Could Germany have won WWII?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Well, even on the premise that children are born 50/50, there has been at least three generations since the Great War. Any deficit would have recovered in the younger generations by now, so going to a club with a bunch of young adults will not the be the result of the Great War, unless these 20 girls on the dance floor are Old Age Pensioners.

As a result of normal PH factors, there is a slight advantage toward girl children, usually in a .2% or so swing. You are, of course essentially correct that with 3 full generations of "turnover" since 1945 that a more or less 50/50 balance must have reasserted itself.

That said, I don't think that the Russians have yet recovered from the deaths of so many during the Stalin era. Russia lost more than 13 % of its population (maybe even higher if the Soviets had been inflating the population numbers for propaganda purposes) in WW2 and those figures are exclusive of the purge/starvation campaigns of the 1930s or the Gulag efforts of the Post-War era. The pre-war CCCPP claimed over 168 million. Current day Russia claims fewer than 144 million. By contrast the UK had 46.5 million in 1939 and has over 62 million today. France had over 40 millions in 1939 and now has a population of over 61 million. The USA had 132 million in 1940 and has over 310 million today.

Some of Russian's retrograde is the divesture of all of its other countries -- the stans, Belorussia etc. But even if you add in their current total population, Russian barely keeps pace with France in terms of growth percentage.