Arminius: Hitler’s barbarian hero

This article is from Military History Matters issue 136

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In AD 9, a warlord known as Arminius led an army of Germanic warriors belonging to the Cherusci tribe. They were armed to the teeth, carrying wooden spears with fire-hardened tips for throwing and stabbing. Some of them also held long iron slashing swords. A few wore armour of mail, but most were stripped to the waist, pumped up with adrenaline. They gathered in the gloom of the Teutoburger Wald – a vast region of ancient forest in what are today the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.

Arminius and his men shadowed three Roman legions marching through the brushwood and ferns. Some of the younger warriors had let their hair and beards grow – swearing only to cut them when they dipped their weapons in the blood of their Roman enemies. When Arminius finally unleashed his forces on the Romans, the battle was brutal and without mercy. The three Roman legions were wiped from the face of the earth, and as news of the massacre spread, the classical world was rocked to its foundations.

Nearly two thousand years later, this devastating display of primitive energy would have a strange afterlife – as the dark inspiration for Germany’s more modern warlords. In 1875, Kaiser Wilhelm I, the man who oversaw the annihilation of the French Army at the Battle of Sedan and founded the German Second Reich, sat in a pavilion near to the city of Detmold. The site was chosen because it was believed to be close to the original battlefield fought over by Germans and Romans in AD 9. The Kaiser watched as actors dressed as ancient warriors re-enacted the bloody events of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

The Kaiser’s ceremony culminated in the unveiling of a giant statue of Arminius, towering on its pedestal more than 150 feet over the surrounding landscape, sword raised heroically above the scene of the German people’s first great victory. Wilhelm I, proclaimed contemporary poets, was the ‘new Arminius’, strong enough to lead a recently unified Germany into a new age of independence and military triumph. The people once dismissed as savage barbarians would now dominate a modern Europe shaped by their energy and force of will.

Leap forward again by another 63 years, and a new kind of Germanic warlord would enter the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Fired up with the bitter struggle of his rise to supreme power, the founder of the German Third Reich let rip with his true feelings. ‘They regard me as an uneducated barbarian,’ declared Adolf Hitler. ‘Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be barbarians! It is an honourable title. We shall rejuvenate the world! This world is near its end. It is our mission to cause unrest.’

Having finally become chief of his people, Hitler commissioned a series of heroic tapestries to be hung in the Reich Chancellery. They were to depict great German victories – and the first of these was that won in the Teutoburger Wald. Arminius was, for Hitler, the ‘first architect of our liberty’. But who was he really? And what made him a hero to both the Kaiser and Hitler?

The real Arminius

Arminius was no half-naked savage. He was in his late 20s when he took up arms against Rome, but until that point he had enjoyed the game played by most sons of high-status Germanic families living on the frontier of the Roman Empire. When the Romans came calling, looking for native tribesmen to add to their armies to fight as auxiliaries, Arminius – as a prominent member of the Cherusci tribe – was happy to supply such warriors and command them in battle on behalf of the Romans.

In return, Arminius was fast-tracked as a member of the provincial Roman ruling elite. He was made a member of the ordo equester – a Roman knight – and learned the ways of the Romans. He spoke Latin and he and his men were fully trained in the Roman method of war. He no doubt wore the armour and carried the weapons typical of a Roman battlefield commander. It was a highly useful education and one that was a risky gamble for the Romans who taught him. Adolf Hitler was acutely aware of Arminius’ early career, and saw it as a warning for his own Nazi colonial administration.