Post-World War II Europe was known as the Continent of Women, and men died in large numbers in the war. The most notable and well-known population deficit in Post-World War II Europe was the absence of men. On Victory Day in Europe, women and children were seen celebrating the end of the war in the streets, and there were hardly any men to be seen except for the elderly and the occasional soldier on rotation. Of course, British women and children are full of laughter, because the number of deaths in Britain in the World War II is relatively small, during the Second World War, about 300,000 Britons were killed, about 1/3 of the number of deaths during the First World War. The women knew that their men had left their homes only temporarily and would soon return. But elsewhere in Europe, people are afraid to be so sure. The vast majority of German soldiers, as well as soldiers from other Axis powers, were taken prisoner at the end of the war, and many of them did not return home until many years later. Of course, there are millions of men from all over Europe who never return home again.
Nearly 4.5 million soldiers and 1.5 million civilians were killed in Germany. During the war, the number of Germans who died in allied bombing alone was roughly equal to the total number of British, Belgians, and Dutch who died for various reasons. One British major general wrote after the war: "We have traveled thousands of miles in Germany, and the most striking fact is that there are almost no men aged 17 to 40. It is a land that belongs to women, children, and the elderly. ”
In many parts of Europe, generations of young women are destined to die alone, as the vast majority of young men there have died. In the Soviet Union, for example, when the war ended, there were 13 million more women than men. The lack of men is most pronounced in rural areas, where 80 per cent of the labour force on collective farms is women. According to the 1959 census, one-third of Soviet women who reached the age of 20 between 1929 and 1938 were still unmarried. So some people say that After World War II, Europe became a continent of women, but in fact it was also a continent of children.
