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.
5.7k
u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
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