Austria-Hungary casualty lists – 1917 is complete

The indexing of the casualty lists of World War I Austria-Hungary is progressing well. Today we could finish the year 1917. Now the years 1914 to 1917 and also the few lists published in 1919 are complete. Therefore we would like to present once again some new graphical evaluations.

Especially when editing the last lists in 1917, one could observe that many soldiers killed in action or deceased from early war years are mentioned. Therefore I created a diagram showing in which list casualties from which year are published:

At the vertical white lines a new year begins in each case. The first block on the left contains the information from 1914 . The last block on the right contains the information from 1918. In 1915 especially many lists (from number 90 to 347) were published. Therefore the distance between the vertical white lines is especially large there. One can see well that it took quite a long time until events were published in the casualty lists. Even in 1918, events from 1914 (blue) were still reported.

Further we asked ourselves whether one can recognize concrete events of the war by the number of reports. For this purpose, the entries with the status “dead” or “killed in action” and a date were evaluated. In the casualty lists, there are not only exact day entries but also date ranges, such as “23./10. bis 7./11. 1914”. In this case, probabilities were used. In the example 1/16 is calculated for each day from October 23, 1914 to November 7, 1914. Interesting diagrams emerge for the four completed years:

Many clusters of deaths correlate with periods of major battles and attacks. Do you have any other clues that can explain periods with particularly high numbers of dead?

The term “casualty list” is misleading, since the military counted as “casualties” not only dead but also wounded, prisoners of war, and missing. The term “Austria-Hungary” also regularly leads to confusion. Indeed, the former Austria-Hungarian empire extended over considerably more of today’s states than just Austria and Hungary. This map shows the twelve present-day states that lie on the territory of the former Austria-Hungary (Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine):

How about YOU helping to complete the lists from 1918 as well?

Info about the project: http://verlustlisten.at