Yet one cannot begin to understand the transformation that has taken place in Germany, particularly amongst the German people, unless one is aware of the true horrors that were unleashed upon German civilians, and the vindictiveness and brutality of the final phase of the war and Germany’s subsequent occupation. Over 160 historic cities were laid to waste with three-quarters of a million civilians — mostly women and children — being killed. Nineteen million Germans were ethnically cleansed from their homelands in the east, resulting in the further deaths of over 2.25 million souls. The statistics from this period are staggering; 2.5 million German women and girls were raped. One million civilians were dragged off to Soviet Gulags to work as slave labourers, or ‘human reparations’, two-thirds of whom never saw Germany again. The nation lost a quarter of its territory; the remainder was occupied and dismembered. The German Red Cross was banned. German industry was forbidden to export; food and medical imports were prohibited leading to starvation rations and sky-rocketing infant mortality rates. During the first three years of the occupation the aforementioned actions, policies and restrictions led to the loss of a further two million German civilian lives. Very few of these victims were Nazis; instead they were the most vulnerable elements of society, the innocent, the old, the frail and the very young. It is no surprise that the generation that survived this hell of war and the murderous ‘peace’ that followed bequeathed the nation with a new mantra: Nie Wieder Krieg (Never Again War).
The leaders of nations who call upon Germans to support their modern wars today and who regularly criticise Germans for their lack of enthusiasm and commitment to sending combat troops to the war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, would do well to familiarise themselves with this post-war period of history. For no nation has come to understand the true cost of war, or been changed by it more, than Germany. A.C. Grayling, the British moral philosopher, argued in his book Among the Dead Cities, that;
Victor nations can face up to our part in committing crimes in the course of a terrible war; crimes by a long way far less in magnitude than those committed by the Nazis… It is an obvious enough statement that only if a civilization looks at itself frankly and accepts what it sees, can it hope to learn from the exercise, and progress in the right direction thereafter.(16)
However, the most compelling reason to explore this period further has to be the common connection of humanity. Irrespective of race or religion one cannot read about the shrunken and charred remains of babies who were pulled out of the rubble of homes, or how their brains were bashed out against barn walls, or listen to stories of how children were gang raped while their parents were stabbed to death with bayonets, without being moved. Could you remain indifferent if you were to witness such acts; could you remain indifferent just because the victims were Germans? Surely a crime is a crime no matter who commits it? Retribution against Nazi Germany was inevitable, as was the collateral damage and the death of civilians during battle, but certainly not after the fight is over, and certainly not against innocent men, women and children.
There is an important moral dimension in the denial or excuse of any genocide, especially if one believes in the value of history as a lesson from which humanity should at least attempt to learn from its mistakes. Attempts to brush episodes that do not suit patriotic national narratives under the carpet do nothing to further understanding or reconciliation, nor do they validate the vain hope that by covering up excesses for long enough, they will cease to exist. The fall of the Iron Curtain, the collapse of Yugoslavia into civil war and ethnic genocide, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the re-emergence of ethnic tensions among Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, and the reunification of Germany are all testimony to the fact that artificial creations and old enmities do not disappear by a will to ignore them or attempts to deny them.
Death of a Nation purposefully comes to a conclusion during the aftermath of the Second World War with the intent of underlining the fundamental breaking point this was for both Germany and Central Europe, not only in terms of national and ethnic geography, but also in relation to nationhood and national consciousness. In the postscript I also explore aspects of life for both those that were expelled and those that remained in the regions of Germany that she lost after the war. How post-war Germany emerged from the most destructive settlement ever imposed on a defeated nation in modern European history will be the subject of another volume.
1
The Early Germans: From Barbarians at the Gates of Rome to Holy Roman Emperors
There were Germans long before there was a Germany, in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. They shared a similar, yet not identical language, culture and ethnicity. They fought and argued over matters political, territorial, ethnic, religious, economic and ideological, including whether they should be ruled by a centralist king-emperor or a collection of quasi independent territorial principalities and city states, all the while pushing the envelope of intellectual, artistic and technological advancement…(17)
A Traveller’s History of Germany, Robert Cole
GERMANIA
The term ‘Germania’ has come down to us from a text written in AD 98 by Cornelius Tacitus, one of the great and revered classical writers of the Roman era. He describes a race apart of blue-eyed, reddish-golden haired giants from the grim north, whose fearsome women often accompanied their men into battle. A country infested with dense woods, impenetrable swamps and with precious few resources. ‘Who would leave Asia, Africa or Italy to visit Germany,’ Tacitus asks, ‘with its unlovely scenery, bitter climate, its general dreariness to sense and eye, unless it were home?’ He describes the inhabitants of Germania as dirt-poor barbarians, who possess no material wealth other than their numbers and whose only form of recorded history is their ‘hoarsely sung’ songs. Nevertheless, he goes on to praise a land ruled by kings chosen for their valour, whose authority derived from their leading by example; and of their representative councils ‘at which anyone could launch an accusation.’ Tacitus’s ‘Germans’ are a simple, brave, largely monogamous, even hospitable people. ‘It is accounted a sin to turn any man from your door. The host welcomes his guest with the best meal that means allow.’ The Roman historian and senator is essentially presenting his audience with an early version of the noble savage, and contrasting the virtuous barbarians with what the author had come to see as the increasing decadence and moral depravity of modern Rome. But it’s not all praise, Tacitus also describes ‘the Germans’ as prone to boozing and bouts of idleness between battles, writing, ‘no nation abandons itself more completely to banqueting and entertainment than the Germans… (who also) hate nothing more than peace.’(1) Tacitus was writing his account some 200 years after the Romans had first encountered the Furor Teutonicus (Teutonic fury) of the northern ‘barbarians’, for an audience that had become all too aware of the troublesome and warlike nature of the Germanic tribes.
