What Was Population Of Germany In 1945

SHARE not only measures major contemporaneous economic and health outcomes of adults over age 50 in these European countries, but includes retrospective modules meant to capture salient parts of early life experiences, including those related to the war. Since the end of WWII, western continental Europe has had a rich and sometime tumultuous economic and political history, the effects of which on its residents are not well documented. The first phase of immigration at the end of World War II and immediately thereafter consisted mainly of refugees and expellees from the Eastern parts of the German Reich as well as from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. The census of 10 October 1946, registered 5.9 million refugees and expellees in the British and U.S. zones and 3.6 million in the Soviet zone . The census of 13 March 1950, counted 7.9 million refugees and expellees living in West Germany . By the beginning of the 1950s approximately 12 million ethnic Germans from the former eastern parts of the Reich and from East Central Europe had emigrated to the FRG, the GDR, and Austria (Benz 1985; Stanek 1985).

When comparing the number and share of these immigrants in the GDR (3.6 million, i.e., 20 percent of total population) and the FRG (7.9 million, or 16 percent of the total population), we see that the demographic impact was somewhat larger in the east. To a certain extent, the fact that this migration was a result of expulsion, forced resettlement, and ethnic cleansing might explain the greater degree to which these migrants were accepted within East and West German society at that time . In the past, some push and pull factors existed for GDR citizens, ethnic Germans, and foreigners alike. However, the dynamics of immigration and emigration have to be explained separately for each of the different groups. GDR citizens and ethnic Germans coming to West Germany from Eastern Europe and Central Asia hardly ever thought of returning some day to their countries of origin, whereas some of the foreign laborers and asylum seekers did. The chances of being successfully integrated into Germany's economic and social life also differed among these groups.

In addition to the murder of European Jews, the Nazi government was responsible for the persecution of several other groups of people. Poles, Sinti, and Roma were viewed as racially inferior to the Aryans and were subjected to death and labor camps. They persecuted church leaders and Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to salute Hitler, served in the German army, or opposed Nazism in general. Homosexuals, specifically men, were viewed as a hindrance to the preservation of the German nation and were therefore subjected to concentration camps.

People with mental and physical disabilities were also killed as part of a "euthanasia program." In addition, Nazis also persecuted political opponents, revolutionary authors and artists, Red Army political officers, and Soviet prisoners of war, amongst many other people. In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war and Soviet citizens who were thought to be Nazi supporters. Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs of the Germans, 57 percent died or were killed during the war, a total of 3.6 million. Soviet ex-POWs and repatriated civilians were treated with great suspicion as potential Nazi collaborators, and some were sent to the Gulag upon being checked by the NKVD.

The best estimates indicate that between 62 and 78 million of them would die due to WWII—more than 3% of the world's population. While earlier wars also resulted in deaths of civilians,5 civilians were particularly heavily affected by WWII with about half of the WWII European casualties being civilians. Among civilian deaths, between 9.8 and 10.4 million civilians were murdered for political or racial reasons by the Nazi regime . Deaths due to the war were very unequally distributed across countries, whether they were military deaths due to combat, civilian deaths, or the holocaust. Figure 1.A displays the fraction of the 1939 population who died in a large array of affected countries. Among European countries covered by our data, Germany and Poland bore the brunt of these casualties.

In contrast and for comparative purposes only, American causalities in the European and Asian theatres combined were a bit over 400,000, the overwhelming majority of whom were soldiers. Similarly, total deaths in the UK are estimated to be about 450,000, 15% of whom were civilians. Starting in the late 1960s, the rotational model, well accepted at first, began to lose ground. Many labor migrants were not able to save as much money within one or two years as they had hoped.

West German employers, forced constantly to revolve their foreign staff, no longer wanted to keep recruiting and training new workers just because the work and residence permits of those recruited earlier had expired. The governments of some countries of origin began to voice criticisms, as did German trade unions, employers, and other groups. The West German government reacted by easing restrictions on the renewal of residence permits. Beginning in 1971 labor migrants who had worked in Germany for at least five years could claim special work permits valid for another five years. A growing number of spouses and children of foreign labor migrants moved to Germany.

