This data collection contains electoral and demographic data at several levels of aggregation (kreis, land/regierungsberzirk, and wahlkreis) for Germany in the Weimar Republic period of 1919-1933. Two datasets are available. Part 1, 1919 Data, presents raw and percentagized election returns at the wahlkreis level for the 1919 election to the Nationalversammlung. Information is provided on the number and percentage of eligible voters and the total votes cast for parties such as the German National People's Party, German People's Party, Christian People's Party, German Democratic Party, Social Democratic Party, and Independent Social Democratic Party. Part 2, 1920-1933 Data, consists of returns for elections to the Reichstag, 1920-1933, and for the Reichsprasident elections of 1925 and 1932 (including runoff elections in each year), returns for two national referenda, held in 1926 and 1929, and data pertaining to urban population, religion, and occupations, taken from the German Census of 1925. This second dataset contains data at several levels of aggregation and is a merged file. Crosstemporal discrepancies, such as changes in the names of the geographical units and the disappearance of units, have been adjusted for whenever possible. Variables in this file provide information for the total number and percentage of eligible voters and votes cast for parties, including the German Nationalist People's Party, German People's Party, German Center Party, German Democratic Party, German Social Democratic Party, German Communist Party, Bavarian People's Party, Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party (Hitler's movement), German Middle Class Party, German Business and Labor Party, Conservative People's Party, and other parties. Data are also provided for the total number and percentage of votes cast in the Reichsprasident elections of 1925 and 1932 for candidates Jarres, Held, Ludendorff, Braun, Marx, Hellpach, Thalman, Hitler, Duesterburg, Von Hindenburg, Winter, and others. Additional variables provide information on occupations in the country, including the number of wage earners employed in agriculture, industry and manufacturing, trade and transportation, civil service, army and navy, clergy, public health, welfare, domestic and personal services, and unknown occupations. Other census data cover the total number of wage earners in the labor force and the number of female wage earners employed in all occupations. Also provided is the percentage of the total population living in towns with 5,000 inhabitants or more, and the number and percentage of the population who were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

It is estimated that, in 1933, just 0.77 percent of the German population was Jewish. Despite this, Nazi leaders and propaganda perpetually claimed that Jews owned up to 20 percent of all capital in the German economy, and used claims such as this to demonize Jews and turn the rest of German society against the Jewish community. Official estimates from the national statistical office or central bank in the 1930s, as well as some modern estimates, also suggest that Jewish wealth may have been equal to as much as 20 percent of national wealth; however, this is misrepresentative.

According to a 2019 paper by Albrecht Ritschl of the London School of Economics, the share of Jewish-owned assets in the private sector alone was actually much lower. Ritschl uses a range of estimates (two potential figures for the German total, and three potential figures for the Jewish total) to show that the Jewish share of capital in the private sector in 1937 was likely somewhere between 0.96 and 1.57 percent. The author claims that the middle estimates, where Jewish assets are valued at 3.54bn RM, is likely the most plausible. It is also estimated that the combined capital in the public and private sector was around 400 billion RM, and if one uses the estimate of Jewish assets being valued at 2.99 billion, then this is equal to a 0.75 percent, which is almost the exact same as their population share in 1933. The paper then concludes that the share of Jewish assets in the German economy was much more in line with their population size than the bogus claims made by Nazi leaders, propaganda, and the German media.

Sources: Scientific Publications; official Statistics:

Max Broesike (1904), Rückblick auf die Entwicklung der preußischen Bevölkerung von 1875 bis 1900, Preußische Statistik 188, S. 12-14.

Elsner/Lehmann (1988): Ausländische Arbeiter unter dem deutschen Imperialismus, 1900 bis 1985. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Hubert, Michel (1998): Deutschland im Wandel. Geschichte der deutschen Bevölkerung seit 1815. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Köbler, Gerhard (2007): Historisches Lexikon der deutschen Länder. Die deutschen Territorien vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. München: Beck.

Königlich Preußisches Statistisches Landesamt: Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Preußischen Staat, 13. Jahrgang, Berlin 1916 und 16. Jahrgang, Berlin 1920.

Königlich Statistisches Bureau in Berlin: Preußische Statistik (Amtliches Quellenwerk), Heft 139. Die Sterblichkeit nach Todesursachen und Altersklassen der Gestorbenen sowie die Selbstmorde und die tödlichen Verunglückungen im preußischen Staate während des Jahres 1894. Berlin, 1896.

Königlich Statistisches Bureau in Berlin: Preußische Statistik, Heft 188: Rückblick auf die Entwicklung der preußischen Bevölkerung von 1875 bis 1900. Berlin, 1904, S. 105.

