{"id":1897,"date":"2026-05-18T12:28:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T12:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/tagi-magazin-report-1993\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T08:01:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T08:01:52","slug":"tagi-magazin-report-1993","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/tagi-magazin-report-1993\/","title":{"rendered":"Tagi-Magazin Report 1993"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u2014 Home \u00b7 Royal Kinship \u00b7 Tages-Anzeiger 1993 <\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Tagi-Magazin\n \u00b7 1993 Report<\/em><\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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A literary reportage linking a Lucerne bank scandal with traces of Louis XVII, the Vatican, and the Pfyffers of Altishofen.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Report from the Tagi Magazin<\/strong> dated June 19, 1993, text by Erwin Koch (Das Magazin, No. 28).<\/p>

Described in the form of a novel, the story closely aligns with conjectures regarding kinship with the French court. The article literarily connects the story of a Lucerne bank manager with traces of Louis XVII, the Swiss Guard, the Vatican, and the Pfyffer von Altishofen lineage.<\/p>

Full original article \u2014 expand to read.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Subject<\/p>\n

A bank manager in Sch\u00f6tz, the Pfyffer Guild of Altishofen, the Vatican, and the trail to Louis XVII.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Source<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Author<\/td>\nErwin Koch<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Publication<\/td>\nDas Magazin No. 28<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Newspaper<\/td>\nTages-Anzeiger<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Date<\/td>\nJune 19, 1993<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Style<\/td>\nLiterary reportage<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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An honest man suddenly becomes a fraudster\uff0b expand<\/span><\/summary>\n
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Erwin Koch \u00b7 Das Magazin No. 28 \u00b7 Tages-Anzeiger<\/p>\n

C<\/span>old was the world and wet when I reached Sch\u00f6tz tonight, a village in an area the locals call the Hinterland, eight degrees east of Greenwich. Passing three gas stations and two churches, I reached the \"Sankt Mauritz\" inn. People were standing outside. They wore colorful scarves and squeaked behind masks. Today was the Fools' Ball, one said, costume mandatory. Nevertheless, I sat down in a corner of the parlor and waited. Pent-up merriment spilled out from the hall next door. A figure, blood-red in its robe, white in its mask and without contour, sat down at my table. Steam rose from its garment. It remained silent for a long time, gasping for air, then I had the feeling it was watching me through its slits. Suddenly, with a voice distorted by pain, it shrieked: \"The Vatican is to blame!\" Then the fool raised a hand and spread out a thumb wrapped in white fabric. \"Cut?\" I asked. \"Smashed!\" he grunted.<\/p>\n

And the blood-red figure, using a small tube he inserted into his mouth to lead Coca-Cola under the mask, began to speak of his pain. In the bright afternoon, he had stood behind Otto Wigger's sawmill in the neighboring village of Altishofen, towards Unterfeld\u00e4cher, next to the men of the local Pfyffer Guild. This association, as it does every year, celebrates the Altishofen Carnival with a parade through the town, and its name, Pfyffer Guild, commemorates the famous lineage of the Barons Pfyffer von Altishofen, whose noble scion Karl, Colonel of the Swiss Guard in the service of the French King Louis XVI, only missed a heroic death on August 10, 1792, when the revolution reached the royal palace, the Tuileries, because he was on leave in Lucerne at the time of the storming. \"What does that have to do with your thumb?\" I interrupted. \"That's exactly what you're about to find out,\" the red figure replied. Behind the Wigger sawmill, towards Unterfeld\u00e4cher, the Pfyffer Guild was giving the final touches in the afternoon to a hay wagon that would be pulled through the village on Sunday to bring fun to life. They built a small house on the wagon, a paper vulture on the roof, whose wings could be moved by a cable pull. The house bore a name: Village Center 2. And next to it stood a prison made of bars. Then the men painted the Raiffeisen Bank logo on the cart, three golden ears of grain and a blue key on a red background, and the municipal coat of arms of Sch\u00f6tz and the words: \"The millions from M. P. are eggs from the bankruptcy vulture!\" \"M. P.!\" \"Wait!\" he commanded.<\/p>\n