The first contact between Romans and Germanics had come about in 120 BC when the Teutons and Cimbri tribes marched south, out of the Jutland Peninsula, assumedly due to a variety of climatic and environmental issues affecting their homeland including: overpopulation, sea water flooding, ensuing famine, and the pressure of other migrating tribes. A sizeable number of families travelled with their warriors creating a caravan of some 120,000 souls.(2) As they marched through Gaul (modern-day France) they were confronted by the Roman army at Noreia, where the tribes proceeded to annihilate two Roman legions.
They appear again, fifteen years later, in southern Gaul, where this time the Teutons and Cimbri laid waste to a massive Roman force at the battle of Arausio (near Orange in Vaucluse, France), killing 80,000 legionnaires. This calamity went down in Roman folklore as one of the most catastrophic military defeats in the empire’s history.(3) These blood-thirsty tribes battled on and after a three-year rampage in northern Italy, were finally defeated in 101 BC at the battle of Vercellae (Vercelli). The few who did not flee or die during this battle were enslaved, and
it would be their children who would come to form a substantial part of the slave army of Spartacus during his onslaught on the Roman Empire. Although Spartacus’s army was destroyed in 71 BC, the legacy of fear and apprehension of the untamed and uncivilised northerners remained notorious amongst the Romans.
A relentless move south of the Germanic tribes now gathered pace, and by 62 BC a collection of Suebi (Swabians), Marcomanni and Scandinavian Harudes, led by King Ariovistus, conquered the eastern swathe of Gaul, settling in the modern-day region of Alsace. As a result, Tacitus dubbed Ariovistus the Rex Germanorum (King of the Germans).(4) The Gauls had long referred to these warlike, savage people from the east as Germans, a name that was subsequently adopted by Julius Caesar and quickly became the common term used by Romans to describe all tribes north of the Danube and east of the Rhine. As the number and regularity of Germanic tribesmen crossing the Rhine increased, Caesar used the threat that the Germanic tribes posed to the empire to rouse the Roman Senate into giving him an army to conquer Gaul, proclaiming ‘Rome must conquer Gaul or it will fall to the Germanic tribes.’(5)
In 58 BC, Julius Caesar began his conquest of Gaul, defeating Ariovistus’s army in the southern Alsace, driving the tribes back across the Rhine. With Gaul conquered, Caesar crossed the Rhine in 55–53 BC, in an attempt to press home his advantage and quell the restive Germanic tribes. The Roman incursions across the Rhine did not emasculate the barbarians, as they had done in Gaul, rather it roused them into ever-greater revolt. Later, Emperor Augustus, Julius Caesar’s successor sought to crush any remaining threat that the Germanic tribes posed to the newly acquired Roman province of Gaul, and conquer all of Germania. Appointing Quinctilius Varus, a tough new commander to his army on the Rhine, Varus set about raising taxes on Rome’s allies (Foederati) in the region, exacting new tributes while depriving them of what little gold and silver they still possessed. This helped pay for the advance on Germania, but these actions did not endear him to Rome’s recently conquered and subjugated new allies.(6)
One of the most troublesome opponents for the Romans in early first-century Germania was the Cherusci tribe who were led by a highly decorated Roman soldier, a praetorian who had been conscripted and served in Rome’s Pannonian and Illyrian campaigns and was promoted to hold an important position with the troops on the Rhine. The Romans called him Arminius, which, centuries later, was translated by Martin Luther into the more German-sounding Hermann (‘master of men’). Arminius united both his own tribe and an array of other disparate Germanic tribes behind his leadership, rousing them to revolt against the Roman occupation. Why Arminius switched allegiance is not clear. Perhaps for reasons of tribal loyalty or in reaction to the oppressive policies of Quinctilius Varus, possibly because Rome was playing one tribe off against the other to the detriment of his people. What we do know is that he became the fulcrum for discord and was able to rally many German tribes and tribal leaders to oppose the Roman occupation. Arminius skillfully used what he had learned in the service of Rome, and his expertise in navigating Germania’s forested and marshy terrain, to draw Varus’s legions deeper and deeper into ever-denser forest and thickets towards a devastating ambush. He had prepared his trap well. Three Roman legions and 30,000 souls were led to total and utter annihilation. Not one man survived. It took three years for Roman search parties to discover their bones. In true Roman custom, Arminius sent Varus’s head in a box to Emperor Augustus, who upon receiving it was said to have torn apart his robes screaming, ‘Give me back my legions!’(7)
