Three weeks earlier, on 14 October 1806, Napoleon had destroyed the Prussian field armies at Jena-Auerstedt, and what followed was less a campaign than a manhunt. As the Grande Armée pursued the wreckage north and east, the surrenders came one after another. Ney's corps bottled up a large force in Magdeburg. On 28 October at Prenzlau, Murat bluffed the Prince of Hohenlohe into capitulating with roughly 10,000 men, 64 guns and 1,800 cavalry horses, though the Prussians were neither surrounded nor outnumbered. Four thousand more gave up at Pasewalk the next day, and that night Antoine Lasalle talked the fortress of Stettin into handing over more than 5,000 troops to a brigade of light cavalry. Blocked from the Oder, Blücher turned west.

Some 47,252 Frenchmen were hunting him: Bernadotte's I Corps, Soult's IV Corps, and dragoons, hussars and cuirassiers from Murat's cavalry reserve. Blücher's own column, about 21,000 strong on 1 November, fought a series of creditable rearguard actions as it fell back. At Crivitz on 3 November his hussars answered a French summons to surrender with a charge, swept away the light cavalry that had ridden up too confidently, and forced Bernadotte himself to shelter inside an infantry square. But his men were starving and worn out by constant marching. He gave up a strong position at Gadebusch without a fight and made for Lübeck, hoping to link up with a Swedish brigade he knew was somewhere near. The Prussians appeared before the neutral Hanseatic city on the morning of 5 November and forced the southern gate at midday.

Lübeck's medieval defences were half dismantled by 1806, but the wet ditches in front of the old walls were still a real obstacle. Blücher packed ten guns around the northern Burgtor and four more on the Bellevue bastion across the Trave to catch attackers in crossfire; in all, seventeen battalions and fifty-two guns defended the city under the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. At six in the morning Murat rode down the Pletz hussars on the southern approaches and chased them inside. Bernadotte massed cannon on the Galgenburg hill east of the Burgtor, Werlé's 27th Light fought its way into the St Gertrude churchyard, and the 94th Line, invisible in the powder smoke, stormed the main battery outright. Around one o'clock the northern defenders broke and ran through the gate with the French behind them. Blücher, believing the north secure, was surprised at his headquarters in the Golden Angel Inn; he escaped with his son and Karl von Müffling, but his chief of staff, Gerhard von Scharnhorst - the man who would later rebuild the Prussian army - was taken with most of the staff. The fighting moved into the market place and the Königstraße, where Yorck was wounded. At the Mühlentor, caught in fire from front and rear, one regiment lost 300 men before two thousand Prussians surrendered. The Owstein Regiment formed square at the Hüxtertor and was engulfed. By 3:30 PM the city was French.

What happened next is the part that belongs to Lübeck rather than to either army. The victorious troops plundered the city thoroughly, and contemporaries did not pretend otherwise - the phrase that survives from the accounts is "pillage, rape, and murder." Bernadotte and other senior officers tried to stop it, reportedly standing in front of houses with sabres drawn. It made no difference. Writers sympathetic to the French, among them Antoine-Henri Jomini and the comte Dumas, admitted the atrocities. The victims were townspeople - merchants, servants, women and children in a city that had declared itself neutral and had been given no say in any of it. The historian Francis Loraine Petre judged Blücher at least partly culpable, because he chose to make his stand in a neutral city after promising he would not. Casualty estimates vary: the French marshals' own contemporary report claimed 3,000 Prussians killed and wounded and 5,000 to 6,000 captured, while historians Digby Smith and Alain Pigeard put Prussian losses lower, at roughly 2,000 killed and wounded and 4,000 captured out of some 15,000 engaged; Pigeard puts French losses at about 1,500 killed and wounded.

At daybreak on 7 November, Blücher stood at Ratekau north of the city with 4,050 infantry and 3,760 cavalry - what was left of 21,000. The Trave lay to his left, the Baltic behind him, and to his right the Danish frontier, held by Johann Ewald's troops under orders to defend Danish neutrality by force. In front were three marshals and as many as 35,000 men. He asked for terms, was told his soldiers must become prisoners of war, and surrendered to all three marshals, appending a line at the foot of the document: "I capitulate, since I have neither bread nor ammunition - BLUCHER." One quieter consequence outlasted all of it. Among the prisoners was a small Swedish force under Count Gustav Mörner. Bernadotte treated its officers with conspicuous courtesy, giving Mörner his own lodgings. Mörner and his nephew Karl Otto later helped set in motion the process that made the French marshal Crown Prince of Sweden in 1810, and King Charles XIV John in 1818.