Official Statistics, Demography and Population Policy in Germany, 1872–1933

Abstract

The direction of demographic research as well as developments in population theory are often dependent on the quality of official statistical data. Demographers, irrespecti­ve of their specific research interests, are invariably required to pay particular attention to the specific conditions under which official data are generated, processed and pub­lished, given the inevitable social construction of vital statistics.1 Friedrich Zahn, wri­ting at the end of the First World War, reflected a general view that official statistics needed to remain „impartial“ (unparteiisch) if they were to be used to counteract preju­dice and to serve as a basis for effective legislation and administrative arrangements.2 But the relationship between official statistics, demographic analysis and state policy has never been fully examined in the context of modem German history.3 Although the representatives of the Statistical Offices (both at the Reich and Lander level) at their annual conference at Baden-Baden in 1924 were well aware that statistics was fre­quently subject to public criticism, „bald, weil sie zu viel tue, bald, weil sie zu wenig leiste“, they retained a clear sense of the strategic importance of their professional role, particularly in terms of the contribution that official statistics could make to the for­mulation of state policy.4 The extent to which the impartiality of official demographic statistics had been seriously compromised before 1933 by the assimilation of eugenic, anthropological and biological concepts is an important issue in its own right, but it has wider implications. To what extent did official statisticians contribute to the reconfigu­ration of population science in the early decades of the twentieth century? Did the sta­tistical offices, in general, help to provide the evidential base that underpinned contem­porary explanations for the decline in fertility, or the inheritability of psychic illnesses? How were official data utilized in confronting and interpreting contemporary demo­graphic trends? And to what extent did the work of the statistical offices, represented in particular by the publication of census data and detailed information on population movements, actually influence the direction of state policy?