The Nazi Hunt for Tacitus' Germania - The Book That Fueled a Genocide

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:15][music] [music] I'm 1944 in the ruins of wartime Italy, elite German troops are on a special mission.

[00:00:37]>> We saw people beaten up, killed, they just shot them.

[00:00:44]>> They have been sent by Hinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazis murderous SS to seize a precious treasure before Italy falls into Allied hands.

[00:00:54]They're searching for what has been called the Bible for the Aryan race. A book which will justify the most horrific policies of Nazi Germany.

[00:01:04]It gives an academic justification to the idea of a difference between peoples.

[00:01:09]>> This is what our ancestors used to be like, pure and unlike any other people.

[00:01:16]Once you create the idea that some races are inferior, then you've got a legitimacy to start murdering people, you know, by the race load. The book is so important that Himmler will stop at nothing to get it.

[00:01:31]This is the true story of the Nazi quest for the book of power.

[00:01:44]I bet in Ireland.

[00:01:52][cheering] >> In January 1933, Adolf Hitler took office as the Chancellor of Germany.

[00:02:04]But his hold on power was not as secure as it seemed.

[00:02:09]The Nazis had won less than half the popular vote. the nation [music] was divided and he needed to unite it.

[00:02:20]>> You've got, you know, in the middle of the 20th century a country that only really exists as a concept because it was until just a few years before in real terms just a collection of very very small states. How do you unite these people? Well, the way to unite them is to create a mythology.

[00:02:50]The myth that the Nazis hoped could unite the German people was the idea that they were descended from a race superior to all others, the Aryans.

[00:03:03]The Nazis claimed that the Aryans had originated from Atlantis, the mythical city first described by Plato as the birthplace of all civilization. [music] They claimed that in prehistoric times, these Aryans had settled on the north German plains.

[00:03:23]They were said to be a race of tall flax-haired warriors who uniquely possessed [music] the genius to create civilization.

[00:03:32]Hitler believed that the German people were descended directly from these superhumans.

[00:03:38][music] >> There is this need in the Nazis to demonstrate that they were a kind of cradle of civilization, that they'd been there for um a long, long time.

[00:03:51]The Nazis claimed that before the ancient Greeks and Romans were ruling the Mediterranean, the ancestors of the Germans had already spawned a great northern European civilization.

[00:04:03][music] >> There does seem to be a tendency to want to endorse your current position in the world by taking your history as far back as it can go to show that you got there first. perhaps you're more advanced, perhaps you're um more legitimate to be in this role.

[00:04:23]>> This Aryan myth was the one the Nazis believed could rally the German people to their banner.

[00:04:30]>> Everything has to tie back to promote the idea that the Germans are the best quote race in the world.

[00:04:41]But the fly in the ointment was that there was no proof that this master race had ever existed.

[00:04:51]But an ancient manuscript was said to exist which [music] supported the Nazis ideas. It told of a people who lived in Germany thousands of years before. And the Nazis [music] believed that this book would prove all their theories to be true.

[00:05:07]It was called the Gmania and was written in Rome nearly 2,000 years before.

[00:05:14]In the 1st century AD, the Roman Empire was reaching its height, stretching from Africa and the Mediterranean to the lands of the Britons. But the Gmania told of a group of people in the north of mainland Europe who even the Romans could not quell.

[00:05:33]A people called the Gmanan.

[00:05:37]In 9 AD, one of Rome's most famous generals, [music] Quintilius Baris, led an army of three legions to conquer the Gamman.

[00:05:53]Under their fierce warrior king, Herman, the Gmanan tribes came face to face with the Romans in the Tutterberg forests.

[00:06:14]>> [screaming] [cheering] >> There they dealt the mighty empire a devastating blow.

[00:06:23][cheering] All three Roman legions were wiped out.

[00:06:31]Germany for the Romans was a very emotive place precisely because of this disaster in AD9 [music] where this general Quintilius Ferris lost these three legions.

[00:06:45]>> So great was the disaster the Roman Emperor Augustus conceded that the Gmanan were just too ferocious to be quelled.

[00:06:54]Augustus decided [music] that Germany should not be pushed further as a conquest. And that was a very powerful [music] message to send out to subsequent emperors. It's daunting. It's forbidding.

