In 1800, the region of Germany was not a single, unified nation, but a collection of decentralized, independent states, bound together as part of the Holy Roman Empire. This empire was dissolved, however, in 1806, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras in Europe, and the German Confederation was established in 1815. Napoleonic reforms led to the abolition of serfdom, extension of voting rights to property-owners, and an overall increase in living standards. The population grew throughout the remainder of the century, as improvements in sanitation and medicine (namely, mandatory vaccination policies) saw child mortality rates fall in later decades. As Germany industrialized and the economy grew, so too did the argument for nationhood; calls for pan-Germanism (the unification of all German-speaking lands) grew more popular among the lower classes in the mid-1800s, especially following the revolutions of 1948-49. In contrast, industrialization and poor harvests also saw high unemployment in rural regions, which led to waves of mass migration, particularly to the U.S.. In 1886, the Austro-Prussian War united northern Germany under a new Confederation, while the remaining German states (excluding Austria and Switzerland) joined following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; this established the German Empire, under the Prussian leadership of Emperor Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. 1871 to 1945 - Unification to the Second World War The first decades of unification saw Germany rise to become one of Europe's strongest and most advanced nations, and challenge other world powers on an international scale, establishing colonies in Africa and the Pacific. These endeavors were cut short, however, when the Austro-Hungarian heir apparent was assassinated in Sarajevo; Germany promised a "blank check" of support for Austria's retaliation, who subsequently declared war on Serbia and set the First World War in motion. Viewed as the strongest of the Central Powers, Germany mobilized over 11 million men throughout the war, and its army fought in all theaters. As the war progressed, both the military and civilian populations grew increasingly weakened due to malnutrition, as Germany's resources became stretched. By the war's end in 1918, Germany suffered over 2 million civilian and military deaths due to conflict, and several hundred thousand more during the accompanying influenza pandemic. Mass displacement and the restructuring of Europe's borders through the Treaty of Versailles saw the population drop by several million more.

Reparations and economic mismanagement also financially crippled Germany and led to bitter indignation among many Germans in the interwar period; something that was exploited by Adolf Hitler on his rise to power. Reckless printing of money caused hyperinflation in 1923, when the currency became so worthless that basic items were priced at trillions of Marks; the introduction of the Rentenmark then stabilized the economy before the Great Depression of 1929 sent it back into dramatic decline. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nazi government disregarded the Treaty of Versailles' restrictions and Germany rose once more to become an emerging superpower. Hitler's desire for territorial expansion into eastern Europe and the creation of an ethnically-homogenous German empire then led to the invasion of Poland in 1939, which is considered the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. Again, almost every aspect of German life contributed to the war effort, and more than 13 million men were mobilized. After six years of war, and over seven million German deaths, the Axis powers were defeated and Germany was divided into four zones administered by France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the U.S.. Mass displacement, shifting borders, and the relocation of peoples based on ethnicity also greatly affected the population during this time. 1945 to 2020 - Partition and Reunification In the late 1940s, cold war tensions led to two distinct states emerging in Germany; the Soviet-controlled east became the communist German Democratic Republic (DDR), and the three western zones merged to form the democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Additionally, Berlin was split in a similar fashion, although its location deep inside DDR territory created series of problems and opportunities for the those on either side. Life quickly changed depending on which side of the border one lived. Within a decade, rapid economic recovery saw West Germany become western Europe's strongest economy and a key international player. In the east, living standards were much lower, although unemployment was almost non-existent; internationally, East Germany was the strongest economy in the Eastern Bloc (after the USSR), though it eventually fell behind the West by the 1970s. The restriction of movement between the two states also led to labor shortages in the West, and an influx of migrants from...

