TIL: The Nazis executed the sister of the author of "All is Quiet on the Western Front" with the words "Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach – you, however, will not escape us" being uttered at her trial
The Nazis wanted people to think war was this glorious and righteous thing that young men should be proud to go off and do even if it costs them their lives. So the literal opposite of the message of the book.
It paints the war as being senseless and horrifying and that the German soldiers were just as lied to and abused as any other soldiers. The Nazis wanted the public to think the war was lost due to betrayal by leftists/Jews and that it was a glorious undertaking.
Uncritical violence and action are central to fascism, and the Nazi's fetishized the idea of Aryan "supermen." All Quiet on the Western Front is in direct conflict with those ideas. I'm sure there's plenty of contemporary politics around WWI that the Nazis didn't appreciate about the novel as well.
This is what I was going to say/ask. I haven’t read it in a long time, but from my recollection it wasn’t like anti-nazi so much as anti-war in general.
In the era of Trumpism, I have learned that fascism is a sort of "collective insanity" where the members are given permission to act out like crazed children and violence is normalized. Cruelty is the point. The book is anti-violence and that cannot be tolerated in the cult of fascism. It doesn't matter that she didn't write the book or maybe even disagreed with it's message. The point was to exercise their hate--a hate that was skillfully cultivated by Hitler and his goons. It's the same here in the US now. A violent mob wanted to kill Trump's most loyal servant: the vice president. It doesn't even matter if you have been loyal; these people WILL kill you and your family if Dear Leader commands it. It scares the hell out of me.
Aside from what everyone else already said, Nazis and Prussians disliked each other. Nazis considered Prussians stuck up old aristocracy and Prussians considered Nazis upstart extremists. There was a ton of Prussian officers in the German military and the Nazis dominated the government so they had to put up with each other, at least while Germany was winning up to 1942. Nearly all of Hitler's assassinations attempts where organized by Prussians and late into the war, Hitler started purging them.
Even though not directly part of the topic, I highly recommend reading "All is quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque while also watching Sam Mendes' "1917" and Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old".
The original film adaptation of All Quiet is also very good. It was an early talkie, but also effectively pre-Hays Code, so it's surprisingly violent and dark at times. It really holds up well, with some battle scenes being so reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan that I'm certain that Spielberg must have been strongly influenced.
I watched they shall not grow old from the front row of a packed movie theater. You really see the swirly details of the processing but i would have missed my chance otherwise. It was only showing in my area a couple days.
The Nazis committed many heinous crimes - they were so many WWII massacres that Wikipedia has a section just for that in the German war crimes Wikipedia article.
The Nazis hated that book. When the movie came out in 1930, they started harassing and attacking theaters that showed it: "During and after its German premiere in Berlin on December 4, 1930, Nazi brownshirts under the command of Joseph Goebbels disrupted the viewings by setting off stink bombs, throwing sneezing powder in the air and releasing white mice in the theaters, eventually escalating to attacking audience members perceived to be Jewish and forcing projectors to shut down. They repeatedly yelled out "Judenfilm!" ("Jewish film!") while doing this. Goebbels wrote about one such disruption in his personal diary. The Nazi campaign was successful and German authorities outlawed the film on December 11, 1930. A heavily cut version was briefly allowed in 1931, before the Nazis came to power in 1933 and the film was outlawed again. The film was finally re-released in Germany on April 25, 1952, in the Capitol Theatre in West Berlin."
To be clear, the Nazis didn't simply execute her to antagonize him like some Game of Thrones type power play. She was very much an anti-Nazi activist herself.
In the German tv show “Babylon Berlin” (that’s how it’s named on Netflix for English language viewers), it is shown as the method for execution of an enemy of the state (not literally the head being chopped off, but the scene around the execution) during the interwar period.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, why the fuck have you not read it? Drop what you’re doing and go read it. It’s not long and it’s a literary masterpiece.
Thanks for posting this. I actually will. It fell into the void of books I was forced to read for school but was way too young to appreciate. When I graduated from college I actually went back and re-read a bunch that fell into this category. Martian Chronicles, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, etc.
