Were the Germans physically superior?

[ImperatorMachinarum]

I never suggested that you were. I suggested that the Illyrians were a creation of Yugoslav nationalism. I've read about the wish of Tito to create a Yugoslav ''ancestor-people" that could rival with the Romans, Celts and Germans as a large 'proto-European' tribe. I'm therefore not sure that 'THE Illyrians' existed, or that they, as I wrote, were a figment of 'Yugoslav imagination'.

Your suggestion is way off base. Albanians are most likely to support a lineage to Illyrians. Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Macedonian, and Bosnian Muslim mainstream academia present very different histories, none of which are particularly motivated to rival Romans, Celts, or Germans as a tribe. In fact, most of these South Slavic people don't put themselves in any meaningful picture until the 6th century at the earliest, but mostly much later.

Finally, there was hardly ever an intense "Yugoslav" nationalism. You do realize that a bitter war was fought amongst the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia in the 1990s...and that the nation of Yugoslavia no longer exists?

:wink:

As for the physical superiority of the Germans, sorry, I don't buy it. The Roman Legions would probably have reflected a good mosaic of the constituent peoples of the Roman Empire, which spanned the spectrum of the European phenotype. Besides, Germans are by no means the tallest people in Europe nor necessarily the strongest. Can you really say that even today's Germans are stronger than Italians, Romanians, Irish, French, Croatian, or Serbian peoples?

I'd say the Germans were a bit more homogeneous than the Roman Legions, but markedly taller or stronger? Doubt it.