The Grim Truth Behind The Massacre of 20,000 Roman Soldiers Lost Legions of Varus Odyssey

For 2,000 years, Europe has been divided by war. Each passing century marked with the blood of endless conflict. Sometimes religious, always political, and never resolved. Finally, it exploded to engulf the world. It seems absurd to think that it could all be traced back to a single battle. But it can. A battle few Europeans remember, but no Roman was allowed to forget. They called it the Varian Disaster. After the Varian Disaster, Rome fell back upon the Rhine, and the Rhine became the Empire's frontier. So, giving birth to a rift in the centre of Europe between two groups of nations, the Romanic and the Germanic. The rift is with us still. The European Union exists to try and heal it, and no one knows whether or not they will succeed. But if you trace this rift back and back, you come eventually to the Teutoburg Forest. In 15 AD, in Germany, a detachment of Roman soldiers under the command of their general, Germanicus, made a grim discovery. They were in the area to exact revenge on the local tribes. And this was why. A slaughtering ground stretching for miles, the remains of as many as 20,000 Romans reduced over six years to a carpet of bones. For here, in 9 AD, the unthinkable had happened. Three of Rome's finest legions wiped out by a horde of Iron Age savages. Their commander, Poplius Quintilius Varus, decapitated, his severed head impaled on a spear. No Roman had thought it possible. But here was the evidence. On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses' limbs lay there. Also, human heads fastened to tree trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had massacred the Roman colonels and senior company commanders. In the depths of the Teutoburg Forest, under constant threat of attack, Germanicus set about burying the remains of his fellow countrymen. With no time to discriminate between human and animal remains, he decided to bury everything, every trace of Rome's shame. So, six years after the slaughter, a living Roman army had come to bury the dead men's bones of three whole divisions. No one knew if the remains he was burying belonged to a stranger or a comrade. But in their bitter distress and rising fury against the enemy, they looked at them all as friends and blood brothers. History would be denied sight of this, the Empire's darkest hour. For 2,000 years, the forest kept its secret. As a battle, the Varian disaster is formative in European history. It shaped the continent, helped define modern Germany and, in halting the advance of the Roman Empire, brought its greatest emperor, Augustus, to his knees. When the news reached Rome, Augustus ordered patrols of a city at night to prevent any uprising. It is said that he took the disaster so deeply to heart that he left his hair and beard untrimmed for months. He would often beat his head on a door shouting, and always kept the anniversary as a day of deep mourning. Three years earlier, when Varus left for Germany, Augustus had thought only of success. His reign was, in fact, glorious. He had brought peace to the Roman world and, with that prosperity, he took in hand the Alps, he conquered Austria, he conquered much of the Balkans, he finished the conquest of Spain, and he annexed Egypt. In fact, these acquisitions for the Roman Empire were more than any previous individual in Roman history. It seems that to Romans, at the beginning of Augustus' reign, Rome had a divine mission. There would be endless empire, conquest without end. But there were lands of which Rome knew nothing. They didn't know how big the world was, and they didn't know that when you left the German areas behind, you ended up in the Eurasian steppe. So that was a problem. They didn't know what lay ahead. I imagine for Roman soldiers, contemplating the penetration of Iron Age Germany, looking across the Rhine at the forest, was rather like one modern explorer looking at the Amazon forest, psychologically. Both are rainforests, and both are dangerous. I think we must understand that Rome had expanded in the Mediterranean by means of the takeover of other people's empires, like those of Carthage, or even older structures like Ptolemaic Egypt. Now, these were ready-made provinces with a population already accustomed to taxation and obedience. However, as horizons widened, the going became tougher, the people more truculent, resistance became more obdurate, the land itself less developed, the people less advanced, where to conquer one tribe merely brings Rome into contact with another, even more defiant, even more backward. For 20 years, the expeditionary armies of Rome had been crossing the Rhine and engaging with the Germanic tribes. They had calmed a few, and they had killed a few. It was Roman policy to split the Germanic tribes. Even in the later years, they made contracts with some of the Germanic tribes to fight against the other Germanic tribes. Some of these tribes got money, others didn't get money, and so on. Like in nowadays policy, there's no difference to America. The job of bribing and coercing the German warlords had been given to Varus by Augustus. Varus was family. P. Quintilius Varus was a Roman lawyer who chanced to marry the emperor's great-niece, Claudia Pulchra, and his career advanced accordingly. Varus was not a general. If anything, he was a lawyer, but he was thought right for the posting. I think what Augustus had in mind, and may have been in Varus' intentions