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statistics for only three months of 1947 and three months of 1948, and again none for 1949 and 1950.

    TABLE B
Place
Year
Population
Deaths
Death rate
Bonn
1939
100,788
1,278
12.7%%
1947
101,498
1,062
10.5%%
1950
115,394
1,233
11.0%%
Karlsruhe
1946
175,588
1,980
11.3%%
1947
184,376
1,975
10.7%%
Karlsruhe (churched)
1946
175,588
2,039
11.6%%
Comments on Table B
    Bonn: The official figures purport that the death rate in the prosperous and mainly peaceful year of 1939 was 21 per cent higher than the disastrous year of hunger, 1947. A parallel anomaly exists between 1947 and 1950. Also, the subsidiary figures for 1947 for men (44,048) and for women (55,825) do not add up to the total population given of 101,498. In view of the conditions of the years 1939, 1947 and 1950, the author finds that the official death toll for 1947 is incredible.
    Karlsruhe: Because the official report from the authorities of Karlsruhe seemed odd to the author, his assistant conductedresearch at the offices of the Catholic church and two of the three Protestant churches, which shows that among the churched alone, the deaths totalled 2,039. It is impossible to know now how many dead Karlsruhers in those years were members of churches, but since the church burials alone exceed the deaths recorded in the town archives, we know that the town archives are not dependable.
    SOURCES:
    Local governments except: Berlin – 1945–46, from Maurice Pate, ‘Reports on Child Health and Welfare Conditions’, FEC Papers, Box 15, the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Also Konrad Adenauer, speech to Swiss Parliament, March 1949, in Erinnerungen 1945–53 , p. 187. Also Gustav Stolper, German Realities , p. 33, and Herbert Hoover, who said 41%% in 1946 in his American Epic , Vol. IV, p. 164. Königsberg – from Ernst-Günther Schenck, Das Menschliche Elend im 20. Jahrhundert , pp. 78–80. Population in 1939 was 368,000. Vienna – General Mark Clark to Herbert Hoover, 15 April 1946; FEC Papers, Box 16, the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
General Comments
    The statistics that indicate a death rate of normal proportions from 1946 through to 1950 have one characteristic in common: they show a near-normal death rate in circumstances that were agreed by everyone to be abnormally harsh. In fact, some of them, e.g. for Bonn, indicate that fewer Germans died while starving, cold, despairing and exposed than died when the country was prosperous, comfortable, peaceful and well-fed in the late 1960s – the years of the Wirtschaftswunder , the ‘Economic Miracle’.
    The British Army reported that the death rate in North Rhine province in 1946 was about 12%%. It fell during the year until it hit only 8%% in September. The death rate in Hamburg in 1946, according to official British Army reports, was 14.9%%. Havingstarted near 20%% in January, by the end of the year, it had declined to only 12.63%% annually.
    In an overall report by Herr Degwitz to the 5th Sitting of the Zonenbeirat on 10 and 11 July 1946, the death total in the British zone was 5,800 per month more than the deaths in the same area in ‘normal times’. 13 Given that the death rate in Hamburg, the principal city in the British zone, was 12.03%% in 1938, 14 this means the death rate in the zone in 1946 was around 15.5%%. The increase may seem minimal, but it must be remembered that it rose through 1947 as conditions grew worse. And modern readers can get the scale of death by remembering that it is about 50 per cent higher than one experiences in modern society. In other words, it means that for every two persons you knew who died recently, you also would have to mourn the death of yet another.
    In April 1947, the Canadian Army General Maurice Pope, Head of Mission in Berlin, reported to Ottawa that among the elderly, who constituted a high proportion of the war-ravaged population, ‘the death rate is high, and the suicide returns do not show much improvement’. He concluded, ‘To sum up, the situation is bad,