Nazi German Birth Rate

Assuming some sort of German victory - the UK makes peace with the Reich, and much of the Western USSR is conquered, how would the German Birth Rate be affected? I'd guess there'd be a post war baby boom, but how big would it be? Would birth rates be significantly higher than OTL West and East Germanies? Or would Nazi pro-natalist policies be doomed to failure? Since a victorious Third Reich is unlikely to accept immigrants, would population decline soon become a significant issue?
 
If there's a baby boom, it's probably much smaller than OTL (war is shorter). On the other hand, there's much less population loss from the Eastern Front. So Germany probably ends up with population similar to in OTL, give or take, which isn't enough to populate the Lebensraum. The Holocaust presumably happens as in OTL (around 80-90% of Jews living in German-occupied Eastern Europe were killed, so in terms of area demographics OTL vs. 100% isn't too important). Does Generalplan Ost happen as intended? Possibly; Nazi atrocities against Poles and Russians were happening throughout the war in OTL, both when Germany was winning and when it was losing.

So Eastern Europe gets depopulated through genocide and doesn't really repopulate with Germans, despite increasingly desperate German measures to get Germans to move there, and then when they don't incentives for Dutch and Scandinavian immigrants to move there. The Dutch actually might, the German occupation there was pretty brutal, if not so brutal by Polish standards, but the Netherlands doesn't have the demographics to Germanize the area either. So it almost certainly ends up majority-Slavic, with something like the race relations of apartheid - German landowners, Slavic workers. Let's guess that the General Government area ends up 50/50 German/Polish, the Baltics end up 50/50 German/Baltic, and Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia are maybe 90% Slavic, just with half of OTL's population.

German industry probably stagnates due to atrocious institutions - lots of court politics under Hitler and whoever succeeds him, even more brain drain than in OTL. There's a cold war between the US and Nazi Germany, where Nazi Germany starts out with lower population and resource endowment and better industry than OTL's USSR, but the trajectory ends up similar, with collapse within a few decades. The preeminent industrial powers are the US, the UK, and Japan. If the Pacific War happens as in OTL, the US focuses all its resources on it and manages to win ahead of schedule even without Russian entry into the war, but ultimately Japan gets occupied and transformed as in OTL, as a bulwark against fascism.
 

Marc

Donor
Repeat after me, there is no such thing as a Nazi victory, that is an oxymoron. Even if they win, they lose everything.
 
Probably negligible. There might be an immediate boomlet in the postwar decade, but then things are likely to stabilize earlier. Despite all the Kinder, Küche, Kirche propaganda, industrialization is likely to push birthrates down to somewhere between OTL West Germany and OTL East Germany among ethnic Germans. Also keep in mind that it might be even lower among Germans than that, because of the T4 eugenics program, especially in Northern Germany. The thing with NS-Germany is that it had a natalist policy, but it would be counteracted by other government policies, and the way they did it often had little relation to reality - you can only reshuffle Volksdeutsche and Kashubians around so much to doctor the numbers.
 
Indeed. It is worth noting that even in the case of Romania, which enforced strict preinstalled policies from the mid-1960s up to the end of the Ceaucescu regime, even increasingly stringent controls did not push fertility rates reliably above replacement levels by the 1980s.

A dysfunctional Nazi Germany, even if it wins, does not strike me as providing a good environment for a baby boom. If it succeeds in conquering Europe to the Urals, who will it be able to loot? Going by the Adam Tooze description of the Nazi economy, a crash in living standards post-war is more likely than not.
 
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I'm going to disagree with most people and suggest that after the war Germany had a baby boom and moreover it was the only country to enjoy one. The rest of the Western world went through Great Depression-lite and continued to have near replacement birth rates. Germany had a baby boom in the 50s, but it continued to the present and birth rates actually gradually increased over the decades. They were especially high in the East where it became common for women to have 7 or 8 children. This Nazis forced women out of professional life, which left women with the option to become housewives. The Nazis were successful at promulgating a Nazi occult religion which placed enormous value on high birthrates. The widespread use of slave labor eased the economic burden on German families. The Nazis fought World War 3 to finish off the Soviet Union and occupied India in large part to keep the slave labor economy running. And finally, the Nazis controlled enough of the world to be able to structure the economy around German women having lots of babies. The German economy wasn't efficient, technology lagged decades behind OTL, but the Nazis controlled enough to get what they wanted. If the U.S. cared or if Mormonism were more popular, we would probably be able to manage similar birthrates.
 
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