one another.
02:46He also asserted that 10,000 people were dying per day in the Byzantine Empire alone,
02:51with an overall death toll that ranged from 15 to 100 million.
02:55While the exact amount has not been and may never be confirmed,
02:59it was still a sign of the damage the disease would cause in the future.
03:03The Spanish Flu.
03:04They would begin to have hemorrhaging in their lungs, an edema in the lungs,
03:08so their lungs would begin to fill with their own bodily fluids, which would mean
03:12that literally people would be kind of drowning in their own fluids.
03:16Disease is horrible enough on its own, but it becomes downright horrific when it spreads
03:21across the globe in just a couple of years.
03:23The Spanish Flu first broke out in the United States in 1918.
03:27By 1920, over one-third of the world had been infected,
03:31with tens of millions succumbing to the illness.
03:34World War I did not help, with overcrowded medical camps and poor hygiene exacerbating the spread.
03:40On an unprecedented scale during World War I, young men are on the move in cramped,
03:47overcrowded conditions, which is an absolute dream for the influenza virus.
03:53Larger countries, such as India, lost about 5 percent of their population to the illness.
03:57After several waves and an estimated mortality rate as high as 100 million,
04:02things finally began to settle down in 1920.
04:05Although we haven't completely eradicated the flu,
04:08vaccines have helped ensure that it doesn't reach that level.
04:11They did early social distancing.
04:13They closed saloons and public gatherings.
04:16They closed down the schools and churches.
04:18They asked people to stay away from one another.
04:21The An Lushan Rebellion
04:22What started out as an attempt to overthrow the Tang government in one area of China
04:27escalated into an all-out, multi-year civil war.
04:30It began in 755, with the Rouguian Dynasty vying for power.
04:34With An Lushan at the helm, they invaded several areas, causing mass loss.
04:39Several leaders, including Lushan, met their own grisly deaths,
04:43but it didn't do much to end their efforts.
04:45The conflict raged on for eight years, with the Tang Dynasty coming out on top.
04:50Later censuses revealed that the population had dropped from almost 53 million in 755
04:56to just under 17 million in 764.
04:59Natural citizens were not the only ones affected.
05:02Several foreign merchants were targeted,
05:04and a massacre was ordered against West Asian Sogdians.
05:07World War I
05:08And people ask why.
05:11Why doesn't America get involved immediately?
05:14And American politicians are petrified of being drawn into a foreign war
05:21and fighting for foreign ends.
05:24When practically the entire world is engaged in a battle, there's bound to be a high death rate.
05:29But the final results from World War I are still shocking to see.
05:33Breaking out in 1914 following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
05:37World War I soon proved to be different from any other fought before it.
05:41People came here to avoid war in Europe.
05:43The use of high-powered weaponry and trench warfare made taking lives far easier,
05:48causing the mortality rate to skyrocket.
05:50As many as 22 million people died, with a majority being lost in battle.
05:54When things finally came to a close in 1918,
05:58no one at the time could have guessed they'd be back in the same position just over 20 years later.
06:03And yet within a year after winning that election,
06:05that very same president is declaring war on the Germans.
06:09The Great Chinese Famine
06:11We woke up in the middle of the night because in the morning we are going to
06:16walk through Tiananmen Square to see our great leader.
06:19It was exciting.
06:21We thought he was a god.
06:23It may have only spanned two years,
06:26but it's still one of the deadliest and cruelest events in modern history.
06:29Mao Zedong's controversial Great Leap Forward had several policies that led to the mass famine,
06:34including a poor distribution of food and ordering many people to work in
06:38iron and steel production rather than farming.
06:41Teachers were the target of the political campaign.
06:46Mao taught us they have to receive the re-education by the worker and peasant.
06:53This led to a widespread food shortage that forced people to take desperate measures,
06:58including eating soil, grass, and in some cases, even other humans.
07:02Several estimates of death have been made,
07:05with one source asserting that 55 million people perished as a result of the famine,
07:10making it one of the worst human-made disasters to date.
07:13The Black Death
07:14The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis,
07:18and most of the time humans get it from a flea bite.
07:20When the aforementioned Yersinia pestis ravaged ancient empires,
07:24none could have guessed it would continue to rear its ugly head throughout history.
07:28One of the worst instances occurred in the 1300s.
07:31Trading culture at the time made transmission much easier,
07:34with rats and fleas being two of the biggest suspected carriers of the disease.
07:38Plague could get into people's blood and it could turn their limbs black,
07:42and that's where we get the term Black Death.
07:44The exact numbers are not known, but several guesses have been made.
07:49Europe took the biggest hit,
07:50with 30 to 60 percent of their population succumbing to the disease.
07:54This led to mass burials taking place,
07:56some of which consisted of thousands of bodies.
07:59Some Italian cities were so greatly affected
08:02that they didn't regain their lost population until the 19th century,
08:06proving just how detrimental the bacteria truly was.
08:09Now before there were antibiotics,
08:11the plague would kill between 66 and 93 percent of people who got it.
08:15Now with antibiotics, that mortality rate goes down to about 16 percent.
08:20New World Smallpox
08:21Some historians say that 90 percent of all indigenous deaths,
08:25which were considerable in those years of the conquest,
08:28were attributable to smallpox.
08:30The colonization of the Americas was disastrous
08:33for indigenous populations for several reasons.
08:35One of the worst was their sudden exposure to diseases
08:38they'd never been in contact with before.
08:40Their lack of natural immunity made the contraction of diseases
08:44like smallpox much easier, and much more deadly.
08:47Cortez writes about the bodies piled up in the streets,
08:51and the odor being so bad that he can't actually stand walking through the streets.
08:56So we're not really sure what the mortality rate was,
08:59but it was certainly, certainly very high.
09:02Some tribes were so heavily affected that they faced total extinction.
09:06Iroquois tribes in Quebec suffered through a staggering 24 epidemics,
09:10nearly all of which were caused by smallpox.
09:12Some settlers were aware of the effects.
09:14One commander even gave infected items as a gift,
09:18with the hope of indigenous people contracting it.
09:20To this day, remaining communities have never received
09:23an apology for the deaths inflicted upon them through contagion.
09:26The Spanish were thinking of this disease,
09:28that they actually had a theory of the disease.
09:30They actually had an idea that it had to be transmitted
09:33by people who didn't have immunity,
09:35and that something new was going on here.
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09:54World War II
09:55World War I was extremely violent,
09:57but the hate-fueled cruelty in the following global war was somehow even worse.
10:02Leaders like Mussolini and Hitler both fanned the flames of brutality,
10:05resulting in an assumed total of between 70 and 85 million individuals perishing on all sides.
10:12Civilian deaths vastly outnumbered military ones.
10:15From Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor to the United States' retaliation with nuclear weaponry,
10:20several countries went to extreme lengths.
10:22The most horrific event by far was the Holocaust,
10:25a mass genocide that led to the demise of roughly 78%
10:29of the Jewish population in Germany-controlled Europe,
10:32along with as many as 11 million other victims.
10:35World War II is considered the deadliest military conflict in history.
10:40Which mass death event do you find the most chilling?
10:43Let us know in the comments below.
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