In 1938, the year before the outbreak of the Second world War, the countries with the largest populations were China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, although the United Kingdom had the largest overall population when it's colonies, dominions, and metropole are combined. Alongside France, these were the five Allied "Great Powers" that emerged victorious from the Second World War. The Axis Powers in the war were led by Germany and Japan in their respective theaters, and their smaller populations were decisive factors in their defeat. Manpower as a resource In the context of the Second World War, a country or territory's population played a vital role in its ability to wage war on such a large scale. Not only were armies able to call upon their people to fight in the war and replenish their forces, but war economies were also dependent on their workforce being able to meet the agricultural, manufacturing, and logistical demands of the war. For the Axis powers, invasions and the annexation of territories were often motivated by the fact that it granted access to valuable resources that would further their own war effort - millions of people living in occupied territories were then forced to gather these resources, or forcibly transported to work in manufacturing in other Axis territories. Similarly, colonial powers were able to use resources taken from their territories to supply their armies, however this often had devastating consequences for the regions from which food was redirected, contributing to numerous food shortages and famines across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Men from annexed or colonized territories were also used in the armies of the war's Great Powers, and in the Axis armies especially. This meant that soldiers often fought alongside their former-enemies. Aftermath The Second World War was the costliest in human history, resulting in the deaths of between 70 and 85 million people. Due to the turmoil and destruction of the war, accurate records for death tolls generally do not exist, therefore pre-war populations (in combination with other statistics), are used to estimate death tolls. The Soviet Union is believed to have lost the largest amount of people during the war, suffering approximately 24 million fatalities by 1945, followed by China at around 20 million people. The Soviet death toll is equal to approximately 14 percent of its pre-war population - the countries with the highest relative death tolls in the war are found in Eastern Europe, due to the intensity of the conflict and the systematic genocide committed in the region during the war.

Chart and table of Germany population from 1950 to 2025. United Nations projections are also included through the year 2100.

The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of Europe's Jewish population in the Second World War, during which time, up to six million Jews were murdered as part of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". In the context of the Second World War, the term "Holocaust" is traditionally used to reference the genocide of Europe's Jews, although this coincided with the Nazi regime's genocide and ethnic cleansing of an additional eleven million people deemed "undesirable" due to their ethnicity, beliefs, disability or sexuality (among others). During the Holocaust, Poland's Jewish population suffered the largest number of fatalities, with approximately three million deaths. Additionally, at least one million Jews were murdered in the Soviet Union, while Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia also lost the majority of their respective pre-war Jewish populations. The Holocaust in Poland In the interwar period, Europe's Jewish population was concentrated in the east, with roughly one third living in Poland; this can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when thousands of Jews flocked to Eastern Europe to escape persecution. At the outbreak of the Second World War, it is estimated that there were 3.4 million Jews living in Poland, which was approximately ten percent of the total population. Following the German invasion of Poland, Nazi authorities then segregated Jews in ghettos across most large towns and cities, and expanded their network of concentration camps throughout the country. In the ghettos, civilians were deprived of food, and hundreds of thousands died due to disease and starvation; while prison labor was implemented under extreme conditions in concentration camps to fuel the German war effort. In Poland, six extermination camps were also operational between December 1941 and January 1945, which saw the mass extermination of approximately 2.7 million people over the next three years (including many non-Poles, imported from other regions of Europe). While concentration camps housed prisoners of all backgrounds, extermination camps were purpose-built for the elimination of the Jewish race, and over 90% of their victims were Jewish. The majority of the victims in these extermination camps were executed by poison gas, although disease, starvation and overworking were also common causes of death. In addition to the camps and ghettos, SS death squads (Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators also committed widespread atrocities across Eastern Europe. While the majority of these atrocities took place in the Balkan, Baltic and Soviet regions, they were still prevalent in Poland (particularly during the liquidation of the ghettos), and the Einsatzgruppen alone are estimated to have killed up to 1.3 million Jews throughout the Holocaust. By early 1945, Soviet forces had largely expelled the German armies from Poland and liberated the concentration and extermination camps; by this time, Poland had lost roughly ninety percent of its pre-war Jewish population, and suffered approximately three million further civilian and military deaths. By 1991, Poland's Jewish population was estimated to be just 15 thousand people, while there were fewer than two thousand Jews recorded as living in Poland in 2018.

The median age of Germans in 2020 was 44.9 years, meaning that half the German population was younger, half older. This number decreased slightly from 1950 to 1970, likely due to the baby boom after World War II, then began increasing. It is expected to slowly increase to 47.4 by 2100. Aging in Germany This shift in the age makeup of Germany is driven by having fewer young people and more old people. While it has increased slightly in the last decade, the German fertility rate remains low. Fewer young people lead to a higher median age. Simultaneously, the life expectancy has increased, having the opposite effect. Regional and global trends The entire European Union, due to higher levels of development, shows an upward shift in its age distribution. While this shift is occurring globally, the level of Germany’s median age is a European phenomenon. In other parts of the world, the proportion of young and old inhabitants is skewed sharply toward the young, pulling the median age lower.

