Soldiers are murderers (original) (raw)

"Soldiers are murderers" (German: Soldaten sind Mörder) is a quote from an opinion piece written in 1931 by Kurt Tucholsky and published under his pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel in the weekly German magazine Die Weltbühne. Starting with a lawsuit against the magazine's editor Carl von Ossietzky for "defamation of the Reichswehr" in 1932, Tucholsky's widely quoted assertion led to numerous judicial proceedings in Germany, also after World War II and until the late 20th century. In several cases in the 1990s, last in 1995, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that using the quote as a means to express pacifist views is protected by the constitution of Germany.