[00:07:16]The Nazis claimed that the modern Germans were the direct descendants of King Herman's fearsome warriors.

[00:07:24]They also believed that the book the Gmania held written proof of the superiority of their ancestors.

[00:07:34]The fabled Gmania was written not by a German but by the Roman senator and orator Cornelius Tacitus around the year 98 AD.

[00:07:45]He was um one of the most accomplished speakers of his generation and he had an exemplary political career. He even became a console and became what many people believe is the greatest Roman historian.

[00:08:06]Tacitus wrote at the time of the most decadent period in Roman history.

[00:08:12]His works describe every sorted detail of the reigns of Rome's leaders. The emperor Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero.

[00:08:22]But for the Gman and Tacitus was apparently full of praise.

[00:08:29]>> He says that no other nation, no other group of people had troubled the Romans so much uh as the Germans with their strong sense of liberty. In the book, The Gammania, Tacitus describes [music] in admiring detail the culture of the Gaman tribes, the gods they worship, how they select their kings, what weapons they use in battle, [music] and their custom of fiercely training their youth as warriors.

[00:08:59]Their characteristics are very much, I think, put on a pedestal as qualities that Romans actually admire. for example, their chastity and their simplicity in terms of not being interested in money, in profit, um, and that sort of thing.

[00:09:19]>> No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted. They choose their kings by birth, their generals by merit. No nation indulges more profusely in entertainments and hospitality.

[00:09:33]Tacitus' descriptions appeared to match the image of their ancestors that the Nazis were keen to promote to the German people.

[00:09:41]>> You're presented with uh idealized native types who have a certain kind of purity about them and go about things in a very different way from uh from Romans.

[00:09:53]>> There's this whole tradition of reading the gamma as if it were a [music] glorification of the noble savage.

[00:10:03]More than that, Tacitus describes the physical characteristics of these mighty Germans.

[00:10:10]He wrote about how they had fierce blue eyes, blonde hair, and huge frames.

[00:10:18]In short, they were perfect Aryans.

[00:10:23]For the Nazis, the Gmania was proof that the German people were descended from a mighty [music] race superior to all others. and provided a direct link to their Aryan origins.

[00:10:36]And the words of Tacitus would resonate with one German in particular.

[00:10:50]In 1924, a young failed chicken farmer called Hinrich Himmler read the Kamania on a long train journey and would be inspired by the words of Tacitus.

[00:11:02]>> There he found written by a Roman historian 2,000 years before many of the things that he already believed in. So he basically found them confirmed.

[00:11:14]After reading the Gmania, the young Himmler confided to his diary, >> "I was lost in the glorious [music] image of the loftiness, purity, and nobleness of our ancestors."

[00:11:28]He wrote down in his diary that he hoped that the Germans would be so again. So, it had a huge impact on him.

[00:11:39]Himmler would go on to become one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.

[00:11:50]Throughout the 1930s, Himmler becomes a very very key figure in the Third Reich.

[00:11:56]He's a very underrated figure because he's quiet and unassuming. He looks quite bookish with his little glasses and his short hair and he's a former chicken farmer and obviously that's quite funny. But actually, don't underestimate Hinrich Himmler. This is a man throughout the whole arc of the Nazi regime is a man who grabs power little by little.

[00:12:21]Himmler rose to be head of the SS, a fearsome paramilitary organization which controlled much of the Nazi state.

[00:12:30]And Himmler would shape his SS in the image of the warrior race described in the Gammania.

[00:12:37]One could in many ways say that what he promised himself in his diary [music] in 1924 he would then try to live up to as the leader of the SS. He himself conceived of the SS as the vanguard of the future Germanic empire.

[00:13:03]But more than that, Himmler believed the words of Tacitus didn't just have lessons for the SS, but for all true Germans.

[00:13:19]>> [music] >> The Gammana by Tacitus is referred to as a Bible that every thinking German should possess because people should aspire to be as morally elevated, straightforward, honorable, direct, and brave as their Germanic ancestors allegedly had Himmler wanted the Nazi state to be a reflection of the ancient German society described by Tacitus.