So true, I got hooked with his writing style, I read all 9 of his books. Each one has different story but some how has small hints and connection here and there. A great writer with such a sad life.
... who was also married to Charlie Chaplin, maker of The Great Dictator, one of the first big movies explicitly attacking Nazis. Paulette Goddard: fucking prominent anti-Nazis one marriage at a time.
It says inn1933 his writings were declared “unpatriotic” by Nazi Germany and banned in the country. Huh. Sounds familiar. Like books being taken out of schools in certain states for painting white people in a bad light in terms of slavery.
Just to be clear "Sippenhaft" means basically "family imprisonment" and it usually was that - you weren't normally executed, but you were sent to prison/concentration camp and children would usually be taken away (other famous examples are what happened to the families of the 20th July plot members).
It is why they managed to rule so effectively and shut down dissent. I find it so annoying hearing people go on about how all Germans were nazis and guilty. Fast forward to 2022 and you see people posting on various social media about how hurt they feel when their boss criticizes them, how traumatizing it is. Imagine fearing for not just yourself but your whole family literally going down, sometimes tortured to death if you say something perceived as critical.
Oh yeah, they killed a group of students and teachers called "Die Weisse Rose" (White rose) just because they printed some anti-regime pamphlets, no jail, all executed after a short (and unfair of course) trial. There were also some young women in this group.
I agree, groupthink is powerful. I feel the aforementioned reaction is due to most people living in a fantasy world where they're chock-full of courage. With bloodlust in their eyes, they imagine that they alone would stand up to face tyranny despite the risk. It's obviously bullshit.
What's frightening to me is this all happened less then 70 years ago. People are still alive who went through that time. And people dont think a war or something like that could happen again or here. Its frightening the way the nazis came to power.
Remarque’s Wikipedia page does not mention his sister’s murder. Someone should fix that. Preferable someone who knows more about history than what I pick up on reddit.
Oh and also, for those who wonder if the third reich were all bad - and sadly there seem to be more every day, here’s an example of their cruelty and evil which anyone can immediately grasp. Yes. They were bad and what’s worse is that this could happen again if we’re not very, very careful.
I once years ago knew the author the book "If You Service." I met him in 1989 and his book is such an elegant anti-war book all while being a biography of his time in action.
Remarque didn't find out what happened to his sister until after the war ended. He dedicated his 1952 book "Der Funke Leben" (the spark of life) about german concentration camps to the memory of his sister. The dedication ("To the memory of my Sister Elfriede“) was included in the English version that was published but was omitted from the German version.
So this is where he got the idea “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” -Trump
Also North Korea, which has a 3 generations of punishment thing where if they want to get you on whatever charge, they'll also send your children and grandchildren, parents, siblings, and spouse to concentration camps.
Why don’t we ever see photos or quotes from Nazis who LOVED slaughtering the innocent? There had to be a million of them that just loved gasing and burning and shooting people on face value. We never hear their words. Just explanations for how Hitler did not know the full extent of the holocaust, and everyone who perpetrated it just did it from a desk with pen and paper. Because their superiors ordered it. But I don’t buy any of that. Everyone who wore a Nazi uniform had some kind of murder fetish.
Oh, there's plenty of that out there. But there are 2 kinds of villains: the mwahaha villains and the Dolores Umbridge "I deeply regret you making me have to do this terrible thing" villains. Everyone gets that the mwahaha villains are villains. Many still think the "oh so sad I must torture you but I'm only following the law" villains aren't villains, so they get most of the attention because of the need to expose them and others like them. They are the banality of evil. They are the cheerful men with 2.3 kids living in suburban enclaves of Cape Town who liked taking long walks on the beach and hanging out with friends drinking beer, who also went to work every day and tortured to death anti-apartheid activists.
Holocaust does not equal modern liberals. Nazis were as right wing as right wing can be. They even exterminated the Socio-democratic (Weimar German equivalent of todays democrats) party and the Communist party.
The bizarre thing is All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the all-time most sympathetic portraits of German (Prussian) soldiers that I'm aware of.
