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Europe’s Famed Bog Bodies Are Starting to Reveal Their Secrets (smithsonianmag.com)
74 points by gricardo99 on May 2, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


Can't recommend Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mystery by Miranda Aldhouse-Green (2015) highly enough. I found it in my library. A-G goes into good detail on all of the bodies mentioned in the article, and the incredible violence inflicted on them ante mortem.


The most interesting part of this article to me was how the Nazi's used the bodies as evidence of German's conservative nature, and superiority, over the surrounding region. Insofar as the Nazi historians were concerned, the cause the the bodies deaths was their violation of some social contract. This minimally supported hypothesis was used successfully to help incite the events leading up to Kristallnacht. Drawing a parallel between the so called reprisals of Germans in the past, and their present day descendants.


The theory the bodies were violators of social customs, are not something Nazi-specific, it is a common hypothesis. They are clearly ritualistic executions, and it corresponds to Tacitus which states that "traitors", "cowards" etc. were hanged and then buried in the bogs. So given how little we know overall, it is actually a pretty well supported hypothesis, since archeological and historical evidence match up.

That Nazis used the theory does not in itself make the theory suspect.


And if you read Kershaw's bio of hitler kristalnact was encouraged as the SA where attacking protestant and catholic churches which was causing bad press




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