[00:13:57]Just as in the Gmania, children were taught to swear loyalty to their leader.

[00:14:01]In this case, Adolf Hitler.

[00:14:05]>> The chief fights for victory. His vassels fight for their chief.

[00:14:14]Students were taught to be like their warrior forefathers, even wrestling and exercising with weapons.

[00:14:23]Naked youths dance amid swords and lances that threaten their lives.

[00:14:28]Experience gives them skill and skill again gives grace.

[00:14:33]The honor cross was awarded to women [music] who bore many children as this was something much admired in Gman society.

[00:14:43]The offspring reproduced the strength of the parents.

[00:14:48]And in the policy of Leman's round, German people were told that the lands of neighboring countries, which had once been the home of ancient Germanic tribes, were rightfully theirs.

[00:15:02]But beyond even that, Himmler would use Tacitus to justify the most evil of all Nazi policies.

[00:15:16]In 1935, the Nazis implemented the first of many racial laws called the law for the protection of German blood and honor. It was an ominous first step in the Nazis anti-Jewish policies.

[00:15:33]It prohibits marriages between Aryan Germans and Jewish Germans.

[00:15:40]>> And it was based on one paragraph of the Gmania.

[00:15:45]The >> key line in Gmania is when uh Tasters writes that the Germans are a people unto themselves. The implication being that there's no breeding with any other race or with any other people. They're a homogeneous group of people.

[00:16:03]Tacitus said they hadn't mixed with other people. So, not only were they indigenous, but they were pure and unlike any other people.

[00:16:14]>> The Nazis were using the words of Tacitus to justify policies which would unleash an unimaginable terror on the world.

[00:16:22]>> It gives an academic justification to the idea of a difference between peoples. And once you create the idea that some races are inferior, you then create the idea that some lives are worth less than others.

[00:16:39]Once you create that idea, then you've got a legitimacy to start murdering people, you know, by the race load.

[00:16:51]In other words, there is a direct link between their interpretation of the Gmania and the Nazi death camps.

[00:17:01]Because of their understanding of Tacitus, over 11 million people would be murdered in the Nazi genocide.

[00:17:15]That's how disastrously influential um that particular paragraph was.

[00:17:24]So important was this book to Nazi ideology that Himmler desperately wanted the authentic text.

[00:17:33][music] The trouble was that no one knew what had happened to Tacitus' original manuscript.

[00:17:42]So to find it, Himmler turned to one of the strangest and most sinister [music] branches of the SS.

[00:17:56]It was known as the Arnanura and had been created by Himmler in 1935.

[00:18:04]Unlike the Germanic warriors who made up the rest of the SS, the Anna Nurba was an institution made up of academics.

[00:18:13]>> If you want the classy example of how the Nazis manipulated intellectualism and academic behavior, you can go no further than look at the Ana.

[00:18:25]This was an institution set up by ultimately by Hima to research quote unquote German ancestry.

[00:18:35]and it was to look at how uh you could construct a mythology of Aryanism and Germanic culture.

[00:18:45]The Anna Nurba were charged with rewriting history to help him to prove that the Aryan Germanic people were superior to all other races.

[00:18:58]They were genuine intellectuals and researchers and scientists working side by side with real cranks >> and there were around you know 100 academics of of various different sorts working there. You had a support staff of about the same size. So you've got about 200 people and the Anonura can't just be seen as a kind of harmless bunch of corrupted academics who were just sucking up the Nazis because what they were proving was helping to create a worldview that was in [music] essence evil.

[00:19:35]On Himmler's orders, the Anna Nurba began to search for Tacitus' lost manuscript.

[00:19:45]Immediately, they encountered a problem.

[00:19:50]Tacitus' original no longer existed.

[00:20:02]In the collapse of the Roman Empire and the ensuing centuries of the dark ages, many precious documents were lost, but a glimmer of hope remained.

[00:20:13]The Anonerba discovered that the manuscript had escaped the fires of Rome, and at some point in history, a single perfect copy of the original text had been made.

[00:20:28]But this too was missing.

[00:20:31]Well, the survival of classical texts is often a very very random and hazardous business.