When the Pfyffer Guild of Altishofen then pulled their prank out of the sawmill for the first time, they discovered that the cage they had built on the boards was shaking. For during the parade, a person is supposed to stand safely in the container, and he will wear a cardboard head on his shoulders that has the features of a certain Mr. M. P. And so the guild decided to better secure the bars with long nails. So he, said the fool, climbed onto the vehicle and began to drive the nails into the wood and bend their heads around the bottom bars of the prison. It happened at the second to last nail. The finger was black and red. I drank my beer. Costumed people noisily moved through the room, staggered into the night to cool off, went back into the hall to be happy and relaxed. But the strange one at my table remained silent. Sweat dripped from his mask. Sometimes he raised his hand, looked at the injured thumb, and shook his head, not violently. \"You wanted to explain something to me,\" I started again. \"What?\" \"About this M. P.\"<\/p>\n

The red figure, despite his disguise, looked around in all directions and pushed the Coca-Cola away. This M. P. was the kindest person in Sch\u00f6tz until May 4, 1992. Then, shortly after 1:00 PM, he, the manager of the Raiffeisen Bank, left the village without word. As skillfully as M. P. had known how to do business and increase the balance sheet total year after year \u2014 from those six million francs he took over from his predecessor in 1969 to the 95 million at the time of his sudden departure \u2014 he was just as friendly and quiet in his dealings with everyone. Children who brought their savings to him were rewarded, from case to case, with five, ten, or twenty francs. The reputation of his kindness was greater than the Hinterland. Even from Emmenbr\u00fccke, a suburb of the cantonal capital Lucerne, people traveled to consult with M. P. on matters of money. Young craftsmen without assets, considered not creditworthy by any institution, found mercy at M. P.'s bank. Only once in 23 years did the good man of Sch\u00f6tz turn away a petitioner, and M. P. was plagued for a long time by the thought of having disappointed someone. Sch\u00f6tz flourished. If money was needed in the village, the sentence sufficed for everyone: Peter will finance it! Receipts were a luxury; they would only have proven mistrust. Then, in 1984, Raiffeisen built a new, red house at Village Center 2. M. P. moved with his family under the exposed beams on the fourth floor; on the first floor, the balance sheet total shot up to 60 million. <\/p>\n

Hungry from the journey, I ordered a sausage salad. M. P., when he left his village shortly after 1:00 PM on May 4, 1992 \u2014 and his wife and daughter had noticed nothing unusual at lunch, as ordinary as ever \u2014 was not only a man of percentages; he was also committed to the righteous God as a churchwarden. As early as 1973, the Sch\u00f6tz-Ohmstal parish had called the young Catholic M. P., a member of the only party whose program does justice to the post of a church administrator, the Christian Democratic People's Party, into office. And Heidi, the wife from Ebersecken, as if she sensed a disaster, wept softly back then. Churchwarden M. P. fulfilled his duty with pleasure. For six million francs, the Catholics of Sch\u00f6tz renovated the parish church, the rectory, and the Chapel of St. Mauritius; for two million, they built a parish hall in the village. And the parish, whose administrator was M. P., received credit from the Raiffeisen Bank, whose manager was M. P. \"You must be this M. P. yourself, knowing everything so precisely,\" I said. A whinny shot out of the mask. M. P., the red figure continued, was not only a bank manager and churchwarden, but thirdly also the treasurer of the Konkordia health and accident insurance. And in this, too, the man achieved such mastery that the board of the Lucerne Cantonal Association elected him their president on October 29, 1991. \"A noble man,\" the mask groaned, \"despite everything.\" And M. P. had given gifts to each of the 30 clubs in the village, 2,000 francs alone for the anniversary fistball tournament of the men's gymnastics group. And it was only thanks to M. P.'s magnanimity that the firefighters could invite their wives to the Agathe celebration every year in February, where the plastic tablecloths of Raiffeisen stretched for free over the tables, three ears of grain and the blue key. \"A noble man,\" the stranger repeated, \"and no one in the Eintracht music society played \" <Il Silenzio> as cleanly as he did.\"<\/p>\n