The ability of the German authorities to regulate immigration according to the demands of the labor market was thus strongly reduced. During this period, the heavy influence of business cycles on the immigration and remigration of foreign labor was apparent. When the next boom period started in 1968, the migration balance again became positive as a result of further labor recruitment. Every day some five hundred to a thousand new guest workers were recruited, bringing the surplus of foreign immigrants to 387,000 a year. Sometimes trains and planes had to be chartered in order to bring enough additional workers into the country.

The foreign population grew from 1.9 to 4.0 million, and the number of foreign workers and employees increased from 1.1 million to its historical peak of 2.6 million . 1945 to 1949 Mainly immigration of ethnic German refugees and expellees and remigration of non-German forced labor, prisoners of war, and survivors of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. World War II ended six years and one day after Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, sparked the 20th century's second global conflict. By the time it concluded on the deck of an American warship on September 2, 1945, World War II had claimed the lives of an estimated million people, approximately 3 percent of the world's population.

The vast majority of those who died in history's deadliest war were civilians, including 6 million Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. 9Regarding the influence of hunger on late-life outcomes, we do not present structural estimates of the influence on late-life outcomes as there are no suitable instruments for the whole of Europe. Van den Berg et al. use hunger periods caused by WWII for Greece, Germany, and the Netherlands as instruments to establish causal effects of under-nutrition on hypertension and adult height. For Germany, we collected data on monthly caloric rations in regions where respondents live. We see large drops in calories towards the end of the war and in occupation zones with the French and Soviet zone hit hardest. When we distinguish different age groups (0–4, 5–10, and 11–16), we see strongest results for 0–4 group and impacts on adult depression.

This suggests that hunger analysis should not only be seen as operating through nutrition-related outcomes such as adult height, but also and equally through adult outcomes such as depression. Our effects on height are similar to Van den Berg et al. who find an effect of between 3 and 6 centimeters. Our analysis shows that experiencing war increased the probability of suffering from diabetes, depression, and with less certainty heart disease so that those experiencing war or combat have significantly lower self-rated health as adults. Experiencing war is also associated with less education and life satisfaction, and decreases the probability of ever being married for women, while increasing it for men. We also analyze pathways through which these wartime effects took place and found strong effects for hunger, dispossession, persecution, childhood immunizations, and having an absent father. While a war of the magnitude of WWII affected all social classes to some degree, our evidence does suggest that the more severe effects were on the middle class with the lower class right below them in size of impact.

Based on the descriptive data and review in the prior section, we find enormous variation even among war countries in the immediate impact of WWII. Long-term economic or population growth rates seem unlikely to be a primary pathway through which the war's influence took place. Instead, changing gender ratios induced by differential male mortality in the war appear to be a more plausible pathway operating both through absence of fathers and difficulties faced by women in marrying. Hunger and immediate and long-term stress created by battles, dispossession, and persecution would also appear to be plausible pathways that could impact adult health, both physical and mental, and our later life measures of adult SES. In this paper, we investigate long-run effects of World War II on late-life economic and health outcomes in Western continental Europe . We explore several channels through which this war might have influenced individual lives, and document which groups of the population were most affected.

Our research relies on retrospective life data from the European Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe that have recently become available. SHARE covers representative samples of the population aged 50 and over in 13 European countries, with about 20,000 observations. We also collected external data on casualties, timing and location of combat action, yearly GDP by country, population movements, and male-female population ratios. Of the total number of deaths in World War II, approximately 85 percent—mostly Soviet and Chinese—were on the Allied side and 15 percent on the Axis side.

Many deaths were caused by war crimes committed by German and Japanese forces in occupied territories. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs, along with gypsies and Jews, were murdered by the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaše in Yugoslavia, and retribution-related killings were committed just after the war ended. Jews were removed from the general populations and placed in ghettos, or were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (Himmler-lead death squads that made their way East towards the Russian front).

