Translated from the Third Reich original Wikinger by Bernhard Kummer. This brief, sympathetic look at the Viking era from a National Socialist perspective presents the start of the Viking era as largely a response to Charlemagne‘s bloody subjugation of the pagan Saxons. The nine original illustrations, four of them by the famous SS artist W. Petersen, are included.
In those years when Kaiser Charlemagne subjugated the pagan Saxons for the Pope in decades of struggle, and then in Rome, on Christmas Day of the year 800, tricked in prayer, had to accept the emperor’s crown from the Pope’s hand, the Viking storm against France broke out in the rear of the fighting and subjugated Saxons. It then raged for over two centuries, fleets conquered cities and harbors, armies took land and founded states, and finally, in piracy that became ever more unsystematic, warriors and “princes without land” campaigned and plundered or feuded among themselves until they perished without honor and victory. But we will now explain how it could come to this final tragedy so alien to Germanic nature. Seen as a whole, this great Norse storm at the brink between paganism and Christianity is a great Nordic struggle of Nordic nature against south and east, a continuation of those earlier journeys and struggles of Nordic folks whom we already saw fight and perish in the Far East or in the Mediterranean region. In part, the same hostile aliens who faced the Nordic peasants in India and Persia, in Greece and Rome, had penetrated across the Alps and eastern trade routes and on Hun assaults into Germanic core land. An alien worldview and a new priesthood, a morality of alien blood and a new ideal, an alien view of folk community and rule, of peasant freedom and tyrant right, grabbed everywhere, openly and secretly, into Germanic life. The unrest of the folk wandering, which had threatened the south, was banished. From the mixed-race Franks, the Catholic state idea and faith united the Germanic tribes; the sword of the converters slew Alemannic resisters at Cannstadt and Saxon ones at Verden in a horrible manner, sufficient news of which certainly spread to all Germanic people. The Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen had planned to advance into the pagan north with conversion and subjugation as well. During his fighting against the Saxons many of them had fled to Denmark and reported there about the horrible enemies. But already centuries earlier, Norsemen had fought against the south and brought home precise news about all the heroic deeds. So now, too, one had clearly enough realized in the north that the struggle was about faith and freedom, and that one had to employ full energy against an enemy who after the so horrible subjugation of the Saxons now directly threatened Northern Germanic man. Only so are the great Viking campaigns to be understood with which the already always a sea power north intervened into the struggle of the period.