[00:20:39]The fact that we can read the Gmania today um dates back to the the fact that there was this one manuscript um which was copied.

[00:20:49]>> It was said that a traveling Italian scholar had made this beautiful word for word copy of the Gmania in a monastery in southern Germany in the mid 15th [music] century.

[00:20:59]This copy of the Gmania became known as the Asenus [music] codeex.

[00:21:03]>> And that's the copy that Hanikuma was trying to get his hands on >> because it's as close as you can get to the written account of the Germanic past. [music] [music] The Anunner immediately began hunting down the Asenas codeex.

[00:21:35]They scoured the world in their search and eventually they brought some good news to him.

[00:21:47]In 1936 they reported that the book he so desperately wanted had been found.

[00:22:09]The Asenus Codeex had been traced to the east of Italy.

[00:22:13]For 200 years, it had lain in obscurity in the vast private library of an Italian count.

[00:22:22]The Count Aurelio Baldeski Balani.

[00:22:29]My father was contem.

[00:22:39]>> My father had three houses. One is this villa area now.

[00:22:45]The other one is a palace in Osmo and the other is the palace in Yazi.

[00:22:53]The codex is stored in [music] the library that they had in the Palazzo in Yazy.

[00:23:02]People had simply forgotten about it.

[00:23:05]The count's libraries contained many other important documents such as the letters of Kasanova and writings by Cicero.

[00:23:13]>> So it's it's fairly easy to see how it would get overlooked.

[00:23:18]>> As a result, Counterellio Baldeski Balani was completely unaware of how important the Asenus CEX was to the Nazis.

[00:23:28]Does orenos codex was the most important book to Germany.

[00:23:36]We really never realized it was such an important thing.

[00:23:43]It was in this library of the family and it was not really nobody knew how important it was.

[00:23:55]>> But soon that would change.

[00:24:14]In 1936, Italy was ruled over by Bonito Mussolini.

[00:24:20]Like Hitler, he was another fascist leader.

[00:24:28]This brutal populist politician had seized control of Italy in Akudetar in 1922 and declared himself Iluche the leader and since coming to power Hitler the German furer had been carefully courting his Italian counterpart.

[00:24:51]Now on Himmler's request, Hitler petitioned the Italian dictator to obtain the manuscript and present it to the Nazi state.

[00:25:03]It seemed that Mussolini was more than happy to oblige.

[00:25:11]Mussolini thought, well, if Hitler [snorts] wants this book very badly, it's a good idea to to give it to him to try to to try and take it from the family.

[00:25:23]Himmler was convinced that it was only a matter of time before he would have it in his grasp.

[00:25:29][music] He planned a triumphant return for the Gmania at the 1936 Nazi party convention where hundreds of thousands of party members would be in attendance.

[00:25:45][music] An enormous Germanic room was built with huge panels featuring quotes from Tacitus. And above the door was a quotation from Hitler himself.

[00:26:03]>> German youth shall know manly loyalty was the virtue of the old Gamhan. The new state is erected upon that virtue.

[00:26:29]But Himmler hadn't reckoned on the stubbornness of the Count Baldeski Balani. [music] An emissary from Mussolini's government was sent to meet the count at his villa to request him to give up the Asenus Codeex.

[00:26:54]But the counterio Baldeski Balani was not used to being bossed around.

[00:27:00]>> Mussolini wanted to give it to Hitler as a present. But my father actually didn't like fascism. He just he didn't like Mussolini.

[00:27:11]>> The count thought Mussolini was ridiculous and he had no time for the pompous upstart's demands.

[00:27:19]So he refused to hand over the book.

[00:27:22]didn't want to make Mussolini too heavy.

[00:27:24]He didn't want to make ether heavy. I mean, he didn't want to give it away.

[00:27:31]I was always proud of my father for everything.

[00:27:36]Just to say no and just to be very nonchalant about it.

[00:27:42]I think that demonstrate courage and intelligence.

[00:27:52]Hemla was infuriated by Mussolini's failure.

[00:27:59]To make matters worse, his best hope of getting the book, Hitler, was losing interest in Himmler's obsessions.

[00:28:07]out of Hitler had in private conversations on more than one occasion only snide comments to make. He couldn't quite see what these scholar types so fascinated with the Germanic past actually had to contribute to the rise of you know the German state.

