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The Germanic peoples did not become Christian in a day. Over roughly a thousand years – from the Goths in the 4th century to the Swedes in the 11th/12th – one tribe after another changed its faith. Sometimes this happened peacefully through mission, sometimes through the political calculation of princes, sometimes by the sword.
The earliest step was Bishop Wulfila's translation of the Bible into Gothic (4th c.) – the oldest continuous Germanic text of any kind. The Goths, however, became Arian Christians, which later separated them from the Roman Church. Already this shows: Christianisation was never a uniform process.
In the 8th century the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface travelled through Hesse and Thuringia. The most famous moment: around 723 he felled the oak dedicated to Donar at Geismar – and when the thunder god answered with no lightning, many converted. From the wood, legend says, he built a chapel. It is a model image of mission: the old god's sanctuary is destroyed to show his powerlessness.
Quite different in the North: Charlemagne's Saxon wars (772–804) were a violent forced conversion. They began with the destruction of the Irminsul, brought mass baptisms, deportations and the infamous bloody assize of Verden. The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae even put pagan customs such as cremation or refusal of baptism under penalty of death. Even Charlemagne's adviser Alcuin criticised this harshness.
Where force did not work, adaptation did. Pope Gregory advised not to destroy pagan temples but to consecrate them, and to let feasts continue – only in honour of the new god. So the old images survived within the new:
"The idol temples of that people should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols within them."after Pope Gregory I to Mellitus, transmitted in Bede, Ecclesiastical History I,30 (public domain, own translation)
Christianisation was the end of Germanic belief as a living religion – and at the same time the beginning of its long afterlife. Anyone who says "Thursday" today or lights a midsummer fire carries a remnant of it onward, often without knowing.
The Irminsul · The Donar oak & Boniface · The Merseburg Charms · Interpretatio Romana · The Germanic feasts.
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