It is entitled, "Against the Murderous and Thievish Bands of Peasants."[24] Here he lets himself loose on the side of the oppressors with a bestial ferocity.

"Crush them" (the peasants), he writes, "strangle them and pierce them, in secret places and in sight of men, he who can, even as one would strike dead a mad dog!" All having authority who hesitated to extirpate the insurgents to the uttermost were committing a sin against God.

"Findest thou thy death therein," he writes, addressing the reader, "happy art thou: a more blessed death can never overtake thee, for thou diest in obedience to the Divine word and the command of Romans xiii.

1, and in the service of love, to save thy neighbour from the bonds of hell and the devil." Never had there been such an infamous exhortation to the most dastardly murder on a wholesale scale since the Albigensian crusade with its "Strike them all: God will know His own"-- a sentiment indeed that Luther almost literally reproduces in one passage.
The attitude of the official Lutheran party towards the poor countryfolk continued as infamous after the war as it had been on the first sign that fortune was forsaking their cause.

Like master, like man.