Thus the fool spoke in mourning, raised his hand when the pain stung him, and cursed the Vatican, which was to blame for everything, and I sat silently over my sausage and listened. But M. P. was said to have been not only pious but also jovial. A few weeks before May 4, 1992, he had appeared at the Sch\u00f6tz Shooting Club, and then he, who was a bit too fat and short, in the outfit of two famous singing bellies, the Wildecker Herzbuben, sang a song that everyone knows: \"Herzilein, du sollst nicht traurig sein.\" The world was strange and cold when I reached Sch\u00f6tz tonight. In the \"Sankt Mauritz,\" the fools were on the loose, and I thought, kept in good spirits by the talk of a native, of the good in man. I was dabbing the sauce from the plate when the red figure laid his hot hand on my arm and slowly, as if they were a formula, spoke the words: \"The people of Sch\u00f6tz had tears in their eyes, do you understand?\" \"Because of their bank manager's jokes?\" Shortly after 1:00 PM on May 4, 1992, M. P., loved by all, left the Hinterland. At 2:00 PM, he called his wife and told her the pistol at his temple was loaded; he only needed to pull the trigger. For justice had not been served. The wife whimpered into the phone: \"What kind of justice?\" Two hours later, when the daughter had already returned home from school, M. P. called again, said he was in the Canton of Ticino, ready to die. The child screamed. The father insisted he had to leave this world. The wife finally managed to inform master carpenter Setz, the chairman of the board of directors of the Raiffeisen Bank Sch\u00f6tz, and sales manager Frey, the chairman of the supervisory board. The men hurried to the village center and talked back and forth, not ruling out that their manager, a Sch\u00f6tz jovial soul, was playing a special prank. M. P. spent the night in a hotel in the city of Bellinzona. He calculated that the amounts from private life insurance, occupational pension plans, and the federal old-age and survivors' insurance (AHV) were sufficient to ensure a life without want or excess for the family he was now leaving behind. He lay down in bed, the pistol that the Confederation had bequeathed to him, a non-commissioned officer in the army, beside him. In the early morning of May 5, 1992, after a night without sleep, Heidi M. P. picked up the receiver, and her husband, still alive, ordered her to send the two children to school; he was now boarding the train to Lucerne to turn himself in to the police. For he could not bring himself to commit suicide. Carpenter Setz and salesman Frey, hearing of M. P.'s turnaround, drove to the capital and waited for the train from Ticino. Finally, arriving at 10:46 AM, M. P. stood before them as they had never seen him, pale and broken. The two chairmen still thought their friend's grief could best be discussed in Sch\u00f6tz, without police and interrogation. M. P., however, refused to travel to the village, drank his last coffee in the station buffet, then walked through the city, reaching Kasimir-Pfyffer-Strasse........ \"Another Pfyffer!\" \"Don't interrupt me,\" the fool hissed, \"Kasimir Pfyffer was the son of Franz Ludwig, and Franz Ludwig was captain of the Papal Swiss Guard in 1797, when Napoleon, that miserable traitor of all ideals, conquered Rome and abducted Pope Pius VI to France.\" \"Do you have something against Napoleon?\" I teased at the Carnival Ball, not meaning the question seriously. But the red figure straightened up: \"As truly as I split my finger today, the French Revolution dealt as unjustly with the Pope. Napoleon, that Corsican rogue, abducted the Holy Father only because, primum, Pius VI had read a funeral mass for the executed Louis XVI and, secundum, had spoken the sentence: \" <We place great hopes for the future in the son of the beheaded king, who we know has been saved.>\" \"Or are you perhaps even a Mr. Pfyffer?\" He chuckled. At Kasimir-Pfyffer-Strasse 26, the Raiffeisen Bank manager M. P. from Sch\u00f6tz reached the main building of the Lucerne Cantonal Police. The officer sitting behind the counter who heard M. P.'s report asked, when the man from Sch\u00f6tz had finished, whether he really felt healthy and in every respect. M. P. repeated that he had embezzled millions of francs.<\/p>\n

Many in the village had tears in their eyes when, on the morning of May 6, 1992, Radio DRS broadcast the news that the manager of the Raiffeisen Bank Sch\u00f6tz was in custody. The \"Luzerner Zeitung\" quoted M. P.'s superior, who, despite all disappointment, spoke of a \"textbook manager.\" But the tears of the Hinterlanders dried quickly. Of all people, M. P., they agitated, had to sit in the front right of the first church pew every Sunday! And he is said to have forged his own tax return so the authorities wouldn't notice his wealth, and enrolled 800 fictional members in the Konkordia health insurance, whose premiums he paid with stolen money to appear as the best treasurer in the canton! Couldn't the rogue have waited another six months with his confession to finance the Berggl\u00f6ggli yodel club's autumn trip to New Zealand? \"Are the people that mean?\" I asked across the table. \"The mob is that mean!\" the man said. \"Already in 1838!\" \"Even back then?\"<\/p>\n