It's the anti war part of the book that does it
The Nazis wanted people to think war was this glorious and righteous thing that young men should be proud to go off and do even if it costs them their lives. So the literal opposite of the message of the book.
It paints the war as being senseless and horrifying and that the German soldiers were just as lied to and abused as any other soldiers. The Nazis wanted the public to think the war was lost due to betrayal by leftists/Jews and that it was a glorious undertaking.
Uncritical violence and action are central to fascism, and the Nazi's fetishized the idea of Aryan "supermen." All Quiet on the Western Front is in direct conflict with those ideas. I'm sure there's plenty of contemporary politics around WWI that the Nazis didn't appreciate about the novel as well.
That's exactly why the nazis hated it. They expected soldiers to be tough fighting machines that show no mercy to anyone.
Realistic depictions of war go against the nationalistic narrative.
This is what I was going to say/ask. I haven’t read it in a long time, but from my recollection it wasn’t like anti-nazi so much as anti-war in general.
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Yeah, I don't understand the hate. I don't recall the book being anti-German in any way, but it's been 25 years since I read it.
In the era of Trumpism, I have learned that fascism is a sort of "collective insanity" where the members are given permission to act out like crazed children and violence is normalized. Cruelty is the point. The book is anti-violence and that cannot be tolerated in the cult of fascism. It doesn't matter that she didn't write the book or maybe even disagreed with it's message. The point was to exercise their hate--a hate that was skillfully cultivated by Hitler and his goons. It's the same here in the US now. A violent mob wanted to kill Trump's most loyal servant: the vice president. It doesn't even matter if you have been loyal; these people WILL kill you and your family if Dear Leader commands it. It scares the hell out of me.
Aside from what everyone else already said, Nazis and Prussians disliked each other. Nazis considered Prussians stuck up old aristocracy and Prussians considered Nazis upstart extremists. There was a ton of Prussian officers in the German military and the Nazis dominated the government so they had to put up with each other, at least while Germany was winning up to 1942. Nearly all of Hitler's assassinations attempts where organized by Prussians and late into the war, Hitler started purging them.
What a bunch of fucking nazis
I'm thinking that the Nazis were baddies.
Check out how the asshole that said that to her died. Gives me some satisfaction. Friesler was a really crazy fanatic.
Yeah the more I learn about these Nazi guys the less kosher I think they are.
These Nazis sound like real jerks.
I need to thank you for my first laugh regarding 'Nazi War trials'.
Hey Nazis, YTAs!
I heard this in Louis CK’s voice.
One of the few justifiable uses of this sentence ever seen on Reddit.
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Yes it bothers me how this is framed.
I was taken aback by the beheading aspect of her death. I didn’t know the Nazi’s killed anyone that way.
Even though not directly part of the topic, I highly recommend reading "All is quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque while also watching Sam Mendes' "1917" and Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old".
In my opinion, the best WWI movie is actually Paths of Glory. 1957, Directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas.
They shall not grow old was absolutely fascinating. Fair warning, you will see many a corpse
Maybe not all at the same time
I recommend
The original film adaptation of All Quiet is also very good. It was an early talkie, but also effectively pre-Hays Code, so it's surprisingly violent and dark at times. It really holds up well, with some battle scenes being so reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan that I'm certain that Spielberg must have been strongly influenced.
"All is quiet on the Western Front" is a great read but man is it rough. I had to take several breaks
The 1979 adaption of
Dan Carlin's WW1 audiobook
I watched they shall not grow old from the front row of a packed movie theater. You really see the swirly details of the processing but i would have missed my chance otherwise. It was only showing in my area a couple days.
1917 was a lowkey masterpiece. I feel like it got nowhere near the amount of respect it deserved.
The movie for AQOWF is a classic as well. From the 30s and yeah just really fucking good
I'm starting to rhino the Nazis were dicks...
In which order?
All Quiet was a bit of a tough read for me because of the nature of translating German in to English.
I don’t think I’d be able to read a book while simultaneously watching two movies.
The Nazis committed many heinous crimes - they were so many WWII massacres that Wikipedia has a section just for that in the German war crimes Wikipedia article.
