Today, The Weasleys and The Grandma have known the story of The Death Eaters, some of the darkest members of the Magic World.
The Death Eaters was the name given to the most ardent followers of Lord Voldemort. The group primarily consisted of wizards and witches who were radical pure-blood supremacists who practised the Dark Arts with reckless abandon, malevolence and without regard to or fear of wizarding law.
Lord Voldemort
used this select group of wizards and witches during both the First and
Second Wizarding Wars, employing them as his elite force. They often
wore black hoods and masks with snake-like eye slits to cover their
faces.
The Death Eaters were considered Lord Voldemort's inner circle and had the Dark Mark burned into their left forearms. When Lord Voldemort touched one of them, each of The Death Eaters felt it, signalling for them to Apparate to their leader's side.
Before The Death Eaters themselves came to be, Tom Riddle, as Lord Voldemort was known in his childhood and early adulthood, gathered a gang of Slytherin students
who considered themselves his friends, though in truth, he felt no real
attachments to any of them due to his lack of desire for a true friend.
According to former Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore,
they were a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious
seeking glory, and the thuggish seeking a leader who could show them
more refined cruelty, and were considered to be forerunners of The Death Eaters since most, if not all, indeed became the first Death Eaters.
He manipulated them to do his bidding, and though this led to several nasty incidents over the years, with Riddle's strategic discretion, none was linked back to the group, much less the model student Riddle himself.
Riddle formed a group he named the Knights of Walpurgis, an organisation that included people that Lord Voldemort knew from his time at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Nearly all of those recruited were from Slytherin House. However there may have been recruits from Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and even from foreign schools within the ranks as well. He would later rename the group the Death Eater".
Members of the organisation Lord Voldemort deemed to be valuable and faithful would be branded with the Dark Mark. This symbol, a skull with a snake protruding from the mouth, was used to summoned his followers at will.
Actively gathering an army of Dark Wizards and creatures, with the belief that his hidden Horcruxes granted him immortality, Lord Voldemort and his followers planned to overthrow the Ministry of Magic. Their ranks were huge, outnumbering The Order of the Phoenix by approximately twenty to one.
Death Eater
activity during the First Wizarding War consisted of stealth attacks,
espionage, torture and mass killings of wizards, witches, and large
numbers of Muggles. These were initiated by the Death Eaters, often, but not always, on the orders of Lord Voldemort.
Part of the Death Eaters modus operandi was to cast the Dark Mark over every house where they committed murder. This inspired much terror in the wizarding community. However, The Death Eaters remained opposed by The Order of the Phoenix, founded by Albus Dumbledore and the Ministry, in retaliation for these heinous crimes and spearheaded by the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
After Lord Voldemort attempted to circumvent a prophecy written by Sybill Trelawney
during the height of the war, he fell out of the picture following his
attack on Godric's Hollow that resulted in the murder of James and Lily Potter.
His primary target, the infant Harry Potter, was mysteriously credited for Lord Voldemort's fall and surviving with nothing but a scar, thus sealing his fate as the Boy Who Lived as well as starting the destiny forced upon him. Being none the wiser to what had become of their master, the Death Eaters largely fell into chaos.
Many were rounded up and imprisoned in Azkaban without trial as part of the hard line taken by Ministry official Barty Crouch Snr, who had legalised the Unforgivable Curses against those suspected to be among the enemy's ranks. Sirius Black, whom Peter Pettigrew framed for his crimes, was among the prime suspects of Death Eater activities imprisoned without a trial.
Soon afterwards, Bellatrix, Rodolphus, and Rabastan Lestrange, and Barty Crouch Jr tortured The Longbottoms into insanity while trying to procure information about Lord Voldemort's whereabouts: this attack was considered one of the most atrocious crimes in recent history.
They were captured and sentenced to Azkaban, but Bellatrix proudly proclaimed that the Dark Lord would rise again. On the other hand, Barty Crouch Jr
proclaimed his own innocence, begging for his father to believe him:
his father ignored his pleas for leniency and sentenced him to prison, a
sentence that led the entire court to roar with triumph.
Some Death Eaters managed to elude justice by claiming the Imperius Curse had been used on them, such as Lucius Malfoy, or by turning in other Death Eaters, as Igor Karkaroff
did. Due to many trying to escape by claiming they were bewitched, the
Ministry assigned specialists to find out who was lying, although this
did not work out to the fullest since Malfoy and several others were
found innocent.
Most followers hid their allegiance to Lord Voldemort and therefore did not try to find him, although a handful of Death Eaters, such as The Lestranges and Barty Crouch Jr, remained fiercely loyal to their fallen master and sought him out. They were supposedly rewarded by Lord Voldemort for their loyalty.
The Death Eaters were an organisation of pure-blood supremacists that coalesced around Lord Voldemort, the Dark Lord
himself, a man who offered a lightning rod for their hatred and
bloodlust and especially those who sought to enforce pure-blood
supremacy or establish New World Order for both wizards and non-magics.