Pope John XXIII said: Even today I will<\/p>\n

In 1838, the municipality of Sch\u00f6tz offered citizenship to Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a profiteer of the beheading of the French king. Perverse, isn't it?\" The fool threw up his arms, bellowed: \"God have mercy on Louis's soul\" through the \"Sankt Mauritz.\" Suddenly a door flew open, men and women shrieked in the hall, a band played music, someone sang along: \"Seven thousand cattle, cattle, cattle, in summer and in winter.\" For ten weeks, M. P. spent the nights in the Lucerne central prison. During the day, he sat on Kasimir-Pfyffer-Strasse and helped police officers Emmenegger and Wermelinger, brooding over files and books they had confiscated at Sch\u00f6tz Village Center 2 on the evening of May 5, 1992. And the longer he told the two men of his crime, the more beautiful life seemed to him. The Swiss Association of Raiffeisen Banks finally reassured that no customer need worry about their francs, for the reserves were large. \"But where,\" I asked, \"did M. P.'s millions go?\" By mid-July 1992, the confession of the Sch\u00f6tz Raiffeisen Bank manager filled 300 pages of paper. Emmenegger and Wermelinger marveled daily, for in all the fraud over 14 years, M. P. had thought of himself last, having allowed himself little more than a small tufa stone fountain for the living room and an Audi 100 2.3 E for the underground garage. And it seemed to the police as if the talk of his kindness had once rightly gone through the Hinterland. Perhaps three, perhaps four million francs the man, who was hardly capable of resistance when someone asked him for a favor, had given away to elderly people, 300,000 to three siblings, perhaps 100,000 to an assistant gardener. Roman Catholic priests in Slovenia and Peru rejoiced at his charity, and M. P. found that the Sch\u00f6tz pastor and his assistants were basically underpaid, and so he, the churchwarden, transferred them a salary outside the norm. If M. P. discovered that the Konkordia health and accident insurance, whose branch he managed, refused to pay his customers' medical bills, he, who felt for everyone, settled the debt and remained silent. Dozens of Sch\u00f6tz children finally wore expensive braces on their teeth, secretly financed by the kindest of hearts. But, above all, an uncle lived on the edge of the village, towards Nebikon, a doctor of law, but penniless, who all his life clung to strange inheritance matters that brought the poor man no money, only debts and a paranoia. With him, the misfortune had begun. To him, M. P. gave four or five million francs. But it was for the best of all purposes: justice. \"This uncle is named Isenschmid,\" said the fool, \"Moritz Isenschmid.\" Suddenly I saw two small, wet eyes behind the mask.<\/p>\n

The narrator at my table had become increasingly quiet, devotion lay in his speech, and I leaned towards him. Then he spoke so weakly that I no longer understood him. Two men, one dressed as a chimney sweep, the other as Saddam Hussein, were arguing about the new gasoline price. Saddam was for it, the chimney sweep against it, and they made such a noise that others joined in and soon entered the war. It was the Carnival Ball in the middle of the continent. I paid for the beer and sausage salad, offered to take over the stranger's Coca-Cola as well, which he had forgotten to sip. But the red figure refused; he would not be bribed. Then we were silent, watching the other fools. \"But what,\" I finally continued, \"does your thumb have to do with the Vatican?\" The man sat down next to me, turned his head in all directions again, slid closer, coughed the phlegm from his throat. Then he whispered. The world was cold on the Place de la R\u00e9volution, which is called Place de la Concorde today, three degrees Celsius on January 21, 1793, in Paris. At 10:22 AM, Louis XVI's head was off. Robespierre, the revolutionary, wrote that 13 centuries of kingship were thus ended. Nine months later, the guillotine blade also went through the neck of Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of the predecessor, Archduchess of Austria and daughter of the German Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. The dead left two children in time: Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se-Charlotte, 15 years old, and Louis-Charles, born on March 27, 1785, thus eight years old, the heir to the throne, the so-called Dauphin. The royal children lived in the dungeon of the Temple in Paris until the girl was handed over to the envoys of her cousin, the German Emperor Francis II, in Basel on December 26, 1795, who in return released a dozen well-known revolutionaries. Louis-Charles, the ten-year-old Dauphin, died on June 8, 1795, in the revolutionary prison, thin and sick, so official history writes............ \"Now you're starting all over again!\" I warned. \"Do not disturb the truth,\" the stranger implored, \"the truth has 90 pieces of evidence.\"<\/p>\n

