ABSTRACT
The damage done to life and property made the war the most destructive in Germany's history before the mid twentieth century. Modern scholars are more or less in agreement that Germany lost some 40 per cent of its rural and 33 per cent of its urban population in consequence of war and epidemics. Germany recovered slowly from the war, remaining a poor country until the nineteenth century. The devastation wrought by the war years led to far-reaching changes in the social structure of Germany generally. Modern historical research with its greater concentration on regional studies and on social development has modified our picture of Germany in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. In the very different conditions prevailing along the Baltic littoral, the Thirty Years War greatly accelerated changes in the social structure of the landed population, which had been in train since late medieval times.
