I was on the subreddit r/DataVizRequests and came across this data set by u/Djangoinspired. It’s a CSV file with with observations about crimes committed by Germans during WWII. I decided to take a look and made several quick histograms.
Here’s a look at the column names:
They’re all fairly self explanatory. I did do some manipulations and added counts so that I could make histograms by the date by year and month. To see the code check out my Github. It’ll make sense once you see the graphs.
The first graph I wanted to create was a general histogram of the age of the criminals. I figured this would be a good starting point. As you can see the age distribution skews older with the bulk of the arrests happening to young adults. I added a color variable to match with the gender of the criminal.
My next thought was to see if different crimes had a different age distribution. Were young people more likely to commit certain crimes? I made a histogram that faceted by the crime type.
Theft is obviously the most commonly committed crime, and its distribution is similar to the previous graph. The three crime graphs that appear to be different are the crimes of “Radio,” “Traffic,” and “Black Market.” By the way Radio is defined as “Failing to surrender a wireless set and parts.” My next thought was to see if different years had different age distributions.
Interestingly 1943 doesn’t have much of a spike. It’s relatively flat. I find it odd and I wonder why 1943 was such a down year for crime. 1943 might have been a good year for Germany. D-day wasn’t until 1944, and the front with Russia hadn’t turned yet. I then thought it would be cool to look at the crimes over time.
Nothing too surprising with this graph. I was wondering if there would be any sort of seasonality. I thought perhaps crimes would spike in the winter when food is hard to find. That does not appear to be the case. the spike in October 1942 is interesting and worth investigating.
My last graph is a look at the crimes over time. To me, the interesting graphs are “Theft” and “Radio.” As the war goes on theft crimes increase. And Radio crimes appear to decrease. It makes sense. As the war goes against Germany, theft would increase as conditions deteriorate. I’m not overly certain why Radio crimes would decrease, perhaps the German police had better things to do?
This was a pretty quick and dirty look at the data. I thought it was an interesting data set and I wanted to just take a quick glance at it. Imgur to all the graphs I made. There are a few more there than I posted.