Thirty men, each in his own way, none convincingly, claimed to be Dauphin Louis XVII after the death of the young heir, whose passing occurred without public scrutiny. The cleverest among the fakes was a certain Naundorff, who lied the role so consistently that only the comparison of his hair with that of the dead Dauphin revealed the ruse. Dauphins suddenly lived on every corner of Europe. One, who had himself called Louis Leroy France, even reported from New York; another, Jean Marie Hervagault, pointed to a mark on his right leg and vowed that Pope Pius VI personally, before Napoleon abducted him, had pressed a stigma into the Bourbon flesh, with 20 cardinals as witnesses, to mark the only Dauphin for all time. I laughed and ordered another beer because I liked the red figure's story better and better, and again it seemed to me that nothing is as improbable as reality. The fool stuck with his Coca-Cola. In the cold November of 1948, 153 years after the death of the ten-year-old in the Paris dungeon, an old man in Oberhallau, Canton of Schaffhausen, Karl Spadin, a preacher of the word of God on his own account, put his signature on a sheet of paper. He and 33 relatives promised a Lucerne lawyer, if he succeeded in finding a long-overdue inheritance, ten percent of the sum, which they estimated had meanwhile reached one and a half billion Swiss francs, gross. For the pious Spadin, a native of Sankt Ant\u00f6nien, Graub\u00fcnden, was, by all that seemed dear and worthy to him, the flesh-and-blood great-grandson of the French Dauphin Louis XVII. I said: \"Whoops!\" Two little eyes glistened.<\/p>\n

Friends of the French royal house had supposedly succeeded in getting the Dauphin out of the dungeon in March 1795, and in his miserable place they had put a child with lung disease, similar to the Dauphin, who then really passed away on June 8. But the king's son was shipped across the sea and grew up with British foster parents, named Russell. There, far from home, at Castle Moor, the heir to the throne was forced to renounce the Catholic faith and also never to reveal to anyone during his lifetime who he truly was. Otherwise, he would be promptly shot. But then, when Napoleon I threw Europe into turmoil, the Dauphin, called Russell, was able to flee the island and thus came to Switzerland to Sankt Ant\u00f6nien, where he, now as Joseph Franz Rassel, became a teacher and had seven children together with the local Margareta Staupf. <\/p>\n

