It's not a lie.
Look, you need to consider Yugoslavia in the aggregate over the course of WW2.
That is, were looking at 1.7 million dead (11% of the population). The average age of a person who died was 22.
There were also 3.5 million left homeless.
Are these numbers too much for you to handle?
There weren’t 1.7 million dead. There were 1.014 million dead across the whole of the ex-Yu. As Milovan Djilas admitted and as the man who came up with the number admitted (both Serbs), the numbers were inflated not only to get more reparations out of Germany, but for propaganda purposes as well.