The deadliest and most destructive war in human history claimed between 40 and 50 million lives, displaced tens of millions of people, and cost more than $1 trillion to prosecute. The financial cost to the United States alone was more than $341 billion (approximately $4.8 trillion when adjusted for inflation). Nearly one-third of homes in Great Britain and Poland were damaged or destroyed, as were roughly one-fifth of those in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia. In Germany’s 49 largest cities, nearly 40 percent of homes were seriously damaged or destroyed. In the western Soviet Union, the destruction was even greater. Nearly 40 million European souls perished from war-related causes between 1939 and 1945, more than half of them noncombatants. Six million Jews were killed, almost all of them civilians. Soviet deaths totaled between 25 million and 27 million, the vast majority civilians as well.