Germany's bloodiest war?

[historygeek2021]

Based on this chart, it would seem that the Thirty Years War was Germany's bloodiest war, both on an absolute and relative scale:

Thirty Years War Deaths.png

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30223245?r ... 5881&seq=6

Looking only within Germany's 1871 borders, two studies put Germany's population decline in the first half of the 17th century at 6 million. Looking at the entire Holy Roman Empire, which included Austria, two studies put the population decline at 7 million. Since this is population decline and is net of new births, the death toll must have been even higher.

Wikipedia gives the upper bound for German WW2 deaths at 7.4 million. So it seems that even on absolute scale, there may have been more German deaths in the Thirty Years War then in WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War ... by_country

On a relative scale it's not even close. Within Germany's 1871 borders, the population declined by more than a third during the first half of the 17th century, while that of the Holy Roman Empire fell by nearly half.

The unknown factor is how much of the population decline is represented by refugees who survived. There were many refugees, but the conditions of the time were so harsh that it doesn't seem that many of them survived.