Verden Massacre

The Massacre of Verden was an event during the Saxon Wars where the Frankish king Charlemagne ordered the death of 4,500 Saxons in October 782. Charlemagne claimed suzerainty over Saxony and in 772 destroyed the Irminsul, an important object in Saxon paganism, during his intermittent thirty-year campaign to christianize the Saxons. The massacre occurred in Verden in what is now Lower Saxony, Germany. The event is attested in contemporary Frankish sources, including the Royal Frankish Annals.

Beginning in the 1870s, some scholars have attempted to exonerate Charlemagne of the massacre by way of a proposed manuscript error but these attempts have since been generally rejected. While the figure of 4,500 victims has generally been accepted, some scholars regard it as an exaggeration.

The massacre became particularly significant and controversial among German nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and in Nazi Germany. In 1935, landscape architect Wilhelm Hübotter designed a memorial, known as the Sachsenhain ("Saxon Grove"), that was built at a possible site for the massacre. This site functioned for a period as a meeting place for the Schutzstaffel. Popular discussion of the massacre made Charlemagne a controversial figure in Nazi Germany until his official "rehabilitation" by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, after which Charlemagne was officially presented in a positive manner in Nazi Germany.

An entry for the year 782 in the first version of the Royal Frankish Annals (Annales Regni Francorum) records a Saxon rebellion, followed by a Frankish victory in the battle of the Süntel before Charlemagne arrived on the scene to restore order. The king ordered the execution of 4,500 Saxons near the confluence of the Aller and the Weser, in what is now Verden. Regarding the massacre, the entry reads:

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