Did they deserve to die?

The following quote was said by the narrator.

“Did they deserve any better, these people? How many had actively persecuted others, high on the scent of Hitler’s gaze, repeating his sentences, his paragraphs, his opus? Was Rosa Hubermann responsible? The hider of a Jew? Or Hans? Did they all deserve to die? The children?” (Zusak 375-376)

The deaths of these characters were necessary to show the impact the war had on the lives of the Germans. It also demonstrates irony, as Liesel starts out abandoned, and ends up as an orphan at the end of the novel. Zusak has used these deaths to imply that there was no happy ending to the war and that there was only pain and suffering.