In late May 1939, just three months before the Second World War began in Europe, Germany's workforce was made up of almost 25 million men, 15 million women, and a very small number of foreign workers. The share of German men in the workforce decreased each year thereafter, as more were conscripted into the armed forces, and there were approximately 11 million fewer German male citizens in the workforce by September 1944. The number of German women fluctuated, but remained between 14 and 15 million throughout the given period, and it exceeded the number of German men in 1944. Despite the number of German men in the workforce dropping by 45 percent, the total number of workers in German was consistently around 36 million between 1940 and 1944, as this difference was offset by foreign and forced laborers. These workers were mostly drafted from annexed territories in Eastern Europe, and prisoners were transferred from concentration and POW camps to meet the labor demands in various areas of Germany.

The worldwide Jewish population experienced a marked decline during the 20th century due to the murder of six million Jewish people during the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. While there were almost 17 million Jewish people alive before the Holocaust, or the Shoah as it is known in Hebrew, after the war this was only around 11.5 million people. By using several different fertility scenarios, demographers have been able to reconstruct what the Jewish population would be in modern times if the genocide of Jewish people had not happened. In scenarios where there was a low or very low fertility rate, the Jewish population in 2000 would be in the range of 26 to 33 million people, double what it was in reality. In a scenario where the population growth rate was the same as that observed in the Jewish population after WWII, which was extremely low, the global Jewish population would have risen to over 20 million people.

During the Second World War, the three Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Finland mobilized the largest share of their male population. For the Allies, the Soviet Union mobilized the largest share of men, as well as the largest total army of any country, but it was restricted in its ability to mobilize more due to the impact this would have on its economy. Other notable statistics come from the British Empire, where a larger share of men were drafted from Dominions than from the metropole, and there is also a discrepancy between the share of the black and white populations from South Africa.

However, it should be noted that there were many external factors from the war that influenced these figures. For example, gender ratios among the adult populations of many European countries was already skewed due to previous conflicts of the 20th century (namely WWI and the Russian Revolution), whereas the share of the male population eligible to fight in many Asian and African countries was lower than more demographically developed societies, as high child mortality rates meant that the average age of the population was much lower.

It is estimated that the Second World War was responsible for the deaths of approximately 3.76 percent of the world's population between 1939 and 1945. In 2022, where the world's population reached eight billion, this would be equal to the death of around 300 million people.

The region that experienced the largest loss of life relative to its population was the South Seas Mandate - these were former-German territories given to the Empire of Japan through the Treaty of Versailles following WWI, and they make up much of the present-day countries of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, the Northern Mariana Islands (U.S. territory), and Palau. Due to the location and strategic importance of these islands, they were used by the Japanese as launching pads for their attacks on Pearl Harbor and in the South Pacific, while they were also taken as part of the Allies' island-hopping strategy in their counteroffensive against Japan. This came at a heavy cost for the local populations, a large share of whom were Japanese settlers who had moved there in the 1920s and 1930s. Exact figures for both pre-war populations and wartime losses fluctuate by source, however civilian losses in these islands were extremely high as the Japanese defenses resorted to more extreme measures in the war's final phase.

Throughout the interwar period, Nazi leaders and propaganda repeatedly put forward the bogus claim that Jews owned up to 20 percent of all wealth in Germany, despite making up fewer than one percent of the population. At this time, Jews were used as a scapegoat for Germany's economic difficulties after the First World War and during the Great Depression, and the Nazis claimed that the Jews were lining their pockets at the expense of "Aryan" Germans. Unfortunately, there are no official figures for Jewish wealth in the 1930s, and emigration tax data only gives an insight into the finances of wealthier Jews. There are, however, a range of estimates from contemporary and more recent sources, which have been used to estimate the real share of German capital that was owned by Jews. Contemporary estimates At various points in the 1930s, the media, statistical office, and central bank all claimed that the combined wealth of German Jews was somewhere between two and 20 billion Reichsmarks (RM). While these three institutions were all state run under the Nazi regime, and despite their uncertainty, some of these estimates are still treated with consideration due to the credentials of the journalists, economists, and statisticians involved. Additionally, these figures were used with the purpose of identifying just how much money the state could take from the Jewish population, therefore it was of interest for the Nazi authorities to ascertain accurate figures, and not inflate estimates for propaganda purposes. Interestingly, the estimates from the Statistical office actually increased from 1933 to 1936, despite the fact that the state had already been seizing Jewish wealth and restricting Jewish business on a large scale since 1933; this has been attributed to the economic impact of the Great Depression. Modern estimates The estimates from Junz and Ritschl were published in 2002 and 2019 respectively, and used some of the contemporary estimates in their investigation, while taking many additional factors into account. These are now some of the most widely-cited estimates on this subject, with estimates of around 8-16 billion RM in 1933, five billion RM in 1936, and 4.4 billion RM in 1938. In Ritschl's 2019 paper, he then goes on to estimate the share of total German wealth owned by Jews; his results show that the Jewish share of private capital was slightly higher than the average, but was still very much in line with their population size.

