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The Transmission of Life: Certain Generalizations about the Demography of Europe's Nations in 1939–41

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

John Lukacs
John Lukacs
Affiliation:
Chestnut Hill College
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Extract

The Second World War became a world war only in December 1941. By that time not only the extent but also the character of its warfare had changed, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thus 1941 was even more of a turning-point in the history of the Second World War than 1917 had been in the history of the First. Most historians of the Second World War would agree with this assessment. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that relatively little interest has been devoted to the history of the everyday lives of European peoples during the years 1939–41, during what could be called in retrospect (perhaps hopefully so) the Last European War.

Type
War and Demography
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 1970 , pp. 442 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1970

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References

1 Lukacs, John, Historical Consciousness, New York, 1968; see especially Chap. IV, and pp. 215–16.Google Scholar

2 I have excluded the Soviet Union from the following general observations for two reasons: first, because few statistics about its demography during the period exist; second, because of her isolation during the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Union was part of Europe only in a very limited sense.

3 Consider that at least one half of the births in a given year (1937 and 1941 may be especially telling examples) are the results of their having been begotten during the previous year. The year 1938 as a turning-point in the popular support to Fascism has been suggested, too, by the most knowledgeable Italian historians of the period, the excellent Renzo De Felice, for example.

4 It is perhaps significant, too, that in 1939 among Germany‘s cities Danzig and Gleiwitz, on the Polish border, registered phenomenally high birth rates, over 24 per 1,000 (the average of German cities of comparable size was 17.5); even more phenomenal was the marriage rate in Linz, this then prototypically Nazi town, the home town of Hitler as well of Eichmann, with 25.8 marriages per 1,000 inhabitants, more than twice that of the national average.

5 I mentioned the existence of very great differences in neighboring nations with similar economic and social structures (before the war in Western Europe Holland had the highest birth rate, and Belgium and Luxembourg one of the lowest); yet in 1939 the Dutch marriage rate jumped from 7.7 to 9.2 when the Belgian and Luxembourgeois rate dropped more than considerably (in 1940 the Belgian marriage rate, 4.3, was the lowest in Europe, lower even than the French.) There are all kinds of fascinating problems latent within these data, full of potential interest to the social historian. How about border areas, for example ? Did towns and regions on both sides of the Dutch-Belgian border reflect the important divergences in the marriage and birth patterns of the two respective nations? Was there an appreciable influence of language, were the Walloon portions of Belgium closer to the French pattern near the Franco-Belgian frontier?

6 In certain countries the occupation by friendly foreign armies resulted, of course, in an increase of marriages and of births—in the case of Iceland, for example, a 20 % increase in marriages in 1941.

7 The extraordinary exception to the above is Greece, with its relatively low marriage and high birth rate, both of which dropped sharply in 1940 and 1941, facts which are not altogether explainable by the war that came to Greece only at the end of October in 1940.

8 As the excellent and unexceptionable F. Baudhuin wrote about the rise in the Belgian birth rate during the miseries of the early years of the German occupation (20% higher in 1941–2 than in 1918): ‘On se trouve partiallement ici en présence d'une des rares consequences positives des ideés d'orde nouveau, favorable à la famille …’ Baudhuin, F., L'économie beige sous I'occupation, 1940–41, Brussels, 1945, p. 198.Google Scholar

9 After 1932 the divorce rate rose in every European state except for Norway, Portugal and, perhaps surprisingly, France (529 per million in 1932, 524 in 1939). In 1939 Latvia was the country with the highest rate, 980 per one million inhabitants, the same nation with the most negative record of population growth in the thirties.

10 11,300 in 1940, including a 50% drop in the July-September period.

11 The annual average of suicides in Britain was slightly over 5,000 in the thirties, dropping to 3,657 in 1941; in Germany the number of suicides committed by young people under twenty dropped 80% during the first six years of the Hitler regime, from 1,215 in 1932 to 250 in 1939.

12 It would be instructive to consider the number of marriages, births, suicides and divorces among Jews in different countries after 1938 and before 1942, comparing these conditions from country to country: but such statistics, to the best of my knowledge, exist only in few instances, whereby the comparative basis for generalizations is missing.