And guarantee that’s not all of them
That link is broken, try this one:
Your link doesn't seem to be working for some people (including me)
Massacres and war crimes of World War II BY LOCATION, and that's just a single section of the page. Puts it into perspective.
weird. that seems really off-brand for those guys. huh.
Your link doesn’t work for me in mobile Firefox on iOS.
The Nazis hated that book. When the movie came out in 1930, they started harassing and attacking theaters that showed it: "During and after its German premiere in Berlin on December 4, 1930, Nazi brownshirts under the command of Joseph Goebbels disrupted the viewings by setting off stink bombs, throwing sneezing powder in the air and releasing white mice in the theaters, eventually escalating to attacking audience members perceived to be Jewish and forcing projectors to shut down. They repeatedly yelled out "Judenfilm!" ("Jewish film!") while doing this. Goebbels wrote about one such disruption in his personal diary. The Nazi campaign was successful and German authorities outlawed the film on December 11, 1930. A heavily cut version was briefly allowed in 1931, before the Nazis came to power in 1933 and the film was outlawed again. The film was finally re-released in Germany on April 25, 1952, in the Capitol Theatre in West Berlin."
Lord, the first steps they took sound straight out the Little Rascals. Shit escalated quickly.
So his family changed their German name “Remark” to “Remarque” when coming to America.
That wiki article was awesome. I had no idea about this guy or his history, but it’s fascinating stuff!
My maternal great grandfather and his brother changed their last name to sound more Italian due to anti-German sentiment around WW1.
Not that uncommon. Lots of immigrants on Elis island Americanized their last name so fit in better or to avoid anti immigrant sentiment
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The more I learn about this Hitler guy, the less I care for him
He was kinda a jerk.
He seems like a real jerk.
This may be controversial, but... Hitler? Not a fan.
To be clear, the Nazis didn't simply execute her to antagonize him like some Game of Thrones type power play. She was very much an anti-Nazi activist herself.
Basically a story about a pair of boots. Only the boots survived.
At least the watch got sent home.
I’m starting to think those Nazi guys were kind of jerks.
“It seems that the Germans are bad, very bad.”
The more I learn about them the less I like them
real knuckleheads
Meth heads. They where meth heads and coke fiends .
Imagine declaring war On the World…twice.
The more I learn about this Hitler guy the less I care for him.
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Oh really? Have you ever had any doubts? 'Jerks' is too gentle for those people who did all those crimes.
You might be on to something there.
Starting?
I had no idea beheading was a form of execution anywhere in 20th century Europe other than France.
In the German tv show “Babylon Berlin” (that’s how it’s named on Netflix for English language viewers), it is shown as the method for execution of an enemy of the state (not literally the head being chopped off, but the scene around the execution) during the interwar period.
Yeah, Sophie Scholl and her brother were guillotined.
THen you do not know a lot of things about the Nazis or the DDR.
The cruelty is the point...
I would be curious to know what became of the nazi executioner
Not sure about the executioner, but the judge died in a bombing raid.
Probably given a job in west Germany by the Americans or a cozy village in Argentina.
I know it's translated from German, but the English title is All Quiet on the Western Front, not "*is* Quiet".
The German title is actually "Im Westen nichts Neues", which literally would translate to "Nothing new in the west".
Never apologize for calling out someone being wrong. More of that would solve far more problems than it would cause.
I wish we used the more literal and ironic title, Nothing New on the Western Front.
He dedicated his 1952 book to her. The dedication was left on in German publications because many Germans still considered him a traitor.
Today, the book is part of the German school curriculum.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, why the fuck have you not read it? Drop what you’re doing and go read it. It’s not long and it’s a literary masterpiece.
Thanks for posting this. I actually will. It fell into the void of books I was forced to read for school but was way too young to appreciate. When I graduated from college I actually went back and re-read a bunch that fell into this category. Martian Chronicles, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, etc.
Or at least watch the movie.
And then read Johnny Got His Gun for the perspective from the other side of the war.
It was a requirement when I was in high school in California.