Oltmer, Jochen (2005): Migration und Politik in der Weimarer Republik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht.

Preußisches Statistisches Landesamt: Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Preußen, Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Preußen, 17. Band, 1921 und 29. Band, 1933.

Stat. Bundesamt (Hrsg.): Bevölkerung und Erwerbstätigkeit. Fachserie 1, Reihe 2. Ausländische Bevölkerung. Ausgabe 2013, S. 26, Tabelle 1.

Stat. Reichsamt (Hrsg.): Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, verschiedene Jahrgänge: Jg. 1880 bis Jg. 1941/42.

Stat. Reichsamt (Hrsg.): Statistik des Deutschen Reichs: Band 360, Band 393, Band 441.

Trevisiol, O.: Die Einbürgerungspraxis im Deutschen Reich 1871-1945. Diss. 2004. Tab. 1, S. 20 und Tab. 4, S. 24. KOPS – Das institutionelle Repositorium der Universität Konstanz, Suche im Bestand ‘Geschichte und Soziologie‘, WEB: http://d-nb.info/974206237/34

Further literature

Bade, Klaus J. (2002): Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. München: Beck.

Gosewinkel, Dieter (2001): Einbürgern und Ausschließen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Oltmer, Jochen (2012): Globale Migration. Geschichte und Gegenwart. München: Beck.

Oltmer, Jochen (2013): Migration im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. München: Oldenbourg.

wikipedia.org

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.

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.

„Anhaltspunkte dafür, wie sich der Bestand an Arbeitern und Angestellten in Deutschland strukturell – also unabhängig von den Wirtschaftsschwankungen – gewandelt hast, geben die Ergebnisse der Berufszählungen aus den Jahren 1882, 1895, 1907, 1925 und 1933. Dabei sind freilich gleich zwei Einschränkungen zu machen. 1882 war der Industrialisierungsprozess mit seinen weitgehenden Einwirkungen auf den Berufsaufbau bereits sehr weit vorangeschritten. Die Zahlen seit 1882 erfassen also nur einen Teil – und wahrscheinlich nicht einmal den größeren – dieser Entwicklung. Außerdem geben die Querschnitte der Berufszählungen die langfristigen Veränderungen nicht rein wieder. Die Wirtschaftsschwankungen machen sich dadurch störend bemerkbar, dass 1895 und 1933 Jahre des Tiefstandes der Wirtschaftstätigkeit und damit der Beschäftigung waren, während in den übrigen Jahren die Arbeitslage besonders gut war. Da aber die Strukturwandlungen im Aufbau der Berufe so ausgeprägt sind, dass sie sich über die Wirtschaftsschwankungen hinwegsetzen, sich auch außerdem bis 1933 ein gutes Stück weiter entwickelt haben, begeht man keinen allzu großen Fehler, wenn man die Jahre 1882 und 1933 als Ausgangs- und Endpunkt der strukturellen Entwicklung zugrunde legt“ (Wagenführ, a. a. O., S. 288). Datentabellen in HISTAT: A.01 Gliederung der Bevölkerung nach der Erwerbstätigkeit, Gebietsstand von 1933 (1882-1933) A.02 Anteil der Erwerbstätigen an der Gesamtbevölkerung (1882-1933) A.03 Veränderung der Erwerbstätigkeit in den einzelnen Wirtschaftszweigen (1925-1933)

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 Europea...

