rat line
n.— «The former CIC colonel said hundreds of Nazis were brought out of Germany by the same route and “everybody that went through the Rat Line was personally accompanied to the ship by a member of our organization.”» —“U.S. agents felt ‘no great pangs’ after helping Barbie flee Europe” Globe and Mail (Toronto, Can.) July 5, 1983. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A listener remembers her grandmother’s colorful comment when someone arrived late after getting lost: You went around your elbow to get to your thumb. Lots of similar sayings in English suggest roundabout routes or overcomplicated tasks, including...
A North Carolina listener is fond of the German loanword Weltschmerz, literally “world pain,” a compound word made up of Welt, cognate with English world and Schmerz, cognate with smart as in That smarts! Coined by a 19th-century German author who...