Many of the 500,000 French babies born annually during the occupation are believed to have been German-sired. Despite these contributions, the French birth rate, already low before the war, ran consistently behind the death rate. In six years (1936-42), France's population dropped 4,000,000. The return of 2,000,000 Frenchmen from German prison camps and slave labor battalions, now under way, will be a step in the right direction, but probably not enough of one. For many of these men have been so weakened by undernourishment and ill treatment that they have temporarily lost either the desire or the capacity for fatherhood.
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