Who estimated war casualties from tightly-controlled government news sources? I've read about this historical case before so I thought it would be very easy to Google, but after a few dozen queries that come up with nothing relevant I'm ready to punt.
The story goes like this.  There is a war on  (maybe WWI?) and for strategic reasons the government wants to avoid disseminating useful information about the number of casualties they have sustained.  As such, they don't publish obituaries for everyone who has died in the war.  Instead, they limit the number of obituaries printed each week to some number $n$, where $n$ is far lower than the actual number of weekly casualties.
However, it's noticed that in the obituaries they first see obituaries mainly for so-and-so's first son, and later on the proportion of second sons increases, then third sons, etc.  Making some assumptions, they're able to successfully estimate casualties from this information.
Does anyone have the details?

You may be referring to Hugo Steinhaus. He was a Polish-Jewish mathematician, which resorted to the ingenious method you sketch to estimate the casualties of the Nazis, while in hiding during WWII. What source I got this information from, I cannot remember. It was a book, which I may have given away to someone long ago; but I checked the information from
https://hmong.es/wiki/Hugo_Steinhaus (in Spanish) a moment ago, and you will surely find sources in English if you google for Hugo Steinhaus.
