September 13, 1950: West Germany Counts Itself for the First Time

Today in 1950 · Wednesday, September 13, 1950

Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, photographed in 1950

Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, photographed in 1950 · U.S. government photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, census-takers fanned out across the year-old Federal Republic of Germany for the country's first national census — the first full count on West German soil since the Nazi-era census of 1939, and the first ever conducted by the new democratic state founded in May 1949.

What they were counting was a nation transformed by catastrophe. Between 1944 and 1950, nearly eight million expellees from the former eastern territories had arrived in the West, joining millions of bombed-out city dwellers in a country whose housing stock lay partly in ruins. The census — population and housing together — was the young republic's first systematic look at who it now was: roughly 51 million people, redistributed by war.

East Germany had run its own separate count a month earlier, in August 1950. The two censuses, taken weeks apart on either side of the new inner-German border, mark the statistical beginning of the two-Germanys era — the divided normality that would last four decades.

Also on this day

  • US cruisers and destroyers began the pre-landing bombardment of Wolmi-do in Inchon harbor — D-day minus two.
  • Three fishermen died in a storm at Glacier National Park, Montana.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — a folk song adapted by Lead Belly, who died broke in December 1949 — one year before it became the biggest hit of 1950. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: Late summer's big pictures — “Sunset Boulevard,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Winchester '73” — were still crowding the marquees as the fall season warmed up.
⚾ In sports: Joe DiMaggio went 4-for-4 with three home runs at Washington's Griffith Stadium on the 10th, keeping the Yankees a half game back in an AL race with three teams packed within one game.

Sources: GHDX: Germany 1950 census record · Beyond History: German census history · Wikipedia: September 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from September 2026

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