also, was now was the time to start turning this area, which they had overrun and which they were holding, into a Roman province. That is to say, an area which could produce revenue in terms of taxes, could produce products, agricultural products, minerals, whatever, and also manpower. The political situation must have been calm in the moment when Varus was in Germany. The treaties were firm, it was calm, and so there was no reason to think about a revolt. It was quiet. In the spring of 9 AD, Varus, his army, and full civilian entourage left their headquarters for the German interior. Their route would follow the course of the river Lippe and then cross to the banks of the Weser, there to advance the process of Romanization. Normally, the Roman army fought only in summer. In the winter, the Roman army was in camps. So in spring, they went through the country not only for military purpose, but also for prospection, for looking how to organize the country, where to build streets, which are the good places for the foundation of towns. All these prospection was done by the Roman army. The Roman army was a factor of civilizing, of Romanizing a new province. When Quintilius Varus became governor of the province of Germany and in the exercise of his powers also came to handle the affairs of these peoples, he tried both to hasten and to widen the process of change. He not only gave orders to the Germans as if they were actual slaves of the Romans, but levied money from them as if they were subject nations. These demands they would not tolerate. Velaius Paterculus says that he was not only cruel, but greedy. He says that as governor of Syria, he showed no aversion to cash. He commanded the forces in Germany simply because he was governor and the governor was expected to give the orders. But in fact, he was a military nonentity, a military ignoramus. He was learned in the law, but not in common sense. He was a judge, but he was not a judge of men. This was to prove Varus' greatest weakness. In exercising the power of Rome, he was blind to the distress it had brought to the German tribes. They had crisscrossed Germany for 20 years, winning nothing but battles. But in fact, the Germans were biding their time, hiding their weapons, concealing their views and biding their time. And Varus, a military novice, went into this situation not realizing that he was penetrating darkest Germany. Paradoxically, Varus felt safe because he was protected by his own Germanic auxiliaries, local tribesmen under the command of a Cheruscan chieftain, Arminius. He was a Roman officer, and as a member of the royal family, he got Roman citizenship and was a Roman officer. He took his own people, his own soldiers, his own Cherusci, and fought with his troops under Roman command, and so he was able to learn Roman tactics and strategy, and he knew exactly the weak points. Arminius knew the Romans because he was raised as one. An education in Rome was a privilege extended to families of the influential. They were supposed to become Romans. Arminius did not. During his time in Germany, he must have reflected very often, was I right to think Rome was invincible? True, the Germans had suffered 20 years of defeat, but in his service in the Balkans, he had seen brave men make a bid for freedom and almost win. So he thought, what now in Germany? Germany under Varus. Here is a stupid man. Here is a gullible man. Is Rome really invincible? And then he hatched the plot. Campaigning over for the summer, it was time for Varus to return to winter quarters several days' march away. For the three legions, auxiliaries, and the rabble of camp followers, the return journey would be slow and difficult. In his terse, epigrammatic way, Tacitus summed up the Roman view of Germany. Silvis horida, aut paludibus fida. Fearful forest and stinking bog. The one usually beginning as soon as the other ended. It was a terrain in which communications were almost impossible. The tribes were scattered and wary of each other, and yet Arminius had begun to pull them together. He communicated his thoughts at first to few, and afterward to more, stating to them and assuring them that the Romans might be cut off by surprise. He then proceeded to add action to resolution and fixed a time for carrying a plot into action. His plot was to bide his time. Then, at a critical moment, he would send a false message about some fictitious uprising to the northwest, hoping that Varus would change course into the uncharted forest. Amazingly, Varus did, playing right into the hands of Arminius. His master stroke may have been to deliver the message at the right moment, at a point on the Roman march back towards the Rhine where to divert meant that the Romans would go through the worst of the terrain, the thickest part of the forest. And by delivering that message and calculating that Varus would be rash enough to follow it, he drew them through a part of the forest where he was waiting and where the conditions were least favorable to the Roman army. It remains a mystery why Varus took the whole entourage on what was clearly a risky adventure. But he did. It's fairly clear, I think, from the literary accounts, that Varus was lulled into a sense of security which really didn't exist. The attacks began almost immediately. The beleaguered army, stretched out like a snake, could now be chopped to pieces, leaving the head to draw the survivors ever deeper into the forest. A legion, even marching in favorable terrain, could