The Varus battle or the Schlacht (slaughter) of the Teutoburger Forest of AD 9 which celebrated its 2,000 year anniversary in 2009, destroyed the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Legions, which constituted over half of the army of the Rhine. They were never reconstituted, and more importantly the Germanic tribes were emboldened. It proved Rome could be beaten. Rome could no longer treat Germania simply as a frontier territory to attack and exploit at will. The Varus battle became a Germano-Roman epic played out at gladiatorial events in the Coliseum. Although Arminius defeated the legions of Augustus, one of the greatest emperors in Roman history, his pregnant wife Thusnelda was subsequently captured by the Romans, dragged to Rome in chains, and paraded before the crowds. In captivity she bore Arminius a son, Thumelicus, who became one of the great gladiators in the arena at Ravenna.(8) In trying to gain ascendancy of his own tribe over many others, Arminius made powerful enemies, not least in his wars against the Marcommani, whom he eventually succeeded in beating back to their native Bohemia. The unity of the Germanic tribes did not hold for long, and although Tacitus described Arminius as ‘the liberator of the Germans’, his reign only lasted for twelve years before members of his own tribe killed him. Whatever unity had existed among the Germanic tribes then died with him.(9)
Historians who would like to draw a line of continuity through history have argued that the Varus battle was a fundamental turning point in European and more specifically German history. They argue that the Rhine became a physical, as well as a cultural, border in Europe, separating the civilisation of Rome from the territory the Romans called ‘Barbaricum’.(10) The idea that Germany was different, because she was not ‘roundly civilised’ by the genocidal occupations of the Roman Caesars, and as a result, evolved along her own Sonderweg, was a popular one, both before and after the Second World War. Yet like all simplifications, this idea does not stand up to closer scrutiny. As we have seen, the Germanic tribes were far from united and rarely remained unanimous for long. Those who argue that Germania remained ‘uncivilised’ ignore the fact that large parts of Germania did come under Roman occupation for nearly 400 years. These areas included cities such as Cologne, Bonn, Mainz, Trier and Straßburg, all of which were thoroughly Romanised.
The true historical significance of the Varus battle, as acknowledged by historians such as Peter Arens and Peter Heather, is that it marked the beginning of a long battle of attrition between the Romans and the Germanic tribes.(11) Germania became a tipping point, the point at which an empire overreaches itself, where the cost of maintaining itself in a region outstrips what it can gain from occupying it. At the peak of her occupation of Germania, Rome needed two armies of 80,000 men along both the Rhine and the Danube, which had to be supplied with produce from Gaul and the Balkans respectively. Germania proved to be the poorest of all of Rome’s conquests. It lacked open spaces for planting crops and was poor in mineral resources — especially in gold, of which there was precious little. The land had to be garrisoned by large numbers of soldiers in extensive fortifications and was largely supplied from the outside, often at great distances over difficult terrain. To the troops, it just appeared a vast and endless stretch of impenetrable forest. If you take a short drive up from the Rhine, past Rüdesheim, through the steep, winding bluffs, and upwards through the dense forest stopping at the Saalburg (near Bad Homburg) — the best reconstructed Roman frontier post in Europe — you will get a taste of what it must have been like. Alternatively, hike through the Black Forest to better understand how difficult it was to fight in this forbidding terrain.
Despite numerous attempts by the Romans to stabilise their northern frontier, the Germanic tribes were soon on the move again. The Friesians in north-western Germania rebelled in AD 29, followed by the Chatti (Hessens) in AD 39, who rebelled again in AD 50 and AD 60. Each time more Roman legionaries were sucked into Germania and the cost of the occupation mounted. In AD 69, the tribe of the Batavi rose up and the Romans had to bring in reinforcements from as far away as Iberia and Britannia to quell the rebellion. Later in AD 83, Emperor Domitian attempted to draw a line under these seemingly ceaseless rebellions, using massive force to advance into Germania with a view to creating a new and more sustainable frontier. Consequently Rome conquered an area that stretched from the Rhine to the western river Main (to the north of modern day Frankfurt), and south to the upper Danube (north of modern day Munich). Then, between AD 83–90, the Romans built the longest fortified frontier in
their history. It was 548 kilometres of ditches, ramparts, moats, walls and fortresses and was the European continent’s Hadrian’s Wall; keeping the barbarians out, but on a much larger and more elaborate scale. It came to be known as ‘the Limes’, which means the border path between two territories or the path along the frontier.(12) Germania was reorganised into two provinces and separate administrative spheres: Germania Inferior (lower Germany), with its capital at Colonia or Cologne, and Germania Superior with its capital at Mogontiacum or modern day Mainz. (See map of Roman Europe.)
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