Überhaupt und sowieso and überhaupt en sowieso

We compare the use of überhaupt and sowieso in Dutch and German. We use the world-wide web as the main resource and pursue a zigzag strategy, trying to find usages going back and forth between dictionaries, intuitions and real data obtained through web search. To our surprise, the results more or less confirm the decision of Dutch dictionaries to consider überhaupt and sowieso synonymous. In German, we find no synonymy, but only a great overlap of usage conditions in declarative sentences.