With the heightened threat to Germany's Jewish population following the Nazi Party's ascent to power in 1933, many German Jews chose to flee or emigrate. In 1933, Germany's Jewish population was approximately 500,000 people; by the end of the war, it is estimated that 300,000 fled the country, and 165,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. In order to flee, most Jewish emigrants from Germany had to give up the majority of their wealth to the German state, whose emigration tax and seizure of property stripped Jews of their financial assets. Destination and transit For Germany's Jewish refugees, the most common destination country was the United States, and almost half of all these refugees would arrive in the U.S. over this 12 year period. As the United States had a strict quota of 27,000 German migrants per year, many refugees were forced to enter via other countries. France was the second most common destination country, receiving 100,000 refugees. However, France was also used as a transit country for German Jews wishing to travel further afield, especially after it was annexed by Germany in 1940. This was also true for several other European countries, such as the Netherlands, which had provided protection for German Jews in the mid-1930s, before rapidly becoming very unsafe following the outbreak of war in 1939. The Frank family Possibly the most famous example of this was the story of Anne Frank and her family. Anne had been born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929, but her family moved to the Netherlands in 1934 after Hitler came to power. The family then led a relatively comfortable and successful life in Amsterdam, with her father, Otto, founding his own businesses. When the Netherlands was invaded by the Germans in 1940, the family tried to emigrate once more; Otto had been granted a single Cuban visa in 1942, but the family was forced to go into hiding as the restrictions tightened. For the next two years, with the help of non-Jewish friends, they lived in secret in the upper floor of Otto's business premises with several other Jewish refugees, in a small space concealed behind a bookcase. In August 1944, through unknown means, the group was betrayed and then arrested by Dutch authorities, and the Frank family was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau thereafter. Anne's mother, Edith, died of starvation in Auschwitz within five months of her capture, while Anne and her sister, Margot, died one month later after being transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Otto was the sole survivor of the group. Otto's secretary, Miep Gies, had saved Anne's diary the day after the group was arrested, which she then gave to Otto; he then devoted much of the remainder of his life to the publication and promotion of his daughter's diary, which has now become one of the most famous and widely-read books in recent history. Additionally, the hiding space is now open to the public, and has become one of the Netherlands' most popular tourist museums.

Most estimates place the total number of deaths during the Second World War at around 70-85 million people. Approximately 17 million of these deaths (20-25 percent of the total) were due to crimes against humanity carried out by the Nazi regime in Europe. In comparison to the millions of deaths that took place through conflict, famine, or disease, these 17 million stand out due to the reasoning behind them, along with the systematic nature and scale in which they were carried out. Nazi ideology claimed that the Aryan race (a non-existent ethnic group referring to northern Europeans) was superior to all other ethnicities; this became the justification for German expansion and the extermination of others. During the war, millions of people deemed to be of lesser races were captured and used as slave laborers, with a large share dying of exhaustion, starvation, or individual execution. Murder campaigns were also used for systematic extermination; the most famous of these were the extermination camps, such as at Auschwitz, where roughly 80 percent of the 1.1 million victims were murdered in gas chambers upon arrival at the camp. German death squads in Eastern Europe carried out widespread mass shootings, and up to two million people were killed in this way. In Germany itself, many disabled, homosexual, and "undesirables" were also killed or euthanized as part of a wider eugenics program, which aimed to "purify" German society.

