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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7

'''FIGURE 7. Births, deaths, and marriages per 1,000 population, East and West Germany'''

1,000 inhabitants in 1946 to 11.4 in 1951, but as the population has aged, this rate has zigzagged upward to 14.1 in 1970, one of the highest in Europe. The very high infant mortality and death rates in the first years after World War II contrasted with the much lower rates in West Germany (97.1 and 13.0 per 1,000, respectively) and was due primarily to the poorer quality of medical services available to the civilian population during the Soviet occupation.

As in many other countries, East Germany's marriage and divorce rates rose after World War II; these rates reached their highest levels of 11.7 and 2.7 per 1,000 population, respectively, in 1950, and then dipped sharply until 1954, after which time the marriage rate fluctuated between 9.9 and 6.9 per 1,000 inhabitants, and the divorce rate between 1.7 and 1.3 per 1,000 people. With its relatively older and sexually unbalanced population, the marriage rate lags behind that in the rest of Eastern Europe, but at the same time the available pool of unattached women and weakening of taboos against divorce has led to a relatively high rate of divorce. Figure 8 shows the development of vital rates in the past decade.

The age-sex structure of the population has been profoundly altered by the cumulative effects of the manpower losses in two world wars, a major economic depression, and emigration. Combined with the prolonged period of low fertility, these events have given East Germany a comparatively old population. Comparisons of the age-sex structure with those of the United States and West Germany are illustrated in Figures 9 and 10, respectively. Although the median age of the East German population had declined to 34.2 years in 1967, it remained considerably higher than that of the United States (27.8 in 1966). The median age of East German females in 1967 (38.4) was particularly high. At the same time life expectancy at birth is higher than in the Eastern Europe states, West Germany, and the United States, fluctuating between 67 and 68 for men and 72 and 73 for women over the 1961-70 decade.

The high casualty rates in the two World Wars, together with low birth rates during the war and depression years, resulted in abnormally small numbers of persons below the age of 60 in 1970, particularly in age groups, 45-55 and 20-30. Females outnumbered males by 1,342,000—making a ratio of 85 males per 100 females at the end of 1970. This ratio represents a marked increase from the postwar low set in 1946 of 74 males per 100 females but only a slight improvement over the 1950 level of 80 males per 100

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7