At this time, the number of Jews inherited with each occupation became overwhelming, and the murder of innocent civilians, including women and children, upon the SS killing squads was taking its toll and a new solution had to be put in place. The bottom left-hand side of table 3 displays dispossession rates in our SHARE countries by time period with the final column indicating the percent ever dispossessed. Figure 4 complements the data in table 4 by showing the percentage of dispossessed individuals in SHARELIFE for the foreign and native-born populations. In the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland more than 5% of respondents experienced dispossession during their lifetime.

For respondents living in Germany and Poland, dispossession happened more frequently during the war period, while they happened after the war in Czechoslovakia. Dispossessed individuals in our sample are over proportionally born outside of the current borders of their country. Analyzing countries of origin, many of them came from Eastern Europe, thus they most probably lost their property with the big wave of nationalizations after WWII. Not surprisingly, it is the foreign-born living in our SHARE countries who were most likely to be dispossessed. Gender roles in Jewish families also shifted as families faced new and extreme economic and social realities.

Women increasingly represented or defended their husbands and other male relatives with the authorities. In addition, many more women worked outside the home than before the Nazi period and became involved in Jewish self-help organizations that had been established after Hitler's rise to power. Some had never worked before, while others retrained for work in Germany or abroad. Although women often wanted to leave Germany before their husbands came to share their view, they actually emigrated less frequently than men. Parents sent sons away to foreign countries more frequently than daughters, and it was women, more than men, who remained behind as the sole caretakers for elderly parents. Indeed, a large proportion of the elderly population that remained in Germany was made up of women.

In 1939, there were 6,674 widowed men and 28,347 widowed women in the expanded Reich. The new democratic republic that was born amidst the catastrophe of German defeat in World War I promised Germans their first real possibility for liberal democratic governance. The constitution guaranteed equal rights to all its citizens, including full and complete equality for Jews and women. Weimar's contradictory bequest to Jews—greater inclusion but also growing exclusion and intensified antisemitic rhetoric—was fueled by the ongoing economic and political instability of the period. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Jews living in German territories were just beginning to feel the effects of the political, social and intellectual changes that would soon be recognized as the hallmarks of the modern world.

Until this period, Jewish communities had been constituted as distinct and autonomous social, religious and legal entities within an essentially feudal social organization. The Jews were subjected to the will of the rulers of individual German states, who imposed onerous regulations, taxes and restrictions on their ability to marry and settle where they chose. Distinguished from the rest of the population by religious traditions and family structure, Jews lived under the authority of the Jewish community, wholly separate from the non-Jewish population. In the early 1780s, however, Enlightenment thinkers began to call for an end to the discrimination against Jews in Prussia and Austria. Most important among these voices was the high-ranking Prussian government official Christian Wilhelm Dohm (1751–1820), who argued that Jews be granted the same civil rights as those accorded to non-Jewish citizens. In his essay "On the Civil Betterment of the Jews" Dohm explained Jews' moral "depravity" as the result of centuries of oppression.

Only with the elimination of the oppressive conditions that produced their allegedly defective character, Dohm argued, would Jews be able to gradually overcome their "disabilities" and prove themselves to be useful citizens. With increased family reunion and the formation of new families in Germany, the rotational model became obsolete. This is also reflected in the increasing duration of foreigners' stays in Germany . By the end of 1994 half of all foreigners had been in Germany for over ten years, and one in four had been here for more than twenty. Only about 30 percent of all foreigners had entered the country less than 4 years before. Of the 7 million foreign nationals living in Germany, 1.2 million were born in this country.

The majority of those living today in Germany has been in the country for more then ten years. However, the share of Portuguese with shorter stays in Germany has increased. Turks, too, belong to one of the nationalities that have long been settled in Germany. More than two out of three have already spent more then ten years in the country. For the Poles, the corresponding share is only 21 percent; instead, the majority of them arrived in Germany at the end of the 1980s or later.

