Night Key and The Edukators

Has anyone else but me noticed the similarities between the 1937 film "Night Key" and the 2004 German film "The Edukators"? In both films, two men, one of whom is a former employee of a burglar alarm company, team up and use an electrical black box to break into the establishments of clients of the alarm company. In both films, one of the two men wants to steal items from their break-in victims, but the other insists on keeping their actions "pure." In both films, once the protagonists break in, they rearrange the items on the premises and leave an insulting note to indicate they've been there. In both films, they are doing this to strike a blow against greedy capitalists — in "The Edukators" against greedy capitalists in general, in "Night Key" against one greedy capitalist in particular (the owner of the burglar-alarm company) who cheated one of the gang members out of his deserved credit and royalties for the alarm system. I'm not sure which is harder to believe — that the crestors of "The Edukators," director and co-writer Hans Weingartner and his writing partner Katharina Held, ripped off this plot from a movie so obscure that even a long-time Boris Karloff buff like myself had only seen it once before its recent release on DVD, or that they independently came up with such a strikingly similar plot. But the opening premises of the two films are almost identical even though the plots resolve in very different ways.