Hitler may have thought so, but some of the Germans who did the actual fighting disagreed with him. I recall reading a quote attributed to a Waffen SS officer after he was captured by Allied forces, and questioned about the Axis Treaty,
"Italians! What was the Fuhrer thinking?"
And, "intellect and civilisation" didn't help them much
against my ancestors. The Romans won the first and only major battle against Scottish tribes easily. It wasn't even close. They no doubt expected the surviving tribesmen to bend the knee, as every other nation Rome had conquered before had done. Unfortunately, the Picts and Maetae hadn't read the script, and spent the next hundred years killing thousands of Romans in a guerrilla war that would have made Afghanistan look positively civilised by comparison.
The Romans regarded being attacked in the dead of night, or on ground that meant they could not fight as a cohesive unit, to be dashed unsporting. Barbarians were supposed to charge blindly against a Legion's shield wall in broad daylight and be slaughtered to the last man. Sneaking up on a chap in the dark and slitting his throat simply wasn't Playing the Game.
Eventually, the Romans got fed up pissing away lives and, far more importantly, money on a country with appalling weather, few natural resources and a population of howling barbarians who would ambush, rape and kill you, then take your head for a trophy(and that was just the Pictish women
). The Romans went Full Game of Thrones, built the Walls and fucked off South.
