Victims throughout Europe during Christian Reformation inclding

100,000+ German Peasants

Müntzer and the Peasant War: AD 1525
Thomas Müntzer, something of a firebrand as a preacher, makes several attempts - in various German towns and in Prague - to lead his congregation in a cruade against the godless. He finally succeeds at Mühlhausen, in 1525. In the anarchic excitement of the Peasant War, begun in the previous year in the Black Forest region, Müntzer marches at the head of the faithful against any who will oppose them. Although claimed by Marxist historians as a political revolutionary, Müntzer's writings suggest that he is inspired mainly by religious indignation. Any established church is his enemy. He yearns, like the Anabaptists, for a religion of the people.
Luther is well aware of the potential for anarchy in such a movement. As the violence escalates, he takes steps to dissociate himself. Accustomed now to this age of polemical pamphlets, he pens an onslaught which is violently intemperate in its language. Entitled Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants, the tract urges: 'Let everyone who can smite, slay and stab, remembering that nothing can be more devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog.'
Unfortunately for Luther, by the time the pamphlet is in circulation Müntzer and the peasants have been defeated, in May, by the local nobility in a battle at Frankenhausen. Aristocratic reprisals are predictably ferocious - on some estimates as many as 100,000 peasants are rounded up and butchered. Müntzer is captured, tortured until he recants and then executed. Luther's words have been quoted against him ever since. The experience confirms Luther in his distrust of politics. Instead, in this same year, he pioneers a new domestic version of the Christian pastor in the community.	hnp

Reference: HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?groupid=3491&HistoryID=ad03