Contrary to sci-fi worlds. Ours is getting better. Fewer people die of hunger and way fewer from war. Especially if they do not believe in the God of Abraham. So I have always wondered whether we could say murderers are disappearing from our cities? It turns out that as long as you live in former Axis countries, then one could maybe say they are.
However, what one can learn from this other than that wars are bad and that we should not have them is unclear. What follows is a rather broad guestimation.
How many murderers are there really?
The Axis forces had around 20M soldiers during WWII. These represented around r0% of the men of conscriptable age (source). These men were responsible for the death of over 50M Allies civilians and soldiers. Furthermore, around half of all Axis soldiers died in the biggest moral victory in history.
Every year, the ca. 300M citizens of these countries (Japan, Italy, Austria, and Germany) kill way fewer than 3.5 people per every 100k inhabitants. So much less than 10k homicides per year. So even if every homicide is performed by a different person, during the past century, there have been less than 1M non-war homicides.
From above, the 10M surviving Axis soldiers should have killed, on average, more than two people each. Sure, people like Pope Benedict say they did not kill during the war. But he was a Pope, I might believe him but that was probably uncommon. So, during the past century, around 11 million murderers walked the Axis countries.
Given that WWII happened over 80 years ago, many of these murderers should have died or will die soon. That leaves us with, say, half a million murderers who killed in the past half-century. Basically, by the time the centennial of WWII comes along, over 95% of all Axis murderers would have died.
We are making progress!
Said no one. My estimates are dangerously broad. How many dozens of people had a direct influence on the Jewish genocide? How many in the Blitz of London? Sure, on average, every Axis soldier killed two people, but the distribution ought to be very, very skewed.
Furthermore, even if it was not skewed and there were millions of murderers, this does not diminish the problems we have today. We cannot congratulate ourselves for not starting WWIII.
CODA
I have been thinking of this exercise for a while. I have the privilege of coming from a country in which the homicide rate is way higher (10+ per 100k vs <1 in Germany), but that did not engage troops during WWII. Furthermore, Costa Rica abolished its army directly after WWII, so no one was killed in the war. This gave me the privilege, growing up, of never having to wonder whether the old people around me were murderers or not.
Ultimately, the exercise could have been shortened. The Axis took around every other man of conscriptable age. A vast portion of them killed or helped kill. So when I see a very old man around my home, at least during the next decade, a toss of a coin can forecast just as well as I can if they murdered a person or not. #IamScared
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