In Germany there is a record of almost everything. We are a meticulous, observant, and bureaucratic people, and sometimes behave as if documentation and memorandum were the identifying hall-marks of true civilization. Even when it involved the systematic murder of an entire race of people, there were statistics, minutes, photographs, reports, and transcripts. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of war criminals might successfully have resisted conviction but for our very German obsession with numbers, names, and addresses. Many records had been destroyed in Allied air raids, it was true, but I was certain that somewhere I would find Wolfgang Stumpff’s name and address.

I started at police headquarters, visiting both the Registration of Address section and the Passport Office, but found no trace of him there. Then I checked at the Ministry of the Interior on Prinzregentenstrasse. I even looked for his name at the Society of German Jurists. I knew that Stumpff was from Munich and that he had studied to be a lawyer. The baron had told me that much himself. And reasoning that it was highly unlikely he could have come through the war without doing military service, my next port of call was the Bavarian State Archives on Arcisstrasse, where there were records going back as far as 1265. These had suffered no damage at all. But I had no luck there either, except to discover that the archives of the Bavarian army had been moved, to Leonrodstrasse, and it was here, finally, that I found what I was looking for, in the Rank Lists—the officer rolls for Bavaria. Alphabetically listed, year on year. It was a beautiful bit of record-keeping, handwritten, in purple ink. Hauptmann Wolfgang Stumpff of the 1st Gebirgsdivision, which was formerly the Bavarian Mountain Division. I now had a name, an address, the name of Stumpff’s regimental commander—I even borrowed his photograph.

The address in the Haidhausen district of East Munich was no more, having been completely destroyed on July 13, 1944. At least, that’s what the sign on the ruins told me. And temporarily bereft of ideas, I decided to spend an afternoon riding the trams—specifically the three, six, eight, and thirty-seven, with the photograph of Stumpff I had borrowed from his file. But before I did I had an appointment to meet the baron’s daughter outside the Glyptothek.

Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was wearing a knee-length beige skirt, a yellow sweater that was just clingy enough to let you know she was a woman, and a pair of pigskin leather driving gloves. We had a pleasant conversation. I showed her the picture I had purloined from the army archives.

“Yes, that’s him,” she said. “Of course he was much younger when this picture was taken.”

“Didn’t you know? This is at least a thousand years old. I know because that’s how long Hitler said the Third Reich would last.”