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When the Rebels destroyed the second Death Star at the end of Return of The Jedi how many innocents died as well, since the station was still under construction?
Did the Empire move construction crews away for the battle, or were they still on board? I’ve seen people state that millions of slaves were involved in Death Stars construction?
It looks like the death toll of workers on the 2nd death star could be fairly low. Quoting part of TenthJustice's answer.
Wookieepedia describes the second Death Star as being primarily constructed by droids:
Methods of faster construction had been developed in the years since the original station's conception, added to the fact that Imperial engineers made sure to allocate enough space on the station for the maximum possible amount of self-replicating construction droids.
Their source for that claim is an official book called Star Wars: Complete Locations.
On top of that, according to George Lucas, the first star destroyer was at least built with
...I came up with the idea of adding a little schematic of the Death Star in here, because the Geonosians build robots and build things, they're sort of construction workers. They would probably be the ones contracted to build the Death Star, and they were the ones that Jay and Silent Bob worry got killed on the Death Star, but they are after all a bunch of large termites.
We are not to feel bad for the workers because they are essentially insects that breed in mass quantities. Obi-Won and Anakin also kill them fairly freely in the movies compared to them killing other life forms.
The Death Star II is no longer under construction when the battle begins. When the Emperor showed up, Darth Vader reports, "The Death Star will be completed on schedule." Later, the Emperor reveals to Luke that the station is fully armed and operational. So it's done. Sure, they could put some paint on the walls, and maybe hang a few pictures, but it's done. It doesn't have to look pretty.
Zero. Even if any construction workers are on board, they knew they were working on a government super weapon, and that would likely put them at risk. They would not really be innocent, but would be material accessories to mass murder and some pretty significant environmental crimes.
In the real world, such projects like this come with stringent requirements on the workers, and the workers usually command a higher salary commensurate with the added risk involved.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that not even the slaves are innocent. All of them chose to help put weapons of enormous destructive potential into the hands of an utterly ruthless dictatorship. Mass murder and tyranny were the obvious objectives of the Death Star's construction. Without their obedience, the tyrant's capacity to murder and/or terrorize the populace is hindered, if not made impossible outright.
Remember that without obedience, tyranny becomes impossible.
So each and every one of the slaves who obeyed orders to build this thing chose to value one life (their own) or a small handful of lives (their own and their family's) over the lives of many millions of other people.
Not innocent. None of them. Not even one.
