Do we have any statistics on the life expectancy of a Russian male born in 1923, who would have been 18 when the Great Patriotic War began? What about a German male born the same year?

by GrandpasSabre

I would assume the majority of WW2 deaths in both the Soviet Union and Germany would be men from 18-30, and a male born in 1923 would be very likely to serve in the military.

Do we have any information about what happened to men born in that particular year, and has there been any analysis on the cultural effects of so many men dying so young?

amp1212

Short answer:

Yes to all of that. Immense amounts of data, and many kinds of analysis.

We have substantial demographic data for both Germany and the Soviet Union, and there has been substantial scholarly work on the cultural impact of the large male-weighted death tolls

Discussion:

I suspect you may be referring to a factoid that has been reposted around the Internet, to the effect: "Almost 80% of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 did not survive World War II."

Mark Harrison, a professor in international economic history with a particular interest in demography and a familiarity with Soviet sources has addressed this issue. He came up with a slightly lower number-- a ballpark estimate from what are very rough and often incomplete numbers that its likely that 1/3 of the 1923 cohort would have survived the war; but he also notes that the war would not have been the largest cause of death in the cohort. This was a period of very high infant mortality, followed by famine. . . so by his reckoning, deaths from birth to age 18 would have exceeded those from age 18-23.

German demography has somewhat better data than Russia/Soviet Union. Censuses conducted shortly after the War show Germany with 125 women for every 100 men, and that male deficit heavily concentrated in the military aged population. The impact of the War was substantially different for Russia and Germany: Russia had famine in the 1920s and 30s. Compare with Germany where, despite post-WWI dislocation, Weimar inflation and Depression, you find generally good public health in this period, not too many people starve to death in Berlin or Munich. So you'd have much rather been born in Germany in 1923 than Russia, if you were evaluating the likelihood that you'd be alive in 1941.

As a result of that, war losses are a more significant portion of total premature deaths in Germany 1945, than they'd have been in Soviet Union 1945, for the 1923 cohort.

These gender ratios have been studied by all sorts of social scientists. Economists look at them for impact on productivity, sociologists and gender studies scholars look at them for influence on women's roles in society. So, for example, labor economists look at the shortages of men in working age cohorts as a driver in Germany's postwar "Guest worker" programs and immigration, particularly from Turkey.

When one looks at population pyramids for Germany and Russia/Soviet Union for 1950, it's notable that the Soviet pyramid shows more missing children of the age that would have been born during the war -- it's not completely clear whether these children were born and died during the War, or simply were never born.

Gender studies scholars consider issues like contraception and women's participation in the workforce -- if a woman doesn't have a practical path to a traditional family life (eg not enough men around to get married), then people will improvise new patterns.

So there are many different topics here, and lots of data . . . enough for many scholars in several different disciplines to chew over for a career. So the answer to "do we have any?" is "yes, we have many" -- with a more focussed question, we can discuss some particular aspect of this in more detail.

Sources:

Haynes, Michael. “Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note.” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 2003, pp. 303–309.

Harrison, Mark. “Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: Comment.” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 55, no. 6, 2003, pp. 939–944.

“The Demography of War: Germany.” Population Index, vol. 14, no. 4, 1948, pp. 291–308.

NAKACHI, MIE. “A POSTWAR SEXUAL LIBERATION? The Gendered Experience of the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War.” Cahiers Du Monde Russe, vol. 52, no. 2/3, 2011, pp. 423–440.

Steinert, Johannes-Dieter. “Migration and Migration Policy: West Germany and the Recruitment of Foreign Labour, 1945-61.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 49, no. 1, 2014, pp. 9–27.

Heineman, Elizabeth. “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity.” The American Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 2, 1996, pp. 354–395.

Imhof, Arthur E., and Eva Kandler. “An Approach to Historical Demography in Germany.” Social History, vol. 4, no. 2, 1979, pp. 345–366.