The Holocaust Of all races, the Nazi's viewed Jews as being the most inferior. Conspiracy theories involving Jews go back for centuries in Europe, and they have been repeatedly marginalized throughout history. German fascists used the Jews as scapegoats for the economic struggles during the interwar period. Following Hitler's ascendency to the Chancellorship in 1933, the German authorities began constructing concentration camps for political opponents and so-called undesirables, but the share of Jews being transported to these camps gradually increased in the following years, particularly after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in 1938. In 1939, Germany then invaded Poland, home to Europe's largest Jewish population. German authorities segregated the Jewish population into ghettos, and constructed thousands more concentration and detention camps across Eastern Europe, to which millions of Jews were transported from other territories. By the end of the war, over two thirds of Europe's Jewish population had been killed, and this share is higher still when one excludes the neutral or non-annexed territories.

Lebensraum Another key aspect of Nazi ideology was that of the Lebensraum (living space). Both the populations of the Soviet Union and United States were heavily concentrated in one side of the country, with vast territories extending to the east and west, respectively. Germany was much smaller and more densely populated, therefore Hitler aspired to extend Germany's territory to the east and create new "living space" for Germany's population and industry to grow. While Hitler may have envied the U.S. in this regard, the USSR was seen as undeserving; Slavs were the largest major group in the east and the Nazis viewed them as inferior, which was again used to justify the annexation of their land and subjugation of their people. As the Germans took Slavic lands in Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansings (often with the help of local conspirators) became commonplace in the annexed territories. It is also believed that the majority of Soviet prisoners of war (PoWs) died through starvation and disease, and they were not given the same treatment as PoWs on the western front. The Soviet Union lost as many as 27 million people during the war, and 10 million of these were due to Nazi genocide. It is estimated that Poland lost up to six million people, and almost all of these were through genocide.

Over the course of the Second World War approximately 127.2 million people were mobilized. The world's population in 1940 was roughly 2.3 billion, meaning that between five and six percent of the world was drafted into the military in some capacity. Approximately one in every 25 people mobilized were women, who generally served in an administrative or medical role, although hundreds of thousands of women did see active combat. Largest armies In absolute numbers, the Soviet Union mobilized the largest number of people at just under 34.5 million, and this included roughly 35 percent of the USSR's male population. By the war's end, more Soviets were mobilized than all European Axis powers combined. However, in relative terms, it was Germany who mobilized the largest share of its male population, with approximately 42 percent of men serving. The USSR was forced to find a balance between reinforcing its frontlines and maintaining agricultural and military production to supply its army (in addition to those in annexed territory after 1941), whereas a large share of soldiers taken from the German workforce were replaced by workers drafted or forcibly taken from other countries (including concentration camp prisoners and PoWs). Studying the figures The figures given in these statistics are a very simplified and rounded overview - in reality, there were many nuances in the number of people who were effectively mobilized for each country, their roles, and their status as auxiliary, collaborative, or resistance forces. The British Empire is the only power where distinctions are made between the metropole and its colonies or territories, whereas breakdowns of those who fought in other parts of Asia or Africa remains unclear. Additionally, when comparing this data with total fatalities, it is important to account for the civilian death toll, i.e. those who were not mobilized.