So true, I got hooked with his writing style, I read all 9 of his books. Each one has different story but some how has small hints and connection here and there. A great writer with such a sad life.
because I can’t get it
You forgot: It’s also just a really entertaining and exciting read. Sad and horrible, but fast-paced and well-constructed.
I keep kind of a morbid list of "Things that if you think about doing, you now know you're the bad guy"..
Roland Freisler was a particularly abhorrent creature, even amongst nazis.
He ended up being married for years to
... who was also married to Charlie Chaplin, maker of The Great Dictator, one of the first big movies explicitly attacking Nazis. Paulette Goddard: fucking prominent anti-Nazis one marriage at a time.
It says inn1933 his writings were declared “unpatriotic” by Nazi Germany and banned in the country. Huh. Sounds familiar. Like books being taken out of schools in certain states for painting white people in a bad light in terms of slavery.
What a nasty remarque.
Hoodoo, you magnificent bastard
....they didn't like the book?
They didn't like many books.
Sippenhaft is what they called it. You could be executed for something your family did.
Just to be clear "Sippenhaft" means basically "family imprisonment" and it usually was that - you weren't normally executed, but you were sent to prison/concentration camp and children would usually be taken away (other famous examples are what happened to the families of the 20th July plot members).
I'll tell you what... the more I hear about these Nazi characters, the less I like them.
the more I hear about these Nazis, the more I don't like em.
You are correct, they are pretty shitty. Sadly making a comeback lately in MAGA form.
Fun fact.
It is why they managed to rule so effectively and shut down dissent. I find it so annoying hearing people go on about how all Germans were nazis and guilty. Fast forward to 2022 and you see people posting on various social media about how hurt they feel when their boss criticizes them, how traumatizing it is. Imagine fearing for not just yourself but your whole family literally going down, sometimes tortured to death if you say something perceived as critical.
Oh yeah, they killed a group of students and teachers called "Die Weisse Rose" (White rose) just because they printed some anti-regime pamphlets, no jail, all executed after a short (and unfair of course) trial. There were also some young women in this group.
I agree, groupthink is powerful. I feel the aforementioned reaction is due to most people living in a fantasy world where they're chock-full of courage. With bloodlust in their eyes, they imagine that they alone would stand up to face tyranny despite the risk. It's obviously bullshit.
Some people don't have to think about it, if you live in china this is just life.
Yes, when you have a large group of people who are anti Semitic or already hate another demographic it is easy to craft kookie ideas
What's frightening to me is this all happened less then 70 years ago. People are still alive who went through that time. And people dont think a war or something like that could happen again or here. Its frightening the way the nazis came to power.
Y’know, the more I learn about this ‘Hitler’ guy, the more I don’t care for him.
Remarque’s Wikipedia page does not mention his sister’s murder. Someone should fix that. Preferable someone who knows more about history than what I pick up on reddit.
It does mention her murder - it's under Writing Career:
Good book, no wonder the Nazis hated him. Fucking Nazis...
Oh and also, for those who wonder if the third reich were all bad - and sadly there seem to be more every day, here’s an example of their cruelty and evil which anyone can immediately grasp. Yes. They were bad and what’s worse is that this could happen again if we’re not very, very careful.
Nazis: Cowards in 1942, cowards in 2022.
Soooo...they put her on trial. But not for anything she did? Classy.
No they put her on trial because she said that the war was lost. It was the icing on the cake that he was her rother not the reason they executed her.
Now that's some terrifying shit.
Almost as cruel as Japanese rape commandos in ww2
A redditor mentioned the book in a comment a while ago. I bought the book started reading a few weeks ago. It's a good account of what WWI was like.
Yeah. It was mandatory reading when I went to school in Germany.
"trial"
These guys really leaned into the evil thing
Almost as cruel as Japanese rape commandos in ww2
It's one of many remarks attributed to
Man, fuck Nazis. I wish there had been more brave souls like the hero who killed Hitler.
Um. Hitler killed himself.
Another reason to hate nazis? I don't mind if I do.
I'm beginning have my doubts about these nazis
I once years ago knew the author the book "If You Service." I met him in 1989 and his book is such an elegant anti-war book all while being a biography of his time in action.
