# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 10 17_S29
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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of my veneration, and knew how to lend emphasis to his words also by the most powerful energy of deed. With his death, however, everything changed, and now the Swedish armies also vied with the others in excesses, vices and atrocities. The Swedish historians themselves report this. Chemnitz, who moreover bears an official character, gives the following testimony concerning the army of Duke Bernhard of Weimar under the year 1634:

"The soldiers suffered no order whatever, but so behaved that magistrates and subjects had a just dread of them. In sum, they showed themselves in constant carousing and banqueting, in violent extortions and the wringing of money and money's worth from the people, in beatings, hewing and stabbing, yea, slaying and shooting down the dismayed and emaciated subjects, as has hardly ever happened in war. In Frankfurt in particular enormous taxes were demanded, whereupon there arose great wailing, sighing and crying. Many were driven from house and home, and among innkeepers, shopkeepers, tradesmen and others the fleecing and plundering was meanwhile so great that it can scarcely be told, and while many became poor, few grew rich."

That the Imperialists also might not fall behind, the Croats in particular conducted themselves as veritable ruffians, sawed off arms and legs, drove people to despair by needle-pricks in their tender parts, and, like cannibals, roasted others slowly in bake-ovens or over the fire. They further hammered nails through the heads of their unhappy victims, or poured boiling pitch and lead into their ears, nose and mouth, and so forth.

When at length the French appeared in Germany, the highest measure of misery was reached, since to the gluttony of the Swedes and Germans there now came also the lewdness of the Welsh. "The French armies," relates Engelsüß under the year 1644, "behaved very ill everywhere; no one was spared, robbing and taking were counted as nothing. Those who would not submit to their will had the poor innocent children taken from them by the godless people, who (without regard to the so long and sorrowful oppressions over which so many bloody tears had been shed) dashed them against the ground, or flung them from one house, or from one street to another, in order thereby to destroy, out of vengeance, those from whom they had received abundance. Many honorable men had to run away from house and farm, and set wife and child, and whatever else of this temporal life was dear to them, at the disposal of their wicked will and pleasure; some had even to enter the service of war and be shot down, others only to dwell in sorrowful misery. Against this there was no help, etc."

"So many came to despair, that they would no longer believe at all that there was a God in heaven, supposing that, if he lived, he would strike everything into the earth with thunder and lightning."

Germany was through all this divided into two dreadful parts: into numerous bands of merciless slayers on the one hand, and into an anguished flock of timid sheep on the other, who let themselves be sheared, tormented and murdered without resistance.

With the perpetual marching about of great armies it was inevitable that from time to time a great scarcity of provisions must make itself felt; the lawlessness and the dreadful atrocities of the soldiers, however, knew how to raise the dearths by infallible means to a fearful famine. Not enough that the men-at-arms drove the enjoyments with calculating art to immoderate gluttony, they also took pains, with malicious joy in the damage, to spoil whatever they could not consume themselves. At the same time warlike measures increased the misery, since fields were often laid waste in order to deprive the enemy of provisions. Through the working together of all these causes there arose, from the year 1630 on, a terrible famine in Germany, which spread gradually from one province into another. While in Silesia the death by hunger of many people in the year 1630 could not be prevented even by the artificial bread made of hempseed, acorns and roots, the distress in Franconia in the year 1634 rose almost still higher. How enormous the prices of provisions were, according to the money-value of that time, is shown by the fact alone that an egg cost four to six Kreuzer. When now in some summers a failure of crops was added besides, people died of hunger by many thousands, and of the survivors many took on the nature of wild beasts. For men began, namely, even to satisfy themselves upon the dead, and when that was once in vogue, they carried off the corpses from the gallows, and at last tore open the pits of the knackers (flayers), yea, even the graves, to seek nourishment on half-decayed bodies. Now there naturally arose also infectious diseases, and Germany resembled an open grave, into which not only the citizens plunged in multitudes, but also whole armies, without having seen an enemy.

With hunger and pestilence there were joined also the devastations by fire, as the brutalized soldiers set on fire now single houses, now whole streets, now whole villages and towns.

At the end of the Thirty Years' War the population of Germany had become smaller by one half than it had been at the beginning of the same, the workshops were destroyed, traffic hindered, trade crippled, the land a desert and the people brutalized and become beggars.

Extract from the Documents of the Peace of Westphalia.

We hope to meet the wish of many of our readers, especially the preachers, when we hereby communicate the most important points from the documents of this treaty of peace signed on the 24th of October 1648 at Osnabrück. Two documents were drawn up concerning it; the one concerns the peace between the Emperor on the one side, and the Crown of Sweden as well as the German Estates of the Empire on the other; and the other between Germany and France. The first document, usually called the Swedish, which touches the internal affairs of Germany, is of the nearest importance to us; the same has the following content:

The first article states that between the contending parties there shall be an eternal peace and sincere friendship (Pax sit Christiana universalis, perpetua, veraque et sincera amicitia).

In the second a general oblivion of what has passed (amnesty) is ordained, and

in the third this provision is more closely explained to the effect that all Estates of the Empire and immediate knights of the Empire, as well as the vassals and subjects of both, shall be reinstated in the estates or rights which they have lost on occasion of the Bohemian troubles and of the war of religion in general.

Concerning the banished or emigrated hereditary vassals and subjects of the Emperor and of the House of Austria, it was ordained that free return be permitted them, but that they must submit to the laws of the land. For the restoration of their confiscated estates the Swedish plenipotentiaries at the peace congress had indeed interceded repeatedly; but since the Emperor would let nothing be prescribed to him on this point (and yet the war could not on that account be continued), those estates shall remain with the new possessors. On the other hand, the Austrian hereditary vassals and subjects receive back those estates which were taken from them because they had taken up arms for the Swedes and French against the House of Austria.

The fifth article contains the final settlement concerning the religious disputes.

First, the agreement at Passau of 1554 and the religious peace of 1555 which followed it are confirmed, and the provisions also, upon which they have now agreed for the settlement of the later disputes, are declared for all eternity an inviolable law. Then follow these provisions themselves.

The day which is to decide concerning the restitution in church matters and the political innovations arising therefrom is the first of January 1624. According to this, Electors and Estates of the Empire of both Confessions, including the immediate knighthood, shall be reinstated in their former condition purely and completely, that is, by the annulment of all opposing judgments and ordinances.