The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [145]
Although weak, Stein was still obsessed with the Amber Room. Once again he put pressure on the Baron.
'Files of the Criminal Investigation Department, Ingolstadt.' Extract from an outpatient referral from Starnberg to Hamburg. As far as hospitals staff were concerned, Stein was heading back home.
15 August 1987. Dear [Dr Arlt, Ward Registrar, Hamburg-Eppendorf Psychiatric Hospital], enclosed please find some additional information about George Stein, who will attend your clinic on 25 August 1987... Stein is an intelligent, subtly sophisticated personality in full possession of his mental faculties.. . Stein's strategic guideline for his life [is to] look for much honour even at the price of large numbers of unwanted enemies... Many kind regards, Dr Benno Splieth, Clinical Assistant.
George Stein's Bavarian doctor was upbeat about his patient's recovery prospects but concerned about the forces pitted against him. We still do not know if his enemies really existed or if they were in his head.
'8079 Altdorf, Post: Titting, Bavaria.' A postcard from George Stein who was recuperating from his recent traumas in the countryside.
18 August 1987, Dear Dr Splieth! I am well, I am walking a lot, write and make new plans! Your parents have been here yesterday, we hung up the laundry, which had become quite stiff in the sun. I intend to walk now to Eichstadt to post the mail. In the enclosure you can see how the publication of one of my books is being planned. Kind regards, yours George Stein.
The enclosure is missing, so we can only presume that the book was about the Amber Room and Stein's American theory. It is remarkable that Stein had lost none of his bravura and even intended to set out on a round trek to the post office that we calculate would be forty miles.
According to a report in Bild, a farmer claimed to have seen George Stein emerging from a hotel, Pension Schneider, in the small Bavarian hamlet of Altdorf in the early hours of 20 August 1987, shortly after sending his postcard to Dr Splieth. The owner of Pension Schneider told the police that Stein had arrived days before in a highly agitated state and during his stay ate very little, spending most days out walking.
We drive across the belly of Germany, following the line of the Austrian Alps, then turn north, through Bavaria. We skirt Munich and head along the A9 autobahn, past the medieval city of Ingolstadt (the setting for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), where George Stein's criminal file originated. A side road plunges between hop poles and low-slung whitewashed farm buildings. Twelve miles down the road lies Altdorf, a hamlet of less than half a dozen houses, fringed by Titting Wald.
We read in Bild how, on the afternoon of 20 August 1987, Aloise Dirch, a resident of Altdorf, found a body lying in the ruins of the fourteenth-century castle that stands on a hill above the village. Kriminalhauptkommissar Wermuth from Ingolstadt wrote in his report that the victim has been stabbed in the abdomen several times.3 The pathologist from Ingolstadt hospital, who examined the body, wrote that most of the wounds were made 'using a dissecting scalpel'. He also found disturbing evidence of other recent 'sacrificial cuts to the [victim's] abdominal wall'.
Two police photographs exist of the body as it was discovered, lying beneath fallen beech leaves, a relatively tidy scene for such a violent death. In the first picture there are few signs of struggle, only smears of dried blood on the victim's fingers and caked beneath his nails. The face, with