Fight and Flight in the Thirty Years War

On the evening of 22 June 1635 Hans Heberle – a shoemaker from the Swabian village of Neenstetten – set off with his wife and three young children on a 20 kilometre journey to seek shelter in the city of Ulm. Desperate to evade the imperial troops who had set up quarters nearby having plundered local towns, the family steered clear of any settlement where there were likely to be soldiers and spent the night walking across the uneven country through hedgerows, fields, and ditches. It was not until early the next morning that the Heberles reached their destination. They would stay in Ulm for more than a month before it was deemed safe for them, and the thousands of other refugees residing in the city, to return to their homes in early August. This flight was the fifth of almost 30 escapes undertaken by Heberle that he recorded in his account of the Thirty Years War, a conflict which cost the lives of approximately five million people and was the most devastating in European history before the 20th century.