[3] However, it is uncertain how they were related because all sources about him stem from his enemies, the Franks, who painted a negative picture representing him as an "insurgent" and a "traitor".

While Widukind was considered the leader of the Saxon resistance by the Franks, his exact role in the military campaigns is unknown.

The Saxon Wars continued when Westphalian tribes devastated the church of Deventer and the Angrarii laid siege to the Frankish court at Fritzlar.

The next year, the Westphalians again invaded the Frankish Rhineland and subsequently fought a running battle against the Franks and their local allies while Charlemagne was busy in Spain.

Charlemagne, leading an expedition towards the mouth of the Elbe, learned that Widukind was in the land of the Nordalbingians, on the right bank of the river.

He tried to identify Reichenau Abbey as a likely location where Widukind may have spent the rest of his life,[6] but his results are inconclusive and widely rejected.

The Vita Liudgeri biography of Saint Ludger mentions him accompanying Charlemagne on his campaign against the Veleti leader Dragovit.

The emperor concluded that God had given Widukind the grace of witnessing the divine child, Jesus, behind the Sacred Host of the Mass.

The remains of three men who had died in the early 9th century, two of them about sixty-year-old warriors, the third a young man, were identified after a DNA analysis in 2002 as half-brothers or maternal cousins and a nephew.

German neo-pagans saw him as an heroic defender of Germany's traditional beliefs and their gods, resisting the Middle Eastern religion of Christianity.

Two important plays about the Saxon leader were produced in 1934, Der Sieger by Friedrich Forster and Wittekind by Edmund Kiss.

[10] The play portrays Catholic church leaders planning to destroy German freedom by forcing racial mixture on them, thus turning them into pliable "Untermenschen".

Thousands of German maidens are captured and will be forced to mate with "Jews and Moors" unless Widukind converts, which he does only to avoid this horrifying prospect.