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.History of the Varus Battle
Germanic altars and sacrificial sites
The holy Germanic grove in which the Roman officers were slain on alters cannot be identified from the information in the historical texts, just as little as the site of the 3 to 4 day battle can be identified. The documents only contain vague references which apply to many places. A localisation e.g. of the battles, can only be established by archaeological proof. Since it is not even certain whether the Germanic altars are simply natural objects or whether they were sacrificial sites e.g. built with grass sods, the archaeological verification will be just as difficult to determine, if not impossible.
Attempts to localise the sites were obviously carried out again and again. In 1780 for instance, Justus Möser localised the place of the Varus Battle to today’s Osnabrück-Voxtrup. He believed that the megalithic tombs of the New Stone Age could be taken as two large undamaged pagan altars (German: »zwey grosse unversehrte heidnische Altäre«) on which - referring to Tacitus - the Germanic tribesmen slayed their Roman captives.