How many German children died in World War 2?

Answer 1

No one will ever be able to give a precise number, but, very, very many. Since the end of the war the German government (governments, during the Cold War Era) have made several efforts to arrive at numbers of military and civilian deaths, but no precision is possible. Who would you include? Only German citizens residing within the 1942 borders of Germany? How about Austrians, whose country was forcibly annexed to Germany in 1938? What about ethnic Germans, prewar citizens of places such as Poland and Czechoslovakia? What about German boys of 12 to 14, forced to serve with the military in the last months of the war? It is a complicated question. Would you also include those who starved to death in the year after the war, as many did in Germany? What about those who died from disease because they were weakened by starvation, lack of good clothing and shelter? Would you include the mentally defecive children who were the first ones killed in the concentration camps, beginning even before the fighting started? Would you include children among the German Jews, almost all of whom died in the camps? Even if you are looking just for a total of those killed outright, by aerial bombs, artillery bombardments of their towns as the fighting reached them, shot by enemy troops, nothing like an exact figure is possible, in the chaos of those times exact details not always being recorded, and records not always surviving. The best rough estimates possible would be that somewhere between several hundred thousand and several million German children died - depending on how old you set the cutoff point to be a child.