In May 1941, less than two years after the German invasion of Poland, the total number of forced laborers in the German economy stood at approximately three million people. Around half of these worked in an agricultural capacity, and a third worked in industry. Over the next three years, the number increased to 7.1 million forced laborers, and the industrial sector grew to be the largest user of forced labor. Forced laborers Due to the high number of men mobilized, and a reluctance to have women to enter the workforce, the Nazi regime heavily encouraged the voluntary migration of workers from annexed territories in the early years of the war, in order to meet the labor demand of the Reich. There was a small influx of voluntary workers, but it quickly became evident that working conditions were much harsher than expected (especially for Poles), and the stream of workers dried up. In April 1940, authorities in German-annexed Poland then ordered that all available workers born between 1915 and 1925 were required to move to Germany. The largest source of forced labor, however, was from concentration camps; it was mostly Jews and Slavs, as well as other ethnic minorities, political prisoners, criminals, and prisoners of war. Between 1939 and 1944, the number of German laborers also grew substantially; the Nazi regime implemented stricter laws and sentences that punished people for any activities perceived to be critical of or in contrast to Nazi ideology (such as listening to foreign or underground radio stations), and 16 year olds were also sentenced as adults. However, Germans made up a minority of forced laborers in Germany, and this fell to just five to 10 percent of forced laborers by the war's end. Extermination through work Most forced laborers were contributing directly to the German war effort, producing food, armaments, and materiel for the front lines. Because of this, their places of work became targets for Allied bombing campaigns, which had a disproportionate effect on Germany's forced labor population. Forced laborers were then used in the active repair and rebuilding of these targeted areas, which exposed them to further raids, undetonated bombs, and chemical hazards. In later years, the share of Gypsies, Jews, and Slavs working in Germany increased further, and the living conditions for these prisoners worsened. As the Reich's resources became stretched, food and provisions for prisoners were rationed, healthcare became non-existent, and work quotas increased; it was only in mid-1944 that the authorities realized how detrimental this was to output and rations were increased. In the winter of 1944-45, as the Soviets pushed west into Germany, many of the larger concentration camps in the east were evacuated and the prisoners were sent on "death marches" to reinforce the workforce in Germany. Some estimates suggest that up to 700,000 prisoners were forced on these death marches (including 56,000 from Auschwitz in mid-January), and between 200,000 and 350,000 were killed. Despite its negative impact on production for the war effort, the extermination of ethnic minorities and so-called "undesirables" by exhaustion was still seen as an overall favorable outcome.

Throughout the 19th century, what we know today as Poland was not a united, independent country; apart from a brief period during the Napoleonic Wars, Polish land was split between the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian (later German) and Russian empires. During the 1800s, the population of Poland grew steadily, from approximately nine million people in 1800 to almost 25 million in 1900; throughout this time, the Polish people and their culture were oppressed by their respective rulers, and cultural suppression intensified following a number of uprisings in the various territories. Following the outbreak of the First World War, it is estimated that almost 3.4 million men from Poland served in the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian armies, with a further 300,000 drafted for forced labor by the German authorities. Several hundred thousand were forcibly resettled in the region during the course of the war, as Poland was one of the most active areas of the conflict. For these reasons, among others, it is difficult to assess the extent of Poland's military and civilian fatalities during the war, with most reliable estimates somewhere between 640,000 and 1.1 million deaths. In the context of present-day Poland, it is estimated that the population fell by two million people in the 1910s, although some of this was also due to the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed in the wake of the war.

Poland 1918-1945

After more than a century of foreign rule, an independent Polish state was established by the Allied Powers in 1918, although it's borders were considerably different to today's, and were extended by a number of additional conflicts. The most significant of these border conflicts was the Polish-Soviet War in 1919-1920, which saw well over 100,000 deaths, and victory helped Poland to emerge as the Soviet Union's largest political and military rival in Eastern Europe during the inter-war period. Economically, Poland struggled to compete with Europe's other powers during this time, due to its lack of industrialization and infrastructure, and the global Great Depression of the 1930s exacerbated this further. Political corruption and instability was also rife in these two decades, and Poland's leadership failed to prepare the nation for the Second World War. Poland had prioritized its eastern defenses, and some had assumed that Germany's Nazi regime would see Poland as an ally due to their shared rivalry with the Soviet Union, but this was not the case. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, in the first act of the War, and the Soviet Union launched a counter invasion on September 17; Germany and the Soviet Union had secretly agreed to do this with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August, and had succeeded in taking the country by September's end. When Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 it took complete control of Poland, which continued to be the staging ground for much of the fighting between these nations. It has proven difficult to calculate the total number of Polish fatalities during the war, for a variety of reasons, however most historians have come to believe that the figure is around six million fatalities, which equated to almost one fifth of the entire pre-war population; the total population dropped by four million throughout the 1940s. The majority of these deaths took place during the Holocaust, which saw the Nazi regime commit an ethnic genocide of up to three million Polish Jews, and as many as 2.8 million non-Jewish Poles; these figures do not include the large number of victims from other countries who died after being forcefully relocated to concentration camps in Poland.