The brave lawyer who set out in the cold November of 1948 to help the descendants of the French heir to the throne obtain one and a half billion, of which a tenth part was to be his just reward, was Dr. jur. Moritz Isenschmid from Sch\u00f6tz, where the Carnival Ball was tonight. \"Get off my knee, you black-brown Rosmarie,\" Saddam Hussein sang. Dr. Isenschmid, youngest son of the former parish sexton and municipal clerk of Sch\u00f6tz, Eduard Isenschmid, who had given up all his offices in 1933 to serve not only the Lucerne Hinterland but the entire Confederation as a National Councilor for the Catholic Conservatives, began his work immediately. But it was not until the summer of 1950 that he discovered in a book by a certain Dr. de Fontbrune, which he otherwise considered a work of lies, the report that the sister of the French Dauphin, who had escaped death in the dungeon to Austria, had cited a will in favor of her brother to her confessor, the Apostolic Nuncio Michele Viale, in the year of her childless passing, 1851, at Frohsdorf Castle in Wiener Neustadt, with the provision that it could only be opened one hundred years after her passing. That would have to happen soon, Dr. Isenschmid calculated then, on October 19, 1951, and he concluded that the secret paper he was pursuing was kept in the Vatican. To guard against any eventuality, Dr. Isenschmid traveled to Italy a year before the event, on October 27, 1950, departing Lucerne at 08:11, arriving Roma Termini at 22:25. He stayed in the city for six weeks and found in Cardinal Angelo Mercati, the prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, a person he valued as \"highly noble\" in his daily report. But then Dr. Isenschmid experienced a scandal that made him sense the difficulties of his mandate. In those days, a letter arrived at the Vatican from a certain Count of Parma in America, who, like Isenschmid, reminded Secret Archivist Cardinal Mercati to open the king's daughter's will on the coming October 19. \"Count of Parma?\" \"A grandchild of a niece of the Dauphin!\" \"Aha.\" But a few days later, on a dark November night, the Parmesan's letter was stolen from the Secret Archivist's desk. A thief was in the Vatican, no ordinary one. Dr. Isenschmid did not yet grasp the background of the act in its ramifications. Therefore, he returned to Switzerland and waited, and the longer he waited in the Hinterland, the more compelling a trip to the Russian zone to Wiener Neustadt seemed to him, where the Dauphin's sister had once spent her years. Finally, unmolested by the communists, he reached Frohsdorf Castle in June 1951. Princess Beatriz Massimo, born Princess of Bourbon, Infanta of Spain, who now used the estate, allowed the man from Sch\u00f6tz to rummage through her trunks for days. However, the noblewoman stipulated that should Dr. Isenschmid ever disseminate his findings in book form, she would receive 15 percent net of the profit. Thus, on October 19, 1951, the hundredth anniversary of the king's daughter's death occurred. And the Vatican, instead of opening, remained silent. But Dr. Moritz Isenschmid, restless sleuth for justice, wanted to get to the bottom of the matter. On November 3, 1953, he traveled to Rome again, sat in the canteen of the Papal Swiss Guard for four weeks, and asked anyone in a purple sash pressing for food for help. Finally, on December 5, something important happened. The Jesuit Father Aquilino Reinert, confessor in the Basilica of St. Peter, spoke. After he had inquired in the Vatican chambers, he uttered that sentence which Dr. Isenschmid would repeat years later under oath in public document 86\/1976: \"Money and secret documents can only be with Cardinal Canali!\" So the man from Sch\u00f6tz wrote a long letter in Italian to His Eminence Nicola Canali, President of the Cardinalatial Commission for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, Grand Master of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, which he placed in the hands of Canali's secretary, Monsignor Giuseppe Curatola, honorary chamberlain in purple robes. Isenschmid trembled with impatience. A week later, Curatola informed him that his boss had probably read the letter but had never been involved with a secret will, and he, Isenschmid, should therefore stick to the Secretariat of State. Thus the man, in Rome for four months, met on March 10, 1954, with the prelates Bruno W\u00fcstenberg, minutante of the German-speaking department, and Giuseppe Zabkar, second-class secretary, and the two gentlemen explained to him that the childless king's daughter Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se-Charlotte could never, ever have left a fortune to her brother, the Dauphin, for the poor woman had departed life almost destitute. But Dr. Isenschmid, although a Catholic and nothing else, did not believe the Curia. And so the man from Sch\u00f6tz, when he received a letter from Canali's secretary on May 21, 1954,<\/p>\n

A thief was in the Vatican, no ordinary one<\/p>\n

Dr. Isenschmid trembled.<\/p>\n

the assurance of knowing nothing, immediately as a devious restrictio mentalis, a secret reservation, a lousy, cheeky legal trick: Why else would the Cardinal have sent word that under the keyword Dauphin he possessed not a single note, either privately or officially? Had Isenschmid ever asked about the Dauphin? Surely only about his sister! Then it dawned on him that the powerful Cardinal Canali was in truth the Antichrist. Dr. Isenschmid wrote in his notebook: \"Where is the righteous God?\" \"And what did he live on?\" I interjected. \"Who?\" \"Isenschmid.\" \"Does that matter when justice is at stake!\" hissed the red fool, suddenly agitated.<\/p>\n

