Thought Bellatrix Was The Most Dangerous Death Eater? Weasleys Beg to Differ

Summary:

• Neville Longbottom was terrified after the mass break from Azkaban as his parent’s torturer, Bellatrix Lestrange, was among the escapees.
• The murderer of Ron Weasley’s uncles, Antonin Dolohov, was also one of the Death Eaters that managed to break free from the prison.
• Apart from Neville, many more Hogwarts students were horror-struck after the break, because those were Voldemort’s vilest followers that escaped.

When the most notorious Death Eaters escaped from Azkaban, poor Neville Longbottom was terrified: among them was Bellatrix Lestrange, the woman who’d tortured his parents into insanity. But Bellatrix wasn’t the only escapee who’d destroyed one of Harry’s close friends’ families, and the Weasleys also had a personal enemy among the escaped prisoners’ ranks.

Ron’s Uncles Were Killed by One of the Escapees

The First Wizarding World was brutal, and pretty much every wizarding family was affected by it. The Weasleys, too, have lost some good people, especially considering that their older generation were all Order of the Phoenix members.

Few fans know this, but Ron used to have uncles. Molly Weasley’s brothers, Gideon and Fabian Prewett, were brave young men who, too, fought against Lord Voldemort in the First War. Unlike their sister and her husband, they fell victims to a Death Eater attack, killed by one of Voldemort’s most notorious followers: Antonin Dolohov.

The only reason Ron wasn’t as terrified after the mass break from Azkaban as Neville was that he didn’t get to know his uncles, whereas poor Neville had lived his entire life watching the empty shells that once were his parents by that point.

Antonin Dolohov Was a Mass-Murdering Monster

Antonin Dolohov was among Voldemort’s most loyal, dangerous, and sadistic followers. It’s implied that out of all Death Eaters, only Bellatrix Lestrange and Severus Snape were a match for him when it came to raw power, and Dolohov used his potential to wreak as much havoc and destroy as many lives as possible.

We don’t know the full list of Dolohov’s victims, but apart from Gideon and Fabian Prewett, he also killed Remus Lupin in the Battle of Hogwarts, leaving young Teddy fatherless. It took an entire Charms Master, Professor Flitwick, to take down this bloodthirsty Death Eater. To give credit where it’s due, Flitwick defeated a handful of Voldemort’s followers in the battle, and Dolohov was only the most notable of them.

But the point is, Neville was most likely far from the only Hogwarts student cowering in fear after the mass break from Azkaban: the escapees were some of Voldemort’s worst rabid dogs, and they had ruined countless families before they were caught.