Banana Bread wrote:
Germans are the greatest fighters as history has proved. That is why the numbers are lower. They are a small country that can take on those much bigger. Look at Barbarossa. They nearly beat a Red Army of 11 million. Look at Manstein's Miracle for example. A small army took back Kharkov when millions of Russians were attacking. That shows how resilient and tough as fukk the Germans are.
I have no other hobbies, so i'll bite. I initially wanted to give you a 5.9 for effort, since you almost squeaked by by naming a historical German figure (Friedrich I "Barbarossa") before WW2. Then I realized you were only talking about Operation Barbarossa, suggesting that you, like most non-Germans, reduce a millennium of German history to a single decade.
Germany if often used as the "counter-example" to state development in medieval and early-modern history. By that I mean one points to Germany to show "what went wrong", and to contrast it to "what went right" in e.g. England and France. In speaking of powerful states, the Holy Roman Empire was the grandest ideal and the weakest reality in Europe. It was predicated upon a vague notion of translatio imperii - the idea that the German kings, through papal sanction, inherited imperial honors of the ancient regime. However, it was a fragmented quilt of principalities in which the emperor's own domestic domain and income paled in comparison to their English and French (even Danish!) counterparts. They were too weak to counteract the centrifugal tendencies of the elective diets, whose members maintained near sovereignty in their own realms, and ruled adjacent to, and independent of, a string of other autonomous counts and city councils. All the while, the kingdom of England and the kingdom of France forged states (the one with a parliamentary leaning, the other with absolutist tendencies) that were stronger, more integrated and more well-functioning than that mustered by even the more celebrated emperors of the Hohenstaufen or Luxembourg houses.
German history is a rich one....the Hanseatic gems of the north, the banking dynasties of the south, the printing press, the Reformation etc etc. Indeed, one can argue that German culture was one of the great ingredients in the development of Central and Eastern Europe through e.g. the expansion of Crusader states and Lübeck and Magdeburg law, and the transplantation of imperial power to Bohemia in the late middle ages. However, as a political entity, "Germany" is a weakling in the long draw of history.
If we focus only on a brief period between ca. 1860 and 1945, it is indeed a powerhouse. But political propagandists in that era also scrambled comically for straws when trying to disprove the reality that German strength was unprecedented. They looked back to a mythical past, back to Charlemagne, whose greatness derived not from anything "German", but from the Gallo-Romano culture in which he was fostered, his appeals for Rome's promotion and his attacks on "German" (Saxon) culture. They also looked to "Barbarossa", whom they wanted to present as a German force, but in fact spent his energy trying to install himself in Italy and pretend to be Roman and Italian, showing comparatively little concern for his fragmented and feeble holdings north of the Alps. All the while, the talking heads in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries knew deep down that the national pride driving them was rooted in the humiliation of past defeat, having been the whipping boy of Napoleon et al. Anyway, modern Germany is an outstanding country and great (federal) republic with excellent healthcare and medical research. But their efficiency in tackling the current crisis has nothing to do with their innate, historical virility.