He
found them very useful, as their ranks included wizarding aristocrats
that could accomplish his goals through government and money, and
deadly, remorseless thugs of all stripes. However, Lord Voldemort's
single-minded pursuit of power was unpopular and he merely preyed on
prejudice to obtain followers to unwittingly bring him to worldwide
dominion. Though he allowed them to establish purification policies when
they took over the Ministry of Magic, he busied himself with seeking power for himself while never bothering to help them with these goals.
Death Eaters
followed their leader's commands first and foremost, and he treated
them ruthlessly, often sending them on virtually impossible missions and
punishing them horribly if they failed him, even due to bad luck rather
than incompetence. At his command, they worked against Lord Voldemort's opponents, The Order of the Phoenix, through espionage, murder, and battle, and also infiltrated and undermined the Ministry of Magic.
When he
needed tasks done to increase his own power, he often sent them if he
considered the task trivial enough to not warrant his personal
attention, such as retrieving the prophecy from the Department of Mysteries and visiting the werewolves and the giants.
The Death Eaters'
other, more spontaneous activities included Muggle torture and murder
for fun, property crime, and conspiracy against the world powers,
beginning with Great Britain.
Upon their success in taking over the Ministry
during the Second Wizarding War, they began a campaign to identify
Muggle-born witches and wizards and strip them of their wands, or even
imprison or kill them, on the trumped-up premise that they must have stolen their magic from a real witch or wizard.
Although some Death Eaters appeared to have been fanatically loyal to Lord Voldemort, such as Bellatrix Lestrange and Barty Crouch Jr, several only aligned with him for the ideals of purification and shared glory, such as Lucius Malfoy and Regulus Black, while many others seemed to serve him largely out of fear, such as Peter Pettigrew.
As soon as he was defeated, many immediately renounced their loyalty and did not attempt to find Lord Voldemort in the intervening years. Also, due to maltreatment from Lord Voldemort,
some who joined him would come to regret it later on, such as Lucius,
Draco, and Regulus, when they either suffered his abuse or witnessed the
true extent of his diabolical means. Those who rioted at the Quidditch World Cup also fled when the Dark Mark was cast.
Bill Weasley speculated then that those Death Eaters were even more frightened than the rest of us to see him come back. However, most Apparated to his side if they were able to when Lord Voldemort called them upon his return, claiming that they had been loyal all along.
Although Lord Voldemort's standard recruitment seems to be centred around Slytherins, the Dark Wizard-inclined house which he was sorted into and thus the easiest to gain followers, he sometimes gained Death Eaters from other locations such as Peter Pettigrew of Gryffindor and Igor Karkaroff of the north.
Valuing their loyalty over their social statuses or ages, Lord Voldemort recruited Regulus Black and Draco Malfoy,
both of whom were sixteen years old at the time of induction. This was
beneficial to him because it, at least in Malfoy's case, gained him the
latter's respect and anticipation for Death Eater-related duty.
In turn, even though Lord Voldemort valued the services they provided, and spoke as though they were a family, he saw them as no more than dispensable servants.
Lord Voldemort was willing to sacrifice even the most loyal of them if it would increase his power, the most prominent example being Severus Snape, whom he thought to the end was faithful.
Some Death Eaters deluded themselves to thinking that they alone knew and understood Lord Voldemort, or were even close to him, but Lord Voldemort never desired friendship. Lord Voldemort had some commons with several Death Eaters, such as a disappointing father like Barty Crouch Jr, or trying to cover his muggle heritage like Severus Snape,
and even sharing such facts to garner the loyalty of such people,
making it seem as he understand them in return, taking advantage of
their inner feelings without gaining any attachments to them in return.
Coupled with either disloyalty or constant failures, Lord Voldemort lost faith in some of the once-highly revered servants such as Lucius and Bellatrix. As a sign of distrust-based precaution, The Death Eaters did not have knowledge of all their colleagues' identities: Lord Voldemort alone knew who they all were. This was done in order to prevent any traitors from turning all the others in.
Becoming a Death Eater meant a lifetime service to Lord Voldemort. Death Eaters were denied the right to resign under any circumstances, under penalty of death. Sirius Black
thought his younger brother was killed for attempting to quit after
being given an exorbitantly taxing assignment, even though later this
turned out to be the opposite.
Igor Karkaroff deserted the Death Eaters
after turning many of them over to the Ministry, and even though he
went into hiding after his former master was revived, he was eventually
caught and killed for his disloyalty. However, Lord Voldemort did forgive the servants who did not attempt to find him but returned when he touched Wormtail's Dark Mark since Snape claimed that, if otherwise, Lord Voldemort would be left with very few followers.
Because of his diminished military forces at the time of his rebirth ceremony, Lord Voldemort only punished those who returned to him by mild torture and demands: he let Wormtail suffer the pain of severing his hand as punishment for years of disloyalty, and demanded that Avery suffer thirteen years of pain as repayment for thirteen years of disloyalty before truly being forgiven.
Imagine that Voldemort's powerful now.
You don't know who his supporters are,
you don't know who's working for him and who isn't;
you know he can control people
so that they do terrible things
without being able to stop themselves.
Lord Voldemort
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