[00:28:33]Himler liked surrounding himself with all this mythology. Whereas Hitler thought this was going all a little bit too far. He saw it as being unnecessary.

[00:28:41]To him, it was about politics and power.

[00:28:52]But Himmler refused to give up.

[00:28:56]He continued to put pressure on the Bleski Balanis, sending his own emissaries to meet with the count.

[00:29:03]the interest in in the book was was very very very strong and so they they they made several attempt to to try and and take this book from us.

[00:29:16]Finally, after 2 years of mounting pressure, Counterellio made a concession.

[00:29:25]The Germans couldn't have the book, but they could at least have a look at it.

[00:29:37]>> [music] >> Just before the outbreak of the war, the count packed up the book and sent it to Rome where it would be photographed for Himmler.

[00:29:48]In Rome, it was presented to Himla's emissary.

[00:29:54]a member of [music] Anaba Rudolfph Till was given access to the Cordexenas in Italy and he was able to produce a set of photographs.

[00:30:10]The Anunner used these photographs to produce a Nazi edition of the Asenus Codeex.

[00:30:23]Himmler even wrote the forward himself.

[00:30:28]>> The future will only be granted to those who understand the stock of their ancestry.

[00:30:40]But for Himmler, even this was not enough.

[00:30:44]All he had was a faximile. He was determined to possess the original.

[00:30:51]and one day he would have the chance to take it.

[00:30:58]In 1939, Hitler plunged the world into war.

[00:31:05]Under Mussolini, Italy was Germany's most important ally.

[00:31:12]The two dictators eventually found themselves fighting both the Western powers and Russia.

[00:31:25]After four bloody years, the tide of the war turned against the fascist nations.

[00:31:33]In 1943, Allied forces landed in the south of Italy.

[00:31:42]Bonito Mussolini was overthrown by an Italian revolt and Italy switched its allegiance to the allies.

[00:31:57]To shore up his southern flank, Hitler was forced to [music] send German troops into Italy.

[00:32:05]Emler now saw an opportunity to seize the Asenus Codex from the Beldeski Balani family.

[00:32:13]So with the German advance, Himmler now sent an entire unit of his own SS troops to the region with the express purpose of tracking the book down.

[00:32:23]But where was it?

[00:32:32]The Baldeski Balanis had three properties.

[00:32:36]Two town palazzi and a country villa.

[00:32:43]The book could be in any one of them or none of them.

[00:32:51]First, Himmler's soldiers were sent to the Balani's main residence, his villa outside the town of Yazi.

[00:33:07]After Mussolini was dead, at the end, the Germans came looking themselves for the book.

[00:33:25]But they found the villa empty.

[00:33:38][music] Days before, the count had moved his family out of the villa to one of his other properties to protect them.

[00:33:50]But Himmler's troops did discover one thing.

[00:33:56]The count's servants had taken everything of value from the villa to another of his properties, his palazzo in the town of Yazy, only a few miles away.

[00:34:08]The count's treasures had been smuggled out in agricultural carts, hidden from the [music] Germans beneath piles of farm produce.

[00:34:17]There were many cars that were going at that time in the the center of the of the town of Yazi. So, lots of things were hidden under the wheat and under the grapes.

[00:34:31]>> Could it be that the Asenus Codeex was among the valuables?

[00:34:40]So now Himmler's troops rushed to the Palazzo in Yazy.

[00:34:46]They asked for the book in in a very aggressive way. And also here the the waiters and the and the sharers and all the people working in the house maybe pretending they didn't understand the language maybe risking also their life because I mean at those times life was not so safe like it can be today in this kind of [music] situation.

[00:35:13]>> But once again, Himmler's troops found nothing.

[00:35:17]Neither the Gammania nor the Baldeski family were in the villa at Yazi.

[00:35:32]Himla's SS now turned their attentions to the third of the count's properties.

[00:35:37]Another Palazzo 30 kilometers away in the town of Ozimo.

[00:35:43]My family, they all moved to Ozimo. They moved there because they were thinking that it was more safe.

