Imperial dead
About 4-8 million -- the central band.
The 4-8 million band for the Empire is a demographic estimate, not a body count. Some lordships lost over half their people; others far less.
Wolves in empty villages appear in chronicles -- a literary fact that matches empty tax rolls.
Bands
Some territories
Losses above one-third in the worst-studied cases.
Battle share
A minority of deaths; disease and hunger first.
Exile
Bohemian and Palatine Protestant diasporas.
Fiscal wreck
Tax capacity and tillage collapsed together.
Regions
Bohemia
Revolt, defeat, re-Catholicisation.
German central lands
The demographic core of the catastrophe.
Baltic / Pomerania
Swedish entry and later gains.
Alsace / Rhine
French pressure and later territorial afterlives.
Spain / Netherlands
A parallel Eighty Years' War ending in 1648 for the Dutch.
England (observer)
Pamphlets and later IR classrooms -- not a main front.
Key numbers
Span1618-1648
Imperial deathsabout 4-8 million
Westphalia24 Oct 1648
Gustavus death1632
Makers
Military enterprisers
Wallenstein as the named type.
Dutch finance
Credit and the longer Spanish-Dutch war.
French subsidies
Richelieu's gold as a weapon.
Print shops
Atrocity pamphlets as wartime media.
Imperial chancery
Legal war alongside field war.
Peace hosts
Westphalian cities as diplomatic infrastructure.
Recovery took generations. The war is why some German family names vanish from parish books in the 1630s.
Art loot and forced conversion are part of the bill beside corpses.