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## The 1876 Refutation: What Mittelstädt Argued
The historian Otto Mittelstädt published his refutation of the Baden prince theory in 1876, forty-three years after Hauser’s death and well before DNA analysis was conceivable. His argument was entirely documentary: the official records of the infant prince’s birth, baptism, illness, death, and burial were examined, and they were found to be consistent and credible.
The infant prince who died in October 1812 was attended by physicians who left records. He was baptized according to the customs of the House of Baden. His death was certified and recorded. He was buried in the appropriate ceremonial manner. Each of these events generated documentation, and that documentation was examined by Mittelstädt and found not to contain the gaps or inconsistencies that would be expected if a substitution of the kind described by the theory had taken place.
The theory requires that this entire documentary record was fabricated or corrupt — that the physicians, clerics, court officials, and other individuals who generated the documentation were either deceived or complicit. This is not impossible in principle. Historical records have been falsified, and those who had reason to falsify them have sometimes done so successfully. But it requires a substantial conspiracy involving many parties, all of whom maintained the secret for a very long time, without any documentary trace of the deception emerging.
Mittelstädt’s work was not the final word. The theory survived his refutation because its proponents argued that the documentation could have been fabricated, that the apparent consistency of the record was what a successful cover-up would look like. This kind of unfalsifiable reasoning — any evidence against the theory is reinterpreted as evidence of a successful deception — made the theory resistant to documentary refutation.