ABSTRACT
The US pioneered technical developments, but made the Census Office permanent only in 1902. It kept most contents the same from 1890 to 1930 when they introduced the unemployment question. The New Dealers reformed census taking, introducing sampling by asking extra questions about e.g. parental birthplace only from sample-line household members. Also Britain, France and the Scandinavian countries took censuses at regular intervals, and the suffragettes campaign to boycott the British 1911 census succeeded only marginally. In Germany and Russia, the unstable and revolutionary conditions hindered regular census taking. The first full-count Soviet Union census in 1926 was successful in parallel with the Polar census of ethnic minorities. The 1937 census became part of the Moscow processes; the census directors were executed, the state using its power to get rid of census manuscripts and aggregate results.
In Germany, the conflict about the enumerations was mainly between the central state and the regional level. The Weimar Republic managed to take one national census, in 1925, postponing the next until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. It is unclear how useful this and their last census in 1939 were during Holocaust. Statistical information about persecuted minorities helped build the administrative apparatus, and the nominative microdata was used to build population registers. The minorities were forced to contribute statistical information and name lists.
