In the United States despite losing far fewer people to war there was this movement ment of men coming home from the war to have a lot of kids, this was also compensated through the creation of modern suburbs that were subsidized for veterans.
How did your country attempt to fix it’s decrease in population?
12 comments
It didn’t: the loss of life was big, yes, but the population was still large enough that Italy could accede to the European Coal&Steel Community (which was meant to facilitate the exchange of exclusively coal and steel itself) by, unofficially, offering to export its population as manpower.
This is also proven by the fact that the actual Baby Boom in Italy was somewhat delayed compared to the USA and Germany’s, which was the end result of a lot of subsistence farmers either grabbing their neighbours’ land, or, more helpfully for pop growth, becoming factory workers with access to modern medicine, cuting down infant mortality drastically, while still remaining in the country.
We only lost about 200 sailors so our population didn’t take a huge hit. My grandfather was almost one of them not so funnily enough 😁
Between 1949 and 1953 health minister Anna Ratkó initiated a Natalist programme to repopulate Hungary. Abortion was banned and there was a “single tax” for adults who didn’t have children. Its slogan was “Lánynak szülni dicsőség, asszonynak kötelesség.” meaning “It is a glory for a girl to give birth, and a duty for a woman.”
What was left of Germany experienced a significant increase in population because of the expulsion of ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe. In addition to the massive destruction of most cities by area bombing this lead to a severe shortage of housing in the post war years. The simple and functional but ugly post-war architecture that was used back then still shapes the character of many German towns and neighbourhoods
Massive immigration, but it was more gradual than just one big peak after the war, and it was mostly due to shortages in manpower and the rapid changes of society.
Most of the immigration came from former colonies in africa, and also from what was called indochina (fun fact: china town in Paris was founded by mostly vietnamese workforce).
France still attracts a lot of immigration from its former colonies, but the context is not the same as the 60s (a lot of jobs for anyone with 2 hands and 3 legs).
We also had a babyboom in the 60s and a few more waves of immigrations from many different countries.
The UK encouraged people from their colonies to come in and fill in the labour shortages (not just down to the war, a lot of people from the UK buggered off to Canada/New Zealand/Australia/South Africa in the mid-20th century).
That generation have been [absolutely shat on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal) in recent years.
The UK lost around 450,000 people during WW2 (including both military and civilian dead), which translated to a relatively small proportion of the total population compared with other countries in continental Europe, particularly in the former Soviet bloc. Or indeed, compared with WW1 and the subsequent flu pandemic, which resulted in greater female participation in the workplace (and eventual suffrage) due to the lack of young male labour. The total population actually net grew during WW2.
The bigger issues during the immediate post-war period were actually a) rationing of basic foodstuffs, which continued well after 1945, b) how to pay for rebuilding the country and the economy (and how it *should* be rebuilt) and c) the lack of housing due to the large-scale destruction of British cities during the Blitz. In response to the latter, several towns in the South-East of England were either constructed from scratch or massively expanded, the most famous examples probably being Crawley, Harlow, Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead and Welwyn Garden City (Milton Keynes came later). Most of the new immigrants to these towns were from London, and occasionally there were tensions between the more established locals and the newer London transplants. And, while not particularly bad or dangerous places to live in for the most part, they do have the reputation for being rather…*uninspired*.
The post-war period was also the first time in which the UK saw large-scale non-white immigration (first from the [Caribbean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African-Caribbean_people#The_.22Windrush_generation.22?wprov=sfla1), and later from the Indian Subcontinent) as labour was demanded to help rebuild the country. This wave of immigration was more than balanced by emigration to commonwealth countries, which was [often state-sponsored for racist reasons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Pound_Poms?wprov=sfla1) and, in some cases, [not completely consensual](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/27/britains-child-migrant-programme-why-130000-children-were-shipped-abroad). The UK only became a country of net immigration in the 80s, and London only returned to its pre-war population within the last 10 years or so.
We didn’t technically in a policy sense, as boosting the birth rate (and decreasing child mortality) had been a priority in Finland basically since we attained independence. It was just more of a high priority post-war since we lost so many men in the Winter and Continuation Wars, and we needed to grow the economy to pay for integrating the refugees from areas the USSR annexed, and paying the reparations.
We already had laws like the Maternity Grants Act which is the source of the Baby-Box policy Finland’s known for as well as private-sector organizations that helped out. The only difference was we expanded the number of women that qualified for various schemes from low-income women to all women.
What do you mean decrease in population?
The Netherlands got absolutely hammered in WW2. It’s estimated that over 2% of the population died as a result of the war. Not just because of direct war related actions like bombings and the holocaust but also because of things like famine.
But we had such a high birth rate that there still was nothing close to a decrease in population. Before the war the birth rate was 2.5 times the death rate, and during the war still 2x except for the worst year 1945 but even then it was still 1.5x. And after the war in Asia ended and Indonesians started fighting for independence there was a massive influx of immigrants from there which again outpaced the large number of emigrants we also had that year.
And birth rates sky rocketed with a literal baby boom. In fact the government actively encoured emigration in the first few years after the war because a large percentage of housing had become uninhabitable during the war which obviously caused a huge housing crisis yet the population just kept growing. That’s the years that a lot of Dutch people moved to especially Canada and Australia and to a lesser extent also the US.
I think there was this war-era policy where you could get compensation or time off military if you had kids (might be mistaking for something else though), which lead to lot of soldiers impregnating a lot of women. Then of course after war you couldn’t leave USSR and there was lot of moving around of people from all parts of the state.
Historically there is an phenomenon where birth rates actually rise when there is a war going on. Favoring men. Known also as the return of the fallen sons (as in the youngsters come back to live another life now that they can). Bull or not, so it was also in Finland. Higher birthrates, the generation of boomers. Finland did not really need to compensate either way since the soviet union took 10% of our ancestral lands and since no one there wanted to live in Soviet Union the mainland got an surge of new people.
The shit thing was that since they wanted so much compensation for wars they started we had to cut almost all of our ancient forests down and implement an clear cutting policy that still for some reason persists.
Fucking Stalin, let him burn in hell.
Not the same war (we had our own) but the answer is Catholic dictatorship banning divorce, birth control, abortion, etc, perks for large families and literally stealing babies from single mothers and selling them to rich couples (thanks, Catholic Church!).