Altona, night of 9 January 1713. During the Great Northern War, Swedish forces — in revenge for earlier devastation — approached the Danish-owned town of Altona, ordered the inhabitants to leave immediately, and burned it to ashes.
The refugees walked to nearby Hamburg.
At the gates they were refused admittance. The citizens of Hamburg were afraid of infectious disease.
Most of the homeless died in front of the walls of Hamburg.
For civilians in wartime, the fall from prosperity to misery could be almost instantaneous. And people’s terror was sustained not only by war but by rumours of war: in a largely illiterate society, news travelled by rumour, with the inevitable exaggeration and deficient sense of what was probable.
Source. Passage supplied 2026-08-02. Its own footnotes cite Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII, in Œuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1957), pp. 233–4 — and, on the spread of rumour in provincial France, Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789.
Attribution not confirmed
The passage reads like Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 — the period, theme and footnote style all match, and the book is in the vault. But that note holds only metadata, not full text, so I could not verify it. Confirm the book and page before citing it in writing. The Voltaire and Lefebvre footnotes above came with the passage and are safe to repeat as its sources.
What it argues
Fear of contagion overrides compassion — and it does so at the level of ordinary, respectable people making a civic decision. Nobody in Hamburg had to be cruel. They only had to be frightened, and to have a gate.
Three usable claims:
- The fall can be instantaneous. A prosperous town to a column of refugees in one night. Useful against any argument that assumes social stability is the default state.
- The bystander problem has a physical form. This isn’t a story about a wicked army — the Swedes are almost incidental. It’s about the second decision, made by people who were not at war with anyone.
- Rumour does the work of information. Terror was sustained by hearsay in a society that couldn’t check it — a point that transfers directly to and Conspiracy Theories.
Pairs with Only the Animals Stayed — Messina and Florence in 1347–48, where fear of plague dissolved the bonds between parents and children. Same mechanism, 365 years apart: contagion fear is the solvent that reliably breaks social obligation. Told together they make the argument that compassion is a fair-weather achievement, not a human constant.
Also usable in as the concrete image of what “the cost of watching” looks like — the civilians are not killed by the war, they’re killed by the closed gate afterwards.