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During World War I (and less frequently during World War II), "Hun" referred to Germans.

The reason is because at the end of the 1890s, there was a war called the Boxer Rebellion in China. Several countries, including Germany, sent soldiers to help end the rebellion. When the German soldiers were leaving, the German Kaiser (Emperor) told the soldiers that they would be so fierce and deadly that their Chinese enemies would remember them for centuries, just like how the Huns had been remembered and feared in the Roman Empire.

Allied propagandists remembered this quote when World War I began, and applied it to German soldiers to portray them as cruel, uncivilized barbarians.

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7y ago

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