Adapted from Chapter 3 of the book Germania.

Disasters in the fourteenth century killed more people in Germany than at any other time in that country’s history.

What happened in Poland and the Soviet Union in the early 1940s is similar to what happened in those regions in the 1340s and the 1630s.

Unlike the destruction that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the Second World War, the destruction that occurred in the first half of the fourteenth century was limited to German territory.

The disastrous period that began in the German territories after 1280 lasted longer than either the Thirty Years War or the Second World War.

It is likely that more Germans died in the disasters of the late Middle Ages than died in the Thirty Years War and the Second World War put together.