Wawel Castle, where Hans Frank ran the General Government from occupied Krakau, is presented as a place of lavish privilege built on plunder. Its paintings, tapestries, church treasures, jewelry, and alleged bribes establish an early connection between the occupation administration’s luxury and the investigation of Josef Bühler; later, the novel’s archival trail makes the castle’s setting part of a wider history of bureaucratic power, organized persecution, and concealed evidence.

Seat of Occupation and Luxury

In conversation with March, Halder identifies Wawel Castle as Frank’s base and explains that Bühler would have been based there as well. Halder’s account comes through a friend working in the official archives in Krakau, rather than through documents March has yet examined. The castle is described as a place of extraordinary luxury, likened to the Roman Empire: paintings and tapestries, treasures looted from churches, jewelry, and bribes in cash or kind.

The setting contrasts sharply with the public promises used to recruit German settlers to the General Government. Those advertisements offered free farms and guaranteed income, while reports from the occupied territory spoke of poor soil, exhausting labor, drab satellite towns, and the danger of partisan attacks after dusk. Against that bleak reality, Wawel Castle’s reported splendor suggests how occupation could concentrate wealth and comfort among administrators even as life beyond their enclave remained harsh. When March asks whether Bühler participated in the corruption, Halder cannot confirm it; his answer is that Bühler would have been exceptional if he had not.

From Occupation Records to the Wannsee Trail

Wawel Castle is not the site of the later archival discoveries, but the investigation’s movement through official records widens the questions first raised by Halder’s account. In a box of government correspondence, March finds a letter from Reinhard Heydrich dated January 6, 1942. It states that an interagency discussion and luncheon, originally scheduled for December 9, had been postponed to January 20 at the International Criminal Police Commission’s office at Wannsee.

The meeting’s minutes are absent. A separate sheet says they were removed in the interest of state security at the request of the Reichsführer-SS. Its date, April 6, 1964, shows that Heydrich extracted them only eleven days earlier. Halder explains that the Gestapo could remove papers on security grounds and transfer them to vaults on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The archive therefore records both the evidence and the state’s effort to control what could be read: an invitation survives, while the minutes that might explain the meeting’s contents have been deliberately withdrawn.

Documents, Persecution, and Suppressed Evidence

March obtains three poor-quality photocopies from the archive with Halder’s help. Halder is frightened by the invitation and urges March that they should not see each other for a long time; he has risked his safety, but his family comes first. The surviving invitation identifies the subject as a complete solution to the Jewish question in Europe and refers to Jews being evacuated from Reich territory to the East in continuous transports. Its administrative language turns persecution into a matter of interagency coordination, while the missing minutes mark the limits imposed on the historical record.

The novel also presents a sworn affidavit by Wilhelm Stuckart among the papers in Luther’s case. In it, Stuckart recounts that an Interior Ministry adviser told him in December 1941 that Jews recently evacuated from Berlin had been massacred in Rumbuli Forest. This account places a report of mass murder inside the same world of ministries, officials, and documentary records that produced the Wannsee invitation. Wawel Castle’s earlier association with the privileges and possible corruption of occupation administrators thus opens onto a larger pattern: official institutions govern, plunder, document, and, when necessary, suppress the record of what they have done.