Then I saw his hands trembling. The years dragged by between hope and misery. Dr Isenschmid travelled to Vienna and London and Innsbruck and Rome, researched and pieced things together, never married, devoted his life to the struggle, wrote letter after letter and received no reply. Finally, back in Rome: victory. Unexpectedly quickly, perhaps. For the card read: \u201cHis Holiness will receive in audience: Dr M. Isenschmid. Tomorrow, Friday, at 12:30. The Chamberlain.\u201d Never in his life had the man from Sch\u00f6tz been so nervous. When the Holy Father floated into the room on 26 February 1960, he went down on his knees, kissed the Pope\u2019s hand; John XXIII smiled and said: \u201cI will read your documents this very evening.\u201d That was all. Then he added\u2014patting the man from the hinterland on the shoulder as if he were a colleague\u2014\u201cCoraggio, Dottore! Coraggio, Dottore!\u201d Courage, Doctor! Ten days later: nothing had been found. Thirty-four Swiss men and women, all of whom believed they were descendants of the French Dauphin and thus\u2014if they reasoned correctly\u2014multimillionaires, confronted their lawyer Isenschmid when, after 20 years of toil, he still had not secured a single franc in Rome. Dr Isenschmid soothed them with carefully chosen words. He lived off the reputation of his father Eduard, the former Catholic-conservative National Councillor, and the support of his brother Joseph, the canton of Lucerne\u2019s minister of military and police affairs. Brother Hans, the municipal clerk in Sch\u00f6tz, had even had a mortgage of 80,000 francs registered against his own house in order to keep Moritz going; 60,000 of that went to the Dr iur. from the edge of the village. The hardship nevertheless grew, and Isenschmid, the smooth talker, managed to convince even such people of the importance of his craft\u2014people who, if the one and a half billion ever became reality, would in fact have nothing of it, because they descended from harmless Alemanni and not from Bourbons. Yet he promised everyone who lent him money\u2014kinship or not\u2014God\u2019s blessing along with a handsome interest rate and double or even triple the deposit, \u201cas soon as the inheritance matter is paid out, with immediate effect.\u201d If someone nevertheless lost faith that it would ever come to that, Dr Isenschmid assured them on his honour that with 90% certainty the big money would arrive within half a year. And as if he wanted to force his clientele into humility, he had them sign the following sentence on 7 November 1971 in the buffet of Zurich main station, first class, first floor: \u201cWe, the Rassel heirs, are aware that Dr Isenschmid has so far made almost indescribably great financial sacrifices in handling the Rassel inheritance case, in addition to an extraordinarily great amount of work. We also know that this is a uniquely difficult international case.\u201d The Red One rummaged in his rags, found a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his neck. Then, in the manner of the well-bred, he folded the cloth five times, and for a moment it seemed to me as if the letters M and I were embroidered into the fabric. \u201cAre you Moritz Isenschmid?\u201d I asked. A twitch ran through his posture. The fool stared at my face, remained silent and snorted, then cursed: \u201cMoritz doesn\u2019t go to any masked ball!\u201d Now he fell silent. The figures next to us agreed on the harmfulness of expensive petrol, and I considered how I might dilute the narrator\u2019s defiance. Finally I ordered three decilitres of red wine and pushed the bottle and glass towards the stranger\u2019s mask. \u201cWhat next?\u201d I said. On 7 December 1973, as Dr Isenschmid was struggling through Vatican affairs for the ninth time already, the man from Sch\u00f6tz was sharply informed by the secretary of His Excellency Giovanni Benelli, Substitute in the Secretariat of State, that the Vatican never, never, never again wished to deal with his matter. The case had therefore been elevated to a Causa gravis, and only the Holy Father personally could still change anything\u2014basta, Dottore. The shock could not have been greater for the man from the hinterland. His work, grown to 90 written proofs, was destroyed, every hope uprooted. What on earth would he tell the heirs of Joseph Franz Rassel, his clients? And what would people in the village say about him? So he wandered through the halls, depression on his face, when\u2014God is almighty\u2014he recognised an old friend from his student days: the commander of the Pontifical Swiss Guard, a member of the papal household and chamberlain to His Holiness, Dr jur. Franz Pfyffer von Altishofen. Colonel Pfyffer beckoned the man from Sch\u00f6tz into his office and spoke a few words that, as Isenschmid would later put on paper, almost made his heart stop. Pfyffer von Altishofen said: \u201cFrom a high and competent source I have learned that you are right!\u201d Dr Isenschmid noted: \u201cWhere the devil is, God is also there.