take 2 or 3 hours to pass a given spot with all their baggage and their heavy equipment. The end of the column was perhaps half a day behind the beginning of the column when you think that they would have to cut through the woods. So the attacker is in the position where he can choose his moment and he can choose his place and strike where he wishes. And he did, for 2 days and 2 nights. And still the head of the column pressed on, unaware they were playing Arminius' game. Everybody behind would be saying, for God's sake, what is happening? We're being attacked. Doesn't the commander know what's going on? The leaders were lost. Behind them a wake of Roman corpses stretched for miles. The reality of their situation was beginning to dawn. Arminius had finally shown his hand. They fell upon Varus in the midst of the forests, which at this point in his march were almost impenetrable. There, when they stood revealed as enemies instead of subjects, they dealt a succession of terrible blows to the Romans. Confused, demoralised and hemmed in on all sides, the survivors could only go forward. The weather had deteriorated. There were violent thunderstorms. Romans, a portent of disaster. And then word spread through the column. Varus was dead. And so Varus and all senior officers, fearing that they would either be taken alive or slaughtered by their bitterest enemies, for they had already been wounded, nerved themselves for the dreaded but unavoidable act and took their own lives. The legions, their women and children, were on their own. And Arminius' final trap was set. Cut off and surrounded, the Romans were doomed. With nowhere left to go, they were helpless as the Iron Age tribesmen hacked them to pieces. There was no way out, and Arminius clearly knew precisely how to entrap, and he knew how to choose his ground, he did so superbly well, and there was nowhere for the Roman army to go. If they couldn't fight their way out, they'd had it. One-tenth of Rome's total military strength perished in that dark forest. Rome, the world's superpower, was on her knees. The news burst upon Augustus like a thunderclap. His first reaction was panic. His strategy had been to place the Roman legions round the perimeter of the empire, and therefore there was almost nothing standing between Italy and Germany. No attack came. Arminius stayed on his side of the Rhine. It was six years before a Roman army returned looking for revenge. They found a boneyard. These were the remains Germanicus had to bury, stripped of their weapons, stripped of their uniforms, and finally, after six years, stripped of their flesh. They put out the eyes of some of them and cut off the hands of others. They sewed up the mouth of one of them after first cutting out his tongue. Never again would Rome have a 17th, an 18th, or a 19th legion. They were lost for all time. But below the forest floor, their bones lay waiting. In the Teutoburg Forest, the tide of imperial expansion had been halted. Rome's legions wiped out by Arminius in his bid to unite the Germanic tribes. Despite the incredible victory, he failed. But the dream persisted, and in 1871 it became a reality. Germany, a nation in search of a hero, rediscovered Arminius. Arminius was a figure of Germanic nationalism, and brought freedom of Rome to the Germanic tribes. In the 19th century, when this large statue was built, he was a figure of identification. And in this context, the discussion of the liberation of Germany was very, very important and always connected with the battlefield and the search of the battlefield. The Arminius statue was erected on only one of almost 700 possible sites in and around the Teutoburg Forest. In the late 19th century, the German forest was alive with village schoolmasters, local clergymen, retired army officers, scholarly folk of all kinds, tacitus in one hand and map in the other, looking for clues to the lost legions. In the event, it was a retired army officer, a British tank commander serving with the NATO forces in Osnabrück, who would find the first clue. Major Tony Clun's curiosity about the ancient countryside had developed whilst on manoeuvres. In 1987, his interest was, at best, casual. That changed, as he found the first link in a chain that would lead him to the battle site. The first find of Roman silver coins, they were fairly well spread out. But I turned round, returned the following weekend, and was successful in locating the core of the actual find. And within this core, there was approximately 80-odd Roman silver coins. So I recovered all those, bagged them up, and then subsequently handed them in the following week. The silver coins were of the Augustan period. In this case, the type and distribution of the coins conformed to a theory by the eminent 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen. Mommsen had studied a similar hoard found 100 years earlier, and in the same area. Mommsen reasoned that to sweeten the German tribes, Varus must have been carrying large quantities of gold and silver coin. It followed that if he were to plot all Augustan coin finds in northwestern Germany to see if they seemed to radiate from a single point, he might find the battlefield. Applying Mommsen's theory to his own finds, Klunn realized that they all seemed to emanate from a single point. The single point was a narrow gap where, 2,000 years ago, steep forest met impenetrable bog near a place called Kalkwiese. But then, a coin with a difference, virtually the signature of