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## Reading the Silence: What the Historical Record Does Not Contain
One approach to historical mysteries is to focus on what the evidence shows. Another, equally important approach is to attend to what the evidence is conspicuously silent about — what should be in the record if certain things were true, and is not.
If the Baden prince theory were correct — if Hauser was the hereditary prince, removed from the succession by a deliberate substitution ordered by the Countess of Hochberg — the operation would have required the cooperation of a significant number of people over a very long time. The physicians who certified the infant’s death would have had to be deceived or complicit. The clergymen who conducted the baptism and the burial would have had to be complicit or deceived. The court officials who generated the documentation would have had to be deceived or complicit. The people who actually arranged the concealment of the living infant would have had to maintain silence for decades. And the people who eventually deposited him in Nuremberg would have had to trust that all of these earlier participants would continue their silence.
This is a large number of people. Large conspiracies leave traces. People talk. Documents survive that were meant to be destroyed. Deathbed confessions happen. The historical literature on the Baden prince theory has been searching for such traces for a very long time, and none has been found. The absence of any supporting evidence from within the alleged conspiracy is itself evidence, though not conclusive evidence, against the theory.