\u201d Yet when Colonel Pfyffer was to repeat his sentence in writing two years later, to provide Isenschmid with one more piece of evidence, he merely reported that, of course, he could no longer remember the exact content of what had been communicated to him at the time. \u201cA coward?\u201d \u201cA noble man,\u201d replied the stranger, \u201csilenced by the Vatican.\u201d Again useless years passed. The Swiss ministers of justice in Bern, the foreign and interior ministers, let it be known that they could not help Dr Isenschmid even by diplomatic means. Success at the Court of Justice in The Hague was very unlikely. The money was gone, and the people who had trusted him suddenly spoke of fraud. \u201cYou dare to write,\u201d Dr Isenschmid had to train his guns on Miss B., \u201cthat I more or less extorted the loan from you at the time. This untrue allegation is unlawful! You understand what I am implying.\u201d Misfortune became Dr Isenschmid\u2019s shadow. If, on 28 September 1978 at 12 noon, he handed the Vatican post a letter\u2014registered as always\u2014to Pope John Paul I, in which, to spur the Holy Father on, he wrote of the wretched poverty of the Swiss Dauphin heirs, then the priest-king lay dead in bed the next morning. Or if, in July 1980, in Rome for the sixteenth time, Dr Isenschmid waited full of hope for the Polish archbishop Deskur, who, it was said, had the best connections to the Polish Pope Wojty\u0142a, then the man from Sch\u00f6tz had to learn that the important man he had come to Rome to visit was not in Rome at all, but in Ober\u00e4geri for a cure\u201460 kilometres from Sch\u00f6tz. And if, finally, in May 1981 the jurist believed that justice would be restored the day after tomorrow because the Bishop of Solothurn had promised to present the 90 collected papers to the Pope when he next came to Switzerland, then a hired Turk shot the Holy Father three days before the trip, making him unfit for transport. \u201cWatch it,\u201d shouted the Red One because the serving girl, Lady Diana, bumped his split thumb. \u201cPlum!\u201d When justice threatened to fail in autumn 1978, M. P., manager of the Raiffeisenbank and church warden in Sch\u00f6tz, became a fraudster. He could no longer withstand his uncle\u2019s pleading. So he stole 20,000 francs from his parish\u2019s building account\u2014long convinced, like the man who had been telling him about it for years, of the devilishness in the Papal States. Not for long, thought M. P. For his uncle had assured him: \u201cIf I am properly advised, I will receive official glad tidings from the Vatican this month.\u201d After the rehearsal of the Eintracht music society, in which M. P. played the cornet as purely as no other, the bank manager drove to the edge of the village, the money over his heart, towards Nebikon. He was the kindest man on earth, Dr Moritz Isenschmid praised his nephew when he held the loot in his hands. But the 20,000 from the Roman Catholic parish alone did not patch up world justice, and Dr Isenschmid appealed to the Raiffeisen man\u2019s Christian compassion month after month for 14 years, regularly for a few thousand, often for much more. Four or five million. For countless people in the hinterland, seduced by the wealth of the French king\u2019s daughter, had left their money with Moritz Isenschmid, and the jurist, in order to pay interest and compound interest, was constantly in arrears. Debt enforcement proceedings\u201422 between 1980 and 1992 alone\u2014made the fight against the cardinals a battle for life. But the nephew at Dorfkern 2, who financed the war, deceived his supervisory boards and auditors with elegance, shifted figures from the bank to the parish, to Concordia and back again, forged invoices and signatures and stamps\u2014a work that cost him three hours of sin every day\u2014until on 4 May 1992, shortly after 1 p.m., when he no longer believed in the victory of good, he left his village and thus, because fun must be had, gave the Pfyffer guild in Altishofen a welcome occasion to build a carnival float. Over the cage they wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cEven generous sponsors need to rest now and then.\u201d \u201cWhy don\u2019t you ask anything anymore?\u201d whispered the fool in the blood-red cloth.<\/p>\n

I remained silent; then he too fell silent, his thumb\u2014like the symbol of all justice\u2014crushed, splayed away from his hand.<\/p>\n

Erwin Koch \u00b7 Das Magazin No. 28 \u00b7 Tages-Anzeiger \u00b7 19 June 1993<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/details>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2014 Home \u00b7 Royal Kinship \u00b7 Tages-Anzeiger 1993 Tagi-Magazin \u00b7 1993 Report A literary reportage linking a Lucerne bank scandal with traces of Louis XVII, the Vatican, and the Pfyffers of Altishofen. Report from the Tagi Magazin dated June 19, 1993, text by Erwin Koch (Das Magazin, No. 28). Described in the form of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1897","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1898,"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1897\/revisions\/1898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadurer.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}