[00:35:51]>> From their hiding place in Osimo, the Bleski Balanis witnessed the horrors of life under the Germans.

[00:36:00]My brother and I used to look from the window and were really petrified because we saw people beaten up uh killed. They just shot them. And so that was really very very horrible thing to see. And my parents didn't know we were seeing it.

[00:36:20]But I mean children, you know, they climb open a window and look down.

[00:36:30]Eventually, Himmler's soldiers arrived at the Palazzo itself.

[00:36:38]>> Was all locked. The house >> they knocked at the door.

[00:36:41]>> They were knocking at the door. I remember this very vividly and I remember how scared we were that they could break down the [music] door and take my father and kill him.

[00:36:51]>> As the Germans searched the Palazzo, the family hid in the cellars below.

[00:36:58]I was 10 [music] years old. My brother, one was nine, the other was even less.

[00:37:03]It was a terrible experience. [music] We spent 18 days down in the cellers or without ever coming up.

[00:37:10]>> Himless soldiers scoured the house, but they never found the cellar door, and the Bleski Balani family remained safe.

[00:37:25]So did the book.

[00:37:36]May the 8th, 1945 brought an end to 6 years of war in Europe. [music] [cheering] The Nazi dream of a thousand-year Reich based on the foundations of an ancient Germanic culture had come to nothing.

[00:37:56]>> [applause and cheering] >> Hitler had shot himself in his Berlin bunker and Hinrich Himmler swallowed a cyanide capsule whilst in British [music] custody.

[00:38:08]>> This is the house in Lunberg where Himmler committed suicide. In that room, the most despicable of all German criminals contrived to take poison.

[00:38:26]With the war over, the truth about the elusive Aenus CEX would begin to emerge.

[00:38:33]Did this book really justify the Nazis murderous policies?

[00:38:39]And anyway, where was it?

[00:38:51]One mystery was easily solved.

[00:38:54]The book had never moved from the first place that himless troops had gone searching for it.

[00:39:00]The Baldeski Balani's villa outside Yazy had a secret room.

[00:39:06]>> This room has a false window.

[00:39:09]From the outside you see, but in fact is not a window that you can open.

[00:39:15]The room with the false window had a hidden door concealed by a wardrobe.

[00:39:20]>> The door that was already a safety door by itself was also protected by furniture.

[00:39:28]>> So then you continue you can even see the door.

[00:39:31]>> Behind the wardrobe and the hidden door sat a simple chest.

[00:39:37]>> Inside this room there is this we say in Italian. Usually you keep laundry inside.

[00:39:44]Concealed inside a pile of laundry lay the thing that had so obsessed him.

[00:39:51]Tacitus' Gmania.

[00:40:03][music] With the threat of the Nazis gone, the Baldeski Balanius no longer had to hide the book.

[00:40:14]The Italian government now recognized it as a national treasure and the Beldeski Balanis would display it with pride in their library in Yazi for the next 20 years.

[00:40:30]Every year the Italian government sent some inspectors [music] to see if the book was still with us, if it was well kept.

[00:40:41]One year the inspectors asked the count to bring the book to Florence as they couldn't make it to Yazy.

[00:40:47]>> In 1966 they were in Florence these inspectors and they said well I take the book to Florence and I'll show you the book there.

[00:40:58]>> The count took the book to Florence in person where he placed it in an underground bank vault overnight for safekeeping.

[00:41:10]The following day he would take it to the inspectors.

[00:41:16]But then disaster.

[00:41:25]>> That was the night of the flood in Florence.

[00:41:29]>> November the 4th, 1966 saw the worst flooding in Florence's history.

[00:41:37]and water found what Himmler never could.

[00:41:45]>> A flood came and those they weren't waterproof. So all the water with the gas with the oil and paintings they all went completely ruined.

[00:42:01]This manuscript was ruined for the first two or three pages and the last two or three pages. It was seriously damaged.

[00:42:10]The the first and the last pages were almost black.

[00:42:16]The writing looked like a like a negativa.

[00:42:21]>> It looked as if this treasure had been destroyed forever.

[00:42:31]>> [music] >> Months of costly and painstaking restoration followed and the damage of the flooding was undone.