The ruling conservative parties (CDU/CSU) and other conservative groups were mainly interested in limiting the further immigration of asylum seekers . The oppositional Social Democrats and some of the Liberal Democrats sought a package of regulations combining measures on legal immigration, social integration, and naturalization. In 1993 these debates resulted in a compromise on asylum law (Blahusch 1994; Bade 1994b). First, applicants who have entered Germany via other states belonging to the EU or any other so-called safe country can be forced to return to that country. Second, a simplified recognition procedure was introduced for asylum seekers from so-called states with no persecution; in most cases this leads to immediate rejection of the application and possible.

Special provision was made for East Germans, as well as for ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe and the USSR, in order to facilitate their integration into West German society. Public acceptance of these integration programs was promoted in the immediate postwar years. The regulations dating back to this period were mostly maintained until German unification.

A further peculiarity of ethnic German immigration is the fact that economic cycles and crises in the FRG had almost no influence on these flows. Cold war and détente, the political climate in the countries of origin, and the extent to which the different governments were interested in this group of people or even bought out would-be migrants played a much more important role. Another reason for the lack of Nazis was their relative scarcity even before the war. In the last free election in Germany, Adolf Hitler received just a third of all votes cast. By 1945 only about eight million Germans belonged to the Nazi party, out of a total population of approximately 80 million people. Many later justified their membership by saying they would have lost their jobs and businesses if they had not joined the party.

Thousands more Germans simply lied about their Nazi activities or fled the country. In fact, the Allies had such difficulty determining which Germans should staff the postwar German government that occupation forces resorted to using lie detector tests. Germany has one of the world's highest levels of education, technological development, and economic productivity.

Since the end of World War II, the number of students entering university has more than tripled, and the trade and technical schools are among the world's best. With a per capita income of about €40,883 in 2018, Germany is a broadly middle-class society. However, there has been a strong increase in the number of children living in poverty.

In 1965, one in 75 children was on the welfare rolls; but by 2007 this had increased to one child in six. These children live in relative poverty, but not necessarily in absolute poverty. Germans are typically well-travelled, with millions travelling overseas each year. The social welfare system provides for universal health care, unemployment compensation, child benefits and other social programmes. Germany's ageing population and struggling economy strained the welfare system in the 1990s, so the government adopted a wide-ranging programme of - still controversial - belt-tightening reforms, Agenda 2010, including the labour-market reforms known as Hartz concept.

Japan had ruled the Korean peninsula for 35 years, until the end of World War II. At that time, Allied leaders decided to temporarily occupy the country until elections could be held and a government established. The planned elections did not take place, as the Soviet Union established a communist state in North Korea, and the U.S. set up a pro-western state in South Korea—each claiming to be sovereign over the entire peninsula. This standoff led to the Korean War in 1950, which ended in 1953 with the signing of an armistice, but to this day, the two countries are still technically at war with each other. The British experience, however, illustrates some general principles which are relevant today. Firstly, political solutions cannot be imposed from above by force or by decree.

The occupying authority's high command must respond to the changing conditions relayed by those on the ground, as happened in Germany. Thirdly, it is important to provide a period of stability after the end of a war and the removal of the previous government, to give local people the space to develop political, economic, social and cultural institutions and practices. Finally, after war a period of subsequent occupation is not, in itself, any effective guarantee of achieving 'regime change', however desirable that may seem; the outcome is always uncertain, contingent on the wishes of the occupied, and never a foregone conclusion. 6While we concentrate for data reasons primarily on the effects of World War II in continental Western Europe, the War's impact was just as stark in the Asian theatre. The two countries most directly affected in terms of number of causalities were Japan and China.

About 2 million Japanese soldiers died in the war alongside up to a million Japanese civilians—about 4% of the pre-war Japanese population. The total number of deaths in China is believed to range between 10 and 20 million, with more than 70% being civilians. In contrast, we find very strong interactions of a negative middle class war interaction for many of our adult SES outcomes—education, and ln net worth. Life satisfaction decrements associated with the war were concentrated on the lower and middle class. In terms of being ever married, the negative effects of the war were highest on the highest SES women and the lowest SES men.