In Germany and the Czech Republic, however, the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48 still haunts the collective memory – as a uniquely painful national trauma that resulted in the deaths of anywhere between five and eight million soldiers and civilians from battle, famine, and disease.
From a British perspective, the two World Wars of 1914-45 cast such a long shadow over Europe’s past that it can often obscure a third cataclysm, which for nearly three centuries had the dubious honour of being the deadliest conflict in the continent’s history.