Post-war Poland

The immediate aftermath of the war was also extremely unorganized and chaotic, as millions were forcefully relocated from or to the region, in an attempt to create an ethnically homogenized state, and thousands were executed during this process. A communist government was quickly established by the Soviet Union, and socialist social and economic policies were gradually implemented over the next decade, as well as the rebuilding, modernization and education of the country. In the next few decades, particularly in the 1980s, the Catholic Church, student groups and trade unions (as part of the Solidarity movement) gradually began to challenge the government, weakening the communist party's control over the nation (although it did impose martial law and imprison political opponent throughout the early-1980s). Increasing civil unrest and the weakening of Soviet influence saw communism in Poland come to an end in the elections of 1989. Throughout the 1990s, Poland's population growth stagnated at around 38.5 million people, before gradually decreasing since the turn of the millennium, to 37.8 million people in 2020. This decline was mostly due to a negative migration rate, as Polish workers could now travel more freely to Western European countries in search of work, facilitated by Pola...

From 1273 until 1918, Austria was the seat of power of the House of Habsburg; one of Europe's most powerful and influential royal families of the past millennium. During this time and in the subsequent century since the Austro-Hungarian Empire's dissolution, the borders and demography of the Austrian state have changed dramatically, with the population growing from approximately three million people in 1800 to just over nine million in 2020. The area of modern Austria's population rose gradually throughout the nineteenth century, until the early 1900s, where it then dropped and fluctuated during the World Wars, before rising again until recent years.

End of an empire

The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, caused Austria to declare war on Serbia, which marked the outbreak of the First World War. The war (and subsequent Spanish Flu pandemic) would see the deaths of more than 1.2 million people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the area of modern Austria's population dropped by almost 400,000 people between 1916 and 1920. In the years preceding the First World War, Slavic nationalism and tensions between various ethnicities in the empire had escalated to a new level; following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, new states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created for corresponding ethnic groups, while Austrian and Hungarian states were created for ethnic Germans and Magyars respectively (Austria still uses this border today). The Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Austria from joining Germany, however in 1938, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler (who was born in Austria) united the two nations as part of the German Third Reich, with overwhelming support by the people of Austria. In the next few years, Austria's population decreased slightly, as a result of the forced relocation of Jews and the outbreak of the Second World War. Due to the Austria-German union, separate records were not kept for Austrian and German deaths during the war, however most estimates put Austria's total at over 350,000 fatalities.

Post-war Austria

Following Germany's defeat, Austria was split into four separately administered sections, and then the Second Austrian Republic was established in 1955, declaring its permanent neutrality in foreign affairs. In the period after this Austria has enjoyed a period of continued prosperity with a high standard of living and reasonable economic growth. Population growth stagnated in the 80's with the legalization of abortion and improved access to contraception, but has grown steadily in the past three decades. Austria is consistently ranked among the top 20 richest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita, and in 2018 it was ranked 20th in the world by the Human Development Index.

Europe's Jewish population in 1939 was around 9.5 million people, and it is estimated that six million of these were ultimately killed by 1945. The persecution of German Jews escalated during the interwar period, particularly after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, and again after Kristallnacht in 1938. However, the scale of this increased drastically following the German invasions of Poland in 1939 and the USSR in 1941, when Germany annexed regions with some of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Extermination Camps As part of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", the Nazi occupiers established six extermination camps in present-day Poland; these were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek***, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Prisoners, mostly Jews, were transported from all over Europe to these camps. Upon arrival, the majority of victims were sent directly to purpose-built chambers or vans, where they were murdered with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B gas. A relatively small number of prisoners were also forced to dispose of the victims' bodies, which often included their own family members, friends, or persons known to them. Most of the deceased were incinerated, and many of the camp records were destroyed; this means that precise figures for the number of deaths in extermination camps will never be known. It has been estimated that at least 2.7 million Jews were murdered in these six camps; over two thirds of these were killed at Auschwitz or Treblinka. Einsatzgruppen After extermination camps, the most common method of murder was through mass shootings. The majority of these shootings were not carried out by regular soldiers, but specialized task forces known as "Einsatzgruppen". Each group was just a few hundred men each, but they were responsible for some of the largest individual acts of genocide in the war. The largest of these took place at Babi Yar, near Kyiv in 1941, where almost 35,000 victims were beaten, humiliated, and then shot over a two day period. The Einsatzgruppen were most active in the annexed Soviet territories (although additional regiments were active in Poland and the Balkans), and their ranks were often bolstered by local volunteers. It has been estimated that Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the genocide of more than two million people in fewer than six years.