Such a great book, really made me realise how bad war is, Nazis were beyond bastards.
Seems kind of silly to kill someone's sister for writing a book you don't like. But then, these are Nazis we're talking about.
Remarque didn't find out what happened to his sister until after the war ended. He dedicated his 1952 book "Der Funke Leben" (the spark of life) about german concentration camps to the memory of his sister. The dedication ("To the memory of my Sister Elfriede“) was included in the English version that was published but was omitted from the German version.
Remarque's AQotWF is one of my favorite books of all time. Short read, but very impactful.
How very sad....
I wish I’d been taught that in my WW2 class. We even read the book. Fuck.
All. Nazis deserve death
I saw an interview with an old German soldier on YouTube and he mentioned this so called law that the Germans had, it’s called “Sippenhaft”
Banning books that are critical of your home country as unpatriotic is a practice that one political party in-particular would like to do
GQP
ouch
TIL about Hitler'sVolksgerichtshof, or The People's Court...Maybe the TV show "The People's Court" should have done research before naming the show.
I'm just going to say it, the Nazis were really not cool.
Amazing
So this is where he got the idea “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” -Trump
Also North Korea, which has a 3 generations of punishment thing where if they want to get you on whatever charge, they'll also send your children and grandchildren, parents, siblings, and spouse to concentration camps.
Why don’t we ever see photos or quotes from Nazis who LOVED slaughtering the innocent? There had to be a million of them that just loved gasing and burning and shooting people on face value. We never hear their words. Just explanations for how Hitler did not know the full extent of the holocaust, and everyone who perpetrated it just did it from a desk with pen and paper. Because their superiors ordered it. But I don’t buy any of that. Everyone who wore a Nazi uniform had some kind of murder fetish.
Oh, there's plenty of that out there. But there are 2 kinds of villains: the mwahaha villains and the Dolores Umbridge "I deeply regret you making me have to do this terrible thing" villains. Everyone gets that the mwahaha villains are villains. Many still think the "oh so sad I must torture you but I'm only following the law" villains aren't villains, so they get most of the attention because of the need to expose them and others like them. They are the banality of evil. They are the cheerful men with 2.3 kids living in suburban enclaves of Cape Town who liked taking long walks on the beach and hanging out with friends drinking beer, who also went to work every day and tortured to death anti-apartheid activists.
I’m going to assume your post comes from a point of genuine curiosity and lack of information and that you’re not trolling.
Remember when Americans hated Nazis? Now they vote for Trump.
at no point did America hate Nazis when you inspired them with your segregation of black people and vicious treatment of the indigenous population
I remember this, after she died the nazi assholes submitted a bill to the author requiring him to pay for the rope that hung his sister
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It's why when you hear certain people say 'we should go after their families' it's sort of easy to say.. that's a really nazi thing to say
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Hey I bump into none white people who are racist, isn't that amazing.
You’ll be happy to know that there are racists in all races.
I like how you choose to attack white people for no reason at all.
Wow, the Nazis went after the family of the people they cancelled. It could never happen here.
“Cancelled”
Holocaust does not equal modern liberals. Nazis were as right wing as right wing can be. They even exterminated the Socio-democratic (Weimar German equivalent of todays democrats) party and the Communist party.
North Korea tier atrocious behavior.
Almost as cruel as Japanese rape commandos in ww2
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I thought he said the Bible was his favorite book?
I didn’t realize his favorite color was maroon
However, the name Nazi will never escape the filth they brought on it.
From the Wiki...
What's wild is that, by 1942, the German high command knew they had lost. So it isn't like Scholz did anything, other than state the truth.
Germans were a bad lot Im begining to think
Americans lynching innocent black people weren't any better
Almost sounds like China and North Korea where if you do something wrong your whole family is interned and punished.
all quiet on the western front if one of my favourites
Absolute scumbags.
That's a pretty poetic translation of "Ihr Bruder ist uns leider entwischt—Sie aber werden uns nicht entwischen"
That’s awful!! But, it doesn’t surprise me!
They really were the worst people in history.