[00:42:52]Today the Asenus Codeex sits in the Bibliotecha national in Rome.

[00:43:01]After nearly 200 years of holding the book, the Baldeski Balani family had decided that the Asenus Codeex should be available for all to see.

[00:43:12]>> Little by little, we we decided that this book was was better if it was kept in in a public place. And so then we we gave it to the state and it went to Rome to the National Library in Rome.

[00:43:37][music] Now that the oldest version of Tacitus' manuscript can be studied by experts from all nations, a very different picture of the ancient Germans than that promoted by Himmler has emerged.

[00:43:51]For a start, Cacitus was not as enraptured with the Gmanan as Himmler had made out.

[00:43:58]Cacitus [music] attributes several clearly negative characteristics to the Germanic tribes. He basically speaks [music] of their tendency towards drunkenness.

[00:44:12][music] To pass an entire day and night in drinking disgraces no one. Their quarrels are seldom fought out with mere abuse, but commonly with wounds and bloodshed.

[00:44:25]>> They are represented as liking their um drink too much and um having banquetss, feasts during the day, this sort of thing. [music] >> They themselves lie buried in sloth, a strange combination in their nature that the same men should be so fond of idleness, so averse to peace.

[00:44:47]He explicitly writes about their [music] almost addiction to gambling.

[00:44:53]He also comments on what he describes as a form of laziness. Basically, >> they pass much of their time in idleness, giving themselves up to sleep and to feasting, the bravest and the most warlike, doing nothing.

[00:45:13]a sort of simple society but one which has its flaws.

[00:45:18]>> In fact, what Tacitus described was far from the perfect Aryan society claimed by Himler.

[00:45:25]In every household, the children naked and filthy.

[00:45:31]They will be overcome by their own vices as easily as by the arms of an enemy.

[00:45:45]It has become increasingly clear that the Anonerva had only taken from Tacitus what they could use to support Himmler's theories of Germany's noble Aryan ancestors. [music] They blatantly misinterpreted, misread, and misqued particular [music] passages that didn't really fit their particular ideological view to make it fit their ideological view.

[00:46:12]>> They've been highly selective. They've taken [music] little bits of it primarily around chapter 4 where he's talking about their racial purity, [music] their blue eyes, their blonde hair, that sort of thing. and they've taken this work and very much I think made it what they want it [music] to be.

[00:46:42]And the Nazis had chosen to keep hidden another key fact about Tacitus.

[00:46:49]He had almost certainly never even seen [music] any of the gaman he was writing about and had no real evidence for his statements about them.

[00:47:02]Some [music] of his descriptions were plainly made up.

[00:47:07]>> By the end of the monograph, you have this fantasy uh bizarre sort of image of people with human faces but the bodies of animals. So it begins to enter the the world of of the fantastic. [music] So you have to be wary of that when you're reading these [music] texts.

[00:47:37]Himmler also willfully ignored another fact.

[00:47:42]Modern-day Germans could not be the direct descendants of the Gmanan.

[00:47:48]The Nazis in referring to the Germanic tribes refer to them as ancient Germans or the old Germans. And that's exactly the kind of step that you must not make because it is a simplification.

[00:48:05]>> The Gmani are different from the group the people that we would think [music] of today as as Germans.

[00:48:12]That's just the name that came to be uh used for the whole group of of people.

[00:48:19]>> They misidentified the German ancestors with the Germanic tribes that Tessa just describes. So you simply can't say that the Germanic tribes were the German ancestors. [screaming] >> The truth was that Hitler's Germans were descendants of many different peoples, not a single ancient tribe.

[00:48:42]There was no German nation and the whole tribal situation changed dramatically several times over the following centuries. So you can simply say those are our ancestors.

[00:48:58]>> But Himmler was unconcerned about the truth of [music] what Tacitus really said and the truth of the origins of the German people.

[00:49:06]He desired the Asenus Codeex [music] to help promote the vicious and racist policies of the Nazis.

[00:49:14]And the tragic fact is that even without ever laying his hands on the original, he was still able to use the words of Tacitus to aid the Nazis in their murderous policies, which resulted in the death of millions.

[00:49:31]Heat.

[00:49:37][music] Heat.