Already in an early study about the connection between school education and voting behavior in Prussia during the German Empire (see the study of Monika Wölk: “Der preußische Volksschulabsolvent als Reichstagswähler 1871 – 1912“, GESIS Archiv-Nr.: ZA8482) the author of the present study used school generation specific voting behavior as a methodological construct to determine the impact of school education on the voter´s decisions at the Reich elections. The investigation, sponsored by the German research community (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)), about the voter’s generations in Prussia between the German Empire and the Republic is based on this previous work. School generations, defined as graduates of the elementary school in a specific area shaped by specific school-political principles in Prussia, build voting groups within the Prussian voting population. The author inspects their voting motivation concerning continuity or discontinuity in the transition from the authoritarian German Empire to the democratic Republic of Germany and investigates it with her special research question and methodological approach. In the first part of the study the author combines the social-historical quantitative preparation of the material of the age statistics of the population in the chosen research areas with the systematic qualitative analysis of historical educational prerequisites of those parts of population. The school generations (after years of birth) are classified after collective school periods of the elementary school graduates (Volksschulabsolventen (SchVA)): SchVA 1816-1840: “Time of reform“, SchVA 1840 – 1847: “before march“ SchVA 1847 – 1854: „Revolution 1848“, SchVA 1854 – 1872: „Regulative“, SchVA 1872 - 1879: „Falk“, SchVA 1879 – 1892: „Puttkammer“, SchVA 1892 – 1899: „Bosse“, SchVA 1899 – 1918: „1900“, SchVA 1918 – 1927: „Weimar“. In the second part of the study the author continues with considerations and models for the interpretation of the structural changes in the system of political parties from the authoritarian society of the German Empire to the pluralistic, parliamentary presidential governed democracy of the Weimar Republic. In the presentation of the competing models of historical and political-sociological research the author constructs a basis for rating the question on which grid of political directions the voting behavior at the Reich elections before and after the First World War could be based. The comparative trend analysis of school time-stamped generation groups and their voting decisions presented in the third part of the study verifies the work of the second part about the developed models of party systems and its consistency for the generation specific development of the voting population. The voting behavior is broken down into two major alternative parties: The “Reich faithful’s” and the “enemies of the Reich” in the German Empire and the left-right dichotomy as a reverse equivalent of opposition and governmentalism in the Weimar Republic. Data Tables in HISTATA. Tables from the text part (Average values of chosen administrative districts, for each administrative district see the tables of the appendix under part B)A.01a Proportion of school generations of the population over 25 or 20 years (1871-1933)A.01b Proportion of generation groups in the voting population over 25 or 20 years (1871-1933)A.02a Voting behavior after discontinuity models of the German party system – model A (1871-1933)A.02b Voting behavior after discontinuity models of the German party system – model B (1871-1933)A.03 Voting behavior in the left-right continuum of the Protestant party system (1871-1933)A.04 Voting behavior in the polarity of governmentalism and opposition (1871-1933)A.05 Youth generations and voting behavior (1919-1933)A.06 Left parties of the Weimar Republic and the generation group “reaction” (1919 – 1933)A.07a Administrative district of Gumbinen: Votes by left-right polarity and generation groups (1871-1933)A.07b Administrative district of Allenstein: Votes by left-right polarity and generation groups (1919-1933)A.07c Berlin: Votes by left-right polarity and generation groups (1871-1933)A.08 School generations and left-liberal voting potential, Berlin and administrative district Liegnitz (1871-1933) B. Tables from the data appendixB.I. Proportion of school generations of the population over 25 years or 20 years in selected Prussian administrative districtsB.II. Election results of the German Reich election in selected Prussian administrative districtsB.III Votes by left-right polarity and generation groups in selected Prussian administrative districts Register of the tables in HISTAT: A. Tables from the text part(Average values of chosen administrative districts, for each administrative district see the tables of the appendix under part B).A.01a Proportion of school generations of the population over 25 or 20 years (1871-1933)A.01b Proportion of generation groups in the v...

Quelle: Various Sources - detailed description in excel file 'Sources'

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.

The Jewish population of Europe decreased dramatically during the 20th century, as millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust of the Second World War, while millions of others emigrated to escape persecution (notably to Israel and the U.S.). Some estimates suggest that the total number of Jews in Europe in 1933 was approximately 9.5 million people, with the majority of these living in Eastern Europe. Jews were a minority in most countries, however they still made up a significant portion of the population in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Romania. Following the war however, the Jewish populations in these countries dropped drastically, and by the end of the century they made up just 0.1 percent or less in several countries.

The Reichsfluchtsteuer, or emigration tax, was introduced by the German government in 1931 as a means of dissuading wealthy individuals from emigrating during the Great Depression. This tax was set at 25 percent of all assets, for those with assets worth over 200,000 Reichsmarks (RM), or those who earned more than 20,000 RM per year. Following the Nazi Party's rise to power in 1933, this law was then appropriated to target Jews, who were being driven out of Germany through violence, persecution, and the boycott of their business. As Jews emigrated to countries such as the U.S., France, or Poland, they were forced to pay this tax. However, authorities manipulated the transfer process to seize and withhold assets from Jews and other minority groups, and the total sums paid out were much lower. For the total period of 1933 to 1937, over 77 percent of emigrant assets were taken by the Nazi regime, which was equal to roughly 780 million Reichsmarks. Approximately 90 percent of this total value was taken from Jews and other persecuted minorities.

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.

During the eighteenth century, it is estimated that France's population grew by roughly fifty percent, from 19.7 million in 1700, to 29 million by 1800. In France itself, the 1700s are remembered for the end of King Louis XIV's reign in 1715, the Age of Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. During this century, the scientific and ideological advances made in France and across Europe challenged the leadership structures of the time, and questioned the relationship between monarchial, religious and political institutions and their subjects. France was arguably the most powerful nation in the world in these early years, with the second largest population in Europe (after Russia); however, this century was defined by a number of costly, large-scale conflicts across Europe and in the new North American theater, which saw the loss of most overseas territories (particularly in North America) and almost bankrupted the French crown. A combination of regressive taxation, food shortages and enlightenment ideologies ultimately culminated in the French Revolution in 1789, which brought an end to the Ancien Régime, and set in motion a period of self-actualization.

