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At seven in the morning on May 20, 1631, 18,000 soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II stormed the ancient German city of Magdeburg. The Protestant city was in rebellion against its Catholic overlord but had only 7,000 defenders, almost half of whom were armed children. Plague had weakened the populace, and ammunition was low. By mid-morning, Magdeburg was overrun. By noon, it was ablaze. The thousand citizens who huddled in the cathedral were saved; but outside the flames lit hellish scenes of murder and rapine. Twenty-thousand corpses were eventually heaved into the Elbe River. Of 2,000 city buildings, only 200 survived. A year later, the ruins of Magdeburg sheltered less than 500 souls. The city's destruction would go down as the most notorious atrocity of the Thirty Years War.

The war fought between 1618 and 1648 remains, by many measures, the most destructive in Europe's history. During those years the Holy Roman Empire—which governed most of the European continent east of the Rhine—lost as many as eight million subjects, or a staggering 20% of its population. This amount to three times Europe's death rate during World War II. Whole swaths of central Europe were depopulated, abandoned to wild pigs and wolves.

Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory,

The Thirty Years War began, to be sure, as a religious civil war within the Holy Roman Empire—a ramshackle collection of dukedoms and bishoprics ruled by the Catholic Hapsburgs, who sought, nostalgically, to govern all of Christendom as universal monarchs. Since the Reformation, their Protestant subjects had proved unenthused about this project. In 1617, Bohemian Protestants revolted against the empire, announcing their rebellion with the notorious "defenestration of Prague," in which three imperial officials were flung out of a palace window. Crying out to the Virgin Mary as they fell, they were saved by landing in a dung heap.

The empire struck back, crushing the Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. It required four axes for the executioner to behead the 28 condemned "defenestrators." But the war did not end. A glutted market of mercenaries conspired to prolong it. Eventually foreign powers intervened, eager to profit from the empire's mayhem. The most important of these was Sweden, which became, under Gustavus Adolphus, the empire's unlikely scourge. Gustavus fell in battle in 1632 but not before he had scythed his way across central Europe. France, although Catholic, was eager to sabotage its Hapsburg rivals and fought alongside the Swedes.

An epic stalemate developed. At the war's peak, a quarter-million men were under arms. Although they fought with everything from medieval pikes to crude poison-gas shells, their most lethal weapons were the plague, typhus and dysentery that marched with them. For every combat death, three soldiers died of disease. Rural areas were particularly ravaged. In 1636, English travelers along the river Main encountered "a wretched little village" inhabited only by corpses. "We spent that night walking up and down with carbines in our hands," one traveler wrote, "listening fearfully to the sound of shots in the woods around us."