The restrictive 1936 abortion law remained in place until 1955, but it still took a decade to recover the lost ground: no official population estimates were released until April 1956 when the figure reached 200 million, perhaps 5 million above the June 1941 level. Overt population propaganda was constrained by the regime's reluctance to admit the scale of the loss, as this was perceived as a potential indication of weakness in the face of the Cold War adversary: postwar western estimates had suggested perhaps 7 million military dead and about as many civilian victims: only in the late 1950s did it become clear that the scale had been far greater.