[The following is in regards to plague that was spreading through modern-day Germany during the time of the Thirty Years War. This is only an excerpt of an excerpt provided by the author.]

Author’s Note:

The chronicle of Johann Daniel Minck (1611-1644), the Protestant preacher in Bieberau in central Hesse, contains his firsthand impressions of the effects of the plague. Minck describes the mass death, the destabilization of everyday life, and the disruption of normal practices, especially the impossibility of burying the dead in the usual manner. At the same time, his chronicle allows a look at the preacher’s belief system: like many of his contemporaries, he saw the plague as God’s just punishment of sinful humanity.

Meanwhile, in addition to the soldiers as scourge of war, God sent the plague after us. It already started at the beginning of the 1,635th year as a general weakness, from which many died. In the spring of the same year, as the heat began to build up, the poison increased massively and the disease changed to a poisonous pestilence, from which the people quickly fell in such masses that one could not bury them.

[…]

Because, as mentioned above, Lichtenberg was so full of people [in flight] that many had to sleep outside, many headed for home, because they wanted to die under their own roofs. However, there they were not safe from the robbers, who threw the sick out of their beds, searched them, and even tortured the sick, thinking that they could find some money or bread.

Many died in the open countryside, so that nobody knew anything about them, and therefore very many lay unburied for a very long time, so that they were totally decomposed and full of worms. Often the sick lay by the dead in one bed. I myself heard a sick girl at the school in Umstadt pitifully screaming and yelling and bewailing about the worms which crawled onto her from her dead mother. Therefore I arranged with the magistrate to have the mother buried. After this happened, people – who they were, I do not know – left dead bodies in front of the door to my schoolhouse. If I wanted to have them removed, I had to have them buried.

It was the same situation in the entire district of Lichtenberg, not to mention other areas of the land; therefore special grave diggers were requested by the authorities. Among them was Hans Weiss from Bieberau, still alive. They had to go to the villages now and again to look for and bury the dead. They found some [bodies] that were so decomposed that they had to drag them to the holes with hoes. Some had been torn up by dogs and were unrecognizable.

[…]

They made great holes, threw eight, ten, or twelve and fifteen in a hole, without a single coffin, without any ringing or singing. Relatively few were brought to the proper graveyard; rather, because of the great danger in Hausen and Lichtenberg, they were simply buried in masses on the hills, in fields, pastures, vineyards, and gardens, especially toward the bulwark next to the donkey path, including two preachers who had fled from Erbach. And even Görg Uloth, tax collector of Lichtenberg, could not bring his dear old mother to Bieberau to the graveyard, and instead had her buried in the flower bed next to his winepress.

And there came down from the air so much poison that everybody thought that no one would survive it; therefore such pestilence was no longer feared by anyone, because everyone gave up hope of living.

Source:

Medick, Hans, and Benjamin Marschke. “Scourges of War: Plague, Starvation, and Cannibalism.” Experiencing the Thirty Years War: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. 112-13. Print.

Further Reading:

Thirty Years’ War