Germania

Already a key text in German history textbooks, “Germania” took on a darker identity in the 20th century as “a Bible for National Socialists.” The “golden booklet” obsessed Heinrich Himmler, so much so that the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany ordered special forces to steal the oldest surviving manuscript from an Italian villa. (They failed.) As Reichsfuehrer of the SS, Himmler deliberately modeled his dreaded elite troops after Tacitus’s descriptions of the tightknit bands of young warriors. As he ominously proclaimed in his diary, “Thus shall we be again.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post, 7/6/2011. For myself, I concur in opinion with such as suppose the people of Germany never to have mingled by inter-marriages with other nations, but to have remained a people pure, and independent, and resembling none but themselves. —TACITUS