Varus himself. The turning point was when we found the first copper coin with a countermark of Varus himself. The countermark has three letters, V-A-R, Varus. And it indicates that Varus put the countermarks on those coins. It also put Varus and his army at Kalkwiese, a long, long way from the relative safety of either the Rhine or the Lippe. Varus arrived, as it is written, at the Rhine in the year 6-7 A.D. And that means this site could not be dated earlier than 6 or 7 A.D. And this is the first exact date which this countermark gives us. Quite clearly, it is a very, very spectacular event that has caused these coins to be buried in the ground. We have no other site with a similar concentration of this spectrum of coins. Now, an event of that importance will be recorded in the historical sources. The sources for this period are good, and there is only one event which is recorded, and that is the battle in the Teutoburg Forest. If more proof were needed, Major Clunn was about to provide it. Over 50 miles from the statue which celebrated the victory, a British officer armed with a metal detector found three small lead slingshots of standard Roman army design. I didn't actually recognise them at the time, and they were taken into the boxes at the Institute and were later recognised as lead slingshot. And obviously this caused great excitement because it was the first piece of militaria that had been found in the area. So small, so humble, yet these were big with meaning, as big with meaning for German archaeology as Schliemann's discovery of Troy in the 1870s. In 1989, professional archaeologists began to dig in earnest. The site was a rich one. They found coins and much more. A horde of objects that, in their diversity, fit the profile of the Varus group. Besides weapons, there were civilian implements, tools, scraps of armour, and a spectacular cavalry officer's mask. The cavalry mask was a rare find. Whilst principally ceremonial, it was also worn to terrify and intimidate, perhaps this time even to mask fear itself. The finds that included the mask were extremely well preserved. Closer examination of the area revealed why. In the middle of the battlefield, the archaeologists uncovered what appeared to be the ghost of a man-made structure. When we excavated in the beginning of 1990, we saw a structure on the ground which was not natural. It was artificial, and we realised that it was the rest of a wall which had been about four or five metres wide and one and a half metres high. The wall was a major find. The mask and other artefacts had been buried when a section of it collapsed, hiding them for posterity. But more importantly, the wall itself had unique features. It was built as a fixed attacking position, a battlement. It was built rapidly over a period of weeks. It was not built by Romans. Arminius did one thing which was assumably new. He built this sort of small wall in the battlefield. That was new, as far as we know. This is a construction which could have been made by the Romans. They would have made it a bit higher. But we think that some Germans learned to build in this way when they were in the Roman army. Until now, no-one had credited the Germans with such tactical ingenuity. The ambush at Chalcrisa had been planned well in advance. Arminius was a good soldier, of course, and he got the idea, we can press the Roman army between the mountain and the bog. With these ramparts, we can press them into... In German, it's a trichter. What do you tell this? If you fill water into a bottle, it's a... Not only had Arminius organized the tribes, to serve his ends, he had enlisted the landscape itself. It was built by the Germans as an ambush to attack the Romans. The Germans were standing here in this area. The Romans came from the east to the west. The Germans were waiting behind the wall and attacked the Romans when they were in this place. Today, the terrain at Chalcrisa is deceptive. Farmers have drained the fields. The forest has receded. But the archaeologists have restored a small section to see what the land was like in 9 AD. The bog was deep and dangerous. Only a few yards away, the forest was dense and unyielding. Between them, Arminius put his wall. The Romans had been squeezed into a bottleneck. England's most famous guerrilla leaders were Herold the Wake and Robin Hood. One had the Fenlands to protect him. The other had the forest. Arminius had both. Where the trees ended, the reeds began. His plan would use both of these unfavorable elements to deadly effect at Chalcrisa, where the narrow space between forest and marsh narrowed to less than a bow shot, almost a spear's throw. Chalcrisa was made for ambush. A mule, trapped beneath a collapsed wall, had a bell around its neck. The bell was packed tightly with grass to prevent it from ringing. Whoever was traveling was trying to travel quietly. It was already too late. The Chalcrisa site was to yield one more dark secret, perhaps the darkest of all, as the lost souls of the Varus legions returned to bear witness. In 1994, we found pits with bones of Roman soldiers and horses and mules. And we saw that those pits were made after the battle. We had some human skulls in these pits, and we had mules' bones. They had with them many wagons and pack animals, as they would for a journey in peacetime. They were even accompanied by women and children and a large retinue of servants, all being factors which caused them to advance in scattered groups. Flight was out of the