War and peace

After a volatile and tumultuous decade, in which tens of thousands were executed by the state (most infamously: guillotined), relative stability was restored within France as Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, and the policies of the revolution became enforced. Beyond France's borders, the country was involved in a series of large scale wars for two almost decades, and the First French Empire eventually covered half of Europe by 1812. In 1815, Napoleon was defeated outright, the empire was dissolved, and the monarchy was restored to France; nonetheless, a large number of revolutionary and Napoleonic reforms remained in effect afterwards, and the ideas had a long-term impact across the globe. France experienced a century of comparative peace in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars; there were some notable uprisings and conflicts, and the monarchy was abolished yet again, but nothing on the scale of what had preceded or what was to follow. A new overseas colonial empire was also established in the late 1800s, particularly across Africa and Southeast Asia. Through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, France had the second largest population in Europe (after Russia), however political instability and the economic prioritization of Paris meant that the entire country did not urbanize or industrialize at the same rate as the other European powers. Because of this, Germany and Britain entered the twentieth century with larger populations, and other regions, such as Austria or Belgium, had overtaken France in terms of industrialization; the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War was also a major contributor to this.

World Wars and contemporary France

Coming into the 1900s, France had a population of approximately forty million people (officially 38 million* due to to territorial changes), and there was relatively little growth in the first half of the century. France was comparatively unprepared for a large scale war, however it became one of the most active theaters of the First World War when Germany invaded via Belgium in 1914, with the ability to mobilize over eight million men. By the war's end in 1918, France had lost almost 1.4 million in the conflict, and approximately 300,000 in the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed. Germany invaded France again during the Second World War, and occupied the country from 1940, until the Allied counter-invasion liberated the country during the summer of 1944. France lost around 600,000 people in the course of the war, over half of which were civilians. Following the war's end, the country experienced a baby boom, and the population grew by approximately twenty million people in the next fifty years (compared to just one million in the previous fifty years). Since the 1950s, France's economy quickly grew to be one of the strongest in the world, despite losing the vast majority of its overseas colonial empire by the 1970s. A wave of migration, especially from these former colonies, has greatly contributed to the growth and diversity of France's population today, which stands at over 65 million people in 2020.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the area of modern-day Italy, at the time a collection of various states and kingdoms, was estimated to have a population of nineteen million, a figure which would grow steadily throughout the century, and by the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the population would rise to just over 26 million.

Italy’s population would see its first major disruption during the First World War, as Italy would join the Allied Forces in their fight against Austria-Hungary and Germany. In the First World War, Italy’s population would largely stagnate at 36 million, only climbing again following the end of the war in 1920. While Italy would also play a prominent role in the Second World War, as the National Fascist Party-led country would fight alongside Germany against the Allies, Italian fatalities from the war would not represent a significant percentage of Italy’s population compared to other European countries in the conflict. As a result, Italy would exit the Second World War with a population of just over 45 million.

From this point onwards the Italian economy started to recover from the war, and eventually boomed, leading to increased employment and standards of living, which facilitated steady population growth until the mid-1980s, when falling fertility and birth rates would cause growth to largely cease. From this point onward, the Italian population would remain at just over 57 million, until the 2000s when it began growing again due to an influx of migrants, peaking in 2017 at just over 60 million people. In the late 2010s, however, the Italian population began declining again, as immigration slowed and the economy weakened. As a result, in 2020, Italy is estimated to have fallen to a population of 59 million.

The fertility rate of a country is the average number of children that women from that country will have throughout their reproductive years. In Germany in 1800, the average woman of childbearing age would have 5.4 children over the course of their lifetime. It remained around this number until the late 1820s, when it then dropped to just under five, which was a long-term effect of the Napoleonic Period in Europe. From this point until the end of the nineteenth century, Germany's fertility rate was rather sporadic, reaching it's lowest point in 1855 with an average of 4.6 births per woman, and it's highest point in 1875 (just after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871), with an average of 5.4 live births per woman. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of the Second World War, Germany's fertility rate dropped from around 5 children per woman in 1900, to 1.9 in 1945. The only time where the fertility rate increased was in the inter-war years. Like other countries heavily involved in the Second World War, Germany (both East and West) experienced a Baby Boom from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, however it then dropped to it's lowest point of just 1.3 children per woman by 1995, shortly after the re-unification of Germany. In recent years, Germany's fertility rate has gradually been increasing again, and is expected to reach 1.6 in 2020, its highest rate in over forty years.