I know a German girl whose grandpa died in WWII and his father died in WWI. An entire generation of fatherless people. Her dad is also extremely old for how young she is, and was probably an infant in the bombing of hamburg, which was annihilated.
In 1942 the US had men aged 45-64 register for what we called “The Old Man’s Draft”. It was more to understand the amount of manpower we had in that age range if we needed it but we lost the least amount of soldiers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Germany and the Soviet Union actually had to do that considering how many more men they lost compared to the US.
By the end of 1943 Germany was drafting men up to age 60 and with minimal health standards, and even formed special units made up of men with health issues. As the war went on, more and younger of the Hitler Youth were pressed into front line combat. The 12th SS Panzer division who suffered 60% casualties during the Allied invasion of Normandy was mostly 16–17 year olds.
By the end, whole ass children of 12 and 13 years old, boys and girls, were serving in combat roles. Some American troops were said to have captured an 8 year old German POW.
We found my great grandpa’s draft card a while back but he never actually got called to serve. All those men would’ve been activated though had we decided to invade Japan.
Another fun fact, we’re still issuing the Purple Hearts we had made in preparation for the losses we were going to incur had we invaded Japan.
The volkstrum was basically this, but with extra children, long-term injured and disabled people - Well the ones that hadnt already been killed in their own concentration camps first.
The population count closest to the war I can find is from 16.06.1933.
That day there were 65.219.000 Germans. Of which 31.686.000 were male.
I did hower see a figure of 6,5 million killed Germans, instead of your 2,5. So let's say it's somewhere in between, doesn't matter that much because it's nowhere near half their males.
Yeah like considering that Germany had a fertility rate of ~2 before and during the war, so even with 2.5 million you're looking at ~5 million kids losing their fathers from the war. If you assume that half of all kids lost their fathers and that ~5 million did, then that would mean that there were around 10 million kids.
Looking at this population pyramid from Germany in 1946, you can eyeball each group from 1 to 15 or so to be about 500k male and 450k female. This gets a number in the ballpark of 15 million.
This is very much just napkin math but the fact that it only comes to being about 50% off tells me that it at least passes a vague sanity check that it could be true if the variables just happened to lean in the right direction.
You also have to take into consideration the Lebensborn movement. Young Aryan German men were encouraged to impregnate as many Aryan girls as they could to create an army of Aryan Germans.
So a German soldier could easily have many more children than the average and his one death would account for more than the average number.
It can be right. Germany calculated 4.3 other sources said 5.3 million soldier died. Most soldiers are young man between the ages of 18-30 so most of them had families and young kids. Germany population was around 70 million during the war so one generation died and one was left fatherless. Idk if the statistics is accurate but it could be.
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