question, however much a man might desire it. So every soldier and every horse was cut down without resistance. After 2,000 years, it was finally time for the bones to tell their story. The battle that Germanicus buried in 15 A.D. has finally been brought to light. At Göttingen University, forensic anthropologists have established that the remains recently exhumed at Chalcrisa had lain above ground for several years before they were buried. You can say if a dead body lay on the ground, after two years the flesh and the muscles and tendons are away. And so we say, OK, it must be more than two years, and not more than ten years, because after ten years there would be nothing. Furthermore, the evidence reveals that all the bones, human and animal, were buried with extreme care, exactly as the Roman historians had described. Two burials, one under a wall collapsed in the heat of battle, and the other, six years later, in a series of mass graves. Compelling evidence that this is where the remnants of Varus' legions halted and fell. Arminius had built his trap with great care and breathtaking confidence. It was miles from the route the Romans should have been on, and yet he drew them unerringly into it, an act of military genius. He led an entire army across almost impossible terrain to a place from which there was no escape. Once there, he wiped them out. You can't deny Arminius pulled it off, and it was an astounding feat. No one can deny that. But, of course, he was a tremendous opportunist, and I think, really, my admiration should be reserved not for him as a military commander, but as a sort of breathtakingly imaginative conceiver of a plot. It is amazing that a young man of 25 could defeat a superpower. It is quite astonishing. He was, in fact, an arch-opportunist. He was a gambler on a winning streak. This, then, is the point at which Europe was cleft in two, the place where a 25-year-old warrior changed the course of history. I see it as one of the great barbarian triumphs against a very large Roman army, and from that point of view, unexpected, and in Rome, massively shocking. I mean, nothing like this had overcome a Roman army since the days of Hannibal's time in Italy in the 3rd century BC. Another historian, Major General Fuller, wrote... Had Germany been for four centuries thoroughly Romanized, one culture, not two, would have dominated the Western world. There would have been no Franco-German problem, no Charlemagne, no Louis XIV, no Napoleon, no Bismarck, no Kaiser Wilhelm II, and no Hitler. The impact of Arminius on European history has been considerable. He had wanted to break the ties between Rome and the Germanic tribes, and he succeeded. But was a victory for Arminius a victory for the German people? East of the Rhine, at a place called Walgermes, startling new evidence would suggest not. In recent months, Professor von Schnerbein and his team have discovered a town where no town should be, a town made of stone. The first indication was this house here with these colonnades. And we knew that this architecture is not common in the military camps. And so we came to the idea this must be a town. And in the fifth year of our excavation, we found the traces of this stone building. And in the first moment, we thought it must be medieval because we do not have any Roman stone wall in Augustan period in the Northwestern Empire. It's a first, and we didn't believe it in the first time. And only when we could prove that it is Augustan too, then we were sure it's a Roman town. The discovery will literally rewrite the history books. It's of massive significance, and I don't think anybody would have predicted the finding of a site like that 10 years ago. What it does seem to indicate is that Roman intentions of establishing a Roman province here were firm, were determined with Roman-style buildings. Stone buildings of this date across the Roman frontier are extremely rare. Indeed, they're not all that common outside major cities. It was a town east of the Rhine and a town in which Germans and Romans lived and worked together for 10 years. Then suddenly, in 9 AD, it was over. Everything which started here in the Rhine Valley, the fact that the Romanization was already in progress here in the Lahn Valley, everything like this stopped. The Romans withdrew immediately, and the place was burnt down. At Val Girmis, civilization had been snuffed out, but the cities of Mainz, Cologne, and Bonn suggest what might have been. It's difficult to believe that Val Girmis lies on its own. There it is near Gießen. It's quite a long way to the east of the Rhine and even further north of the Danube, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's much more to come elsewhere. So its significance is very great. Rome had lost Germany, but equally Germany had lost Rome. This was, oh, in German, ein Wendepunkt der Geschichte, a turning point of the history. Were the Germans winners or losers? That is perhaps a matter of opinion. Yes, they did win their freedom, but there was a price to pay. Rome had almost pulled the Germans into history. Arminius cut the cord, and they slipped back into prehistory, into tribalism, lawlessness, and barbarism. That was the price they paid. Arminius held the tribes together for another ten years. In 19 A.D., at a tribal meeting, he was assassinated. He had tried to create a unified Germany and failed, creating instead a divided Europe, a continent that would struggle for centuries towards its own uneasy peace.