1939–1945: Une démographie dans la tourmente

Following an analogous publication on World War I (Rohrbasser 2014), this collection is unique for its inclusion of articles written both shortly after the war and over the next half-century.It also showcases some of the early work done at France's Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED), itself founded in 1945.With a preface by Henry Rousso, the edited collection consists of eighteen chapters of previously published articles.Ten of the chapters were published in the first three volumes of INED's Population in 1946-48, and two others were in the 1988 and 1995 volumes.The six remaining chapters were published in other places between 1947 and 2005.The four sections in the collection treat: (i) war losses, (ii) nuptiality and births, (iii) childhood, and (iv) deportations, exterminations, and displaced persons.The demographic counts are mind-boggling: victims of combat, civilian losses, extermination of targeted populations, deportations, and displaced persons.Rousso gives the total deaths at 38-40 million in Europe and 55-62 million in the world.This is about four times the number of deaths in World War I.The total associated population movements, refugees, displacements, and forced migrations up to 1951 amounts to 40 million people.The authors observe that 40 million was the size of the population of France at the time of the Second World War.While the focus is on the population counts, the demographic turmoil ('une démographie dans la tourmente') had broad geopolitical consequences, of interest to historians and political scientists.The deliberate decimation of certain populations, eviction of specific minorities from areas where they had lived for generations, and associated refugee movements and resettlements caused the uprooting of long-established relations across ethnicity and class.Some authors speak of Europe as a whole becoming a continent of refugees, while others speak of the disappearance of minorities as postwar states became more ethnically homogeneous.By country, the total losses were by far the largest in the former USSR, estimated by Alain Blum and Sergej Maksudov at 26 million (not counting the 0.6 million persons who left the USSR; p. 102).In an estimate published in 1947 by Paul Vincent, the figure of 17 million had been used for the USSR (p.26), but this did not include the victims of the Stalinist regime itself, during the war and in the aftermath of the upheavals caused by the war.The Blum and Maksudov chapter is based on a text by Sergej Maksudov that was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique (Maksudov 1977).The estimate of 26 million includes 10.6 million military losses (9.7 million Red Army deaths in combat, in hospital, or in captivity, plus 900,000 deaths of Soviet Partisans and civilians engaged in militias), 8.3 million civilian losses (1.0 million killed in combat, 0.9 million died in the siege of Leningrad, 2.7 million Jews exterminated by the Nazi regime, and 3.8 million in excess mortality caused by German occupation), and 7.0 million losses in territories not under German occupation (1.6 million as prisoners of the gulag or as higher mortality in populations relocated by Stalin, as well as 200,000 soldiers executed by Stalin, 300,000 losses due to conflicts between the Red Army and insurrectionist movements in territories annexed in 1939-40, 1.0 million in the 1946 famine, and 3.9 million in excess mortality of the civilian population in territories not under German occupation; p. 102).

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