Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Würtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood. In fact, from that time on the purely Teutonic race in Germany has been largely replaced by the Alpine types in the south and by the Wendish and the Polish types in the east. This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature and skull characters. The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause.
In addition, the Thirty Years’ War virtually destroyed the land owning yeomanry and lesser gentry formerly found in mediæval Germany as numerously as in France or in England. The religious wars of France, while not as devasting to the nation as a whole as was the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, nevertheless greatly weakened the French cavalier type, the “petite noblesse de province.” In Germany this class had flourished and throughout the Middle Ages contributed great numbers of knights, poets, thinkers, artists and artisans who gave charm and variety to the society of central Europe. But, as said, this section of the population was practically exterminated in the Thirty Years’ War and this class of gentlemen practically vanishes from German history from that time on.
When the Thirty Years’ War was over there remained in Germany nothing except the brutalized peasantry, largely of Alpine derivation in the south and east, and the high nobility which turned from the toils of endless warfare to mimic on a small scale the court of Versailles. After this long struggle the boundaries in central Europe between the Protestant North and the Catholic South follow in a marked degree the frontier between the northern plain inhabited chiefly by Nordics and the more mountainous countries in the south populated almost entirely by Alpines.
It has taken Germany two centuries to recover her vigor, her wealth and her aspirations to a place in the sun.
During these years Germany was a political nonentity, a mere congeries of petty states bickering and fighting with each other, claiming and owning only the Empire of the Air as Napoleon happily phrased it. Meantime France and England founded their colonial empires beyond the seas.
When in the last generation Germany became unified and organized, she found herself not only too late to share in these colonial enterprises, but also lacking in much of the racial element and still more lacking in the very classes which were her greatest strength and glory before the Thirty Years’ War. To-day the ghastly rarity in the German armies of chivalry and generosity toward women and of knightly protection and courtesy toward the prisoners or wounded can be largely attributed to this annihilation of the gentle classes. The Germans of to-day, whether they live on the farms or in the cities, are for the most part descendants of the peasants who survived, not of the brilliant knights and sturdy foot soldiers who fell in that mighty conflict. Knowledge of this great past when Europe was Teutonic and memories of the shadowy grandeur of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, who, generation after generation, led Teutonic armies over the Alps to assert their title to Italian provinces, have played no small part in modern German consciousness.
These traditions and the knowledge that their own religious dissensions swept them from the leadership of the European world lie at the base of the German imperial ideal of to-day and it is for this ideal that the German armies are dying, just as did their ancestors for a thousand years under their Fredericks, Henrys, Conrads and Ottos.
But the Empire of Rome and the Empire of Charlemagne are no more and the Teutonic type is divided almost equally between the contending forces in this world war. With the United States in the field the balance of pure Nordic blood will be heavily against the Central Powers, which pride themselves on being “the Teutonic powers.”
Germany is too late and is limited to a destiny fixed and ordained for her on the fatal day in 1618 when the Hapsburg Ferdinand forced the Protestants of Bohemia into revolt.
Although as a result of the Thirty Years’ War the German Empire is far less Nordic than in the Middle Ages, the north and northwest of Germany are still Teutonic throughout and in the east and south the Alpines have been thoroughly Germanized with an aristocracy and upper class very largely of pure Teutonic blood.