During the Second World War, the German invasion of Denmark took place on April 9, 1940, as part of Operation Weserübung. The primary aim of this campaign was the annexation of Norway, as control of the Scandinavian coast protected Germany's iron supply from Sweden and gave a tactical advantage for naval operations against the UK. Heavily outmanned and outgunned, the Danish government surrendered within a few hours, and this was the least-costly German invasion of the war (not including Austria), with just 16 Danish military fatalities on the day. Overall, modern estimates suggest that more than 6,600 Danes died as a direct result of the Second World War. Roughly half of these fatalities were civilian deaths, including upwards of 1,000 sailors killed by German submarines, and over 750 resistance fighters. However a significant share of Danes were also killed in the service of both the Axis or Allied Powers.

Danes in the service of Germany Almost one third of Danish fatalities were in the service of the German military, as over 6,000 Danish military volunteered to join the German war effort on the Eastern Front, alongside an unknown number of ethnic German volunteers (possibly 2,000) from Schleswig, along the German border. Almost 500 Danes were also killed for informing or collaborating with German authorities during the occupation; most of these were killed by the resistance during the occupation, although many were also executed after the war's conclusion.

The Danish resistance and the rescue of Denmark's Jews When compared with resistance movements in other countries, the rapid annexation of Denmark and the non-removal of the Danish government by Nazi authorities resulted in the Danish movement developing more slowly. The Danish government discouraged its citizens from rising up, and the restrictions imposed by Germany were initially less severe than in many other territories. However, resistance groups (including many military personnel) quickly formed and relayed a significant amount of information to the Allies in early years, before their actions became more violent in later years. Alongside numerous sabotage and assassination missions, a major operation of the Danish resistance was the rescue of Denmark's Jewish population. In early September 1943, German diplomat Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz learned of Hitler's order to arrest and deport Denmark's Jewish population, and secretly organized their reception in Sweden, before leaking the information to Danish authorities. Just days before the order was given, the resistance, with aid from Danish authorities, Jewish leaders, and many ordinary citizens, then smuggled over 7,000 Danish Jews and their families to Sweden. Several hundred Danish Jews were ultimately transported to concentration camps, although the majority were eventually rescued by the Danish-Swedish "white bus" missions just before the war's end. More than 99 percent of Denmark's Jews would ultimately survive the Holocaust. Duckwitz was named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government in 1971, however, the Danish resistance requested not to be honored individually by Yad Vashem as theirs was a collective effort.

The population of Europe was estimated to be 742.2 million in 2023, an increase of around 2.2 million when compared with 2013. Over 35 years between 1950 and 1985, the population of Europe grew by approximately 157.8 million. But 35 years after 1985 it was estimated to have only increased by around 38.7 million. Since the 1960s, population growth in Europe has fallen quite significantly and was even negative during the mid-1990s. While population growth has increased slightly since the low of -0.07 percent in 1998, the growth rate for 2020 was just 0.04 percent.

Which European country has the biggest population? As of 2021, the population of Russia was estimated to be approximately 145.9 million and was by far Europe's largest country in terms of population, with Turkey being the second-largest at over 85 million. While these two countries both have territory in Europe, however, they are both only partially in Europe, with the majority of their landmasses being in Asia. In terms of countries wholly located on the European continent, Germany had the highest population at 83.9 million, and was followed by the United Kingdom and France at 68.2 million and 65.4 million respectively.

Characteristics of Europe's population There are approximately 386.5 million females in Europe, compared with 361.2 million males, a difference of around 25 million. In 1950, however, the male population has grown faster than the female one, with the male population growing by 104.7 million, and the female one by 93.6 million. As of 2021, the single year of age with the highest population was 34, at 10.7 million, while in the same year there were estimated to be around 136 thousand people aged 100 or over.

In 1940, the Soviet Union produced significantly less industrial material than the United States in terms of natural resources and construction materials. The same was true when compared with Germany, apart from iron and steel; the USSR produced over double the amount of iron ore as Germany, and a similar amount of cast iron and steel. However, while the U.S. and Soviet populations were more comparable in 1940, Germany's population was around 70 million, which was 100 million fewer than the USSR; therefore the difference in per capita output was even higher in Germany than what is shown in the graph.