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In Germany, Donald Duck comics are extremely popular, outselling even superheroes like Superman. In the books, Scrooge McDuck is “the richest duck in the world,” an oil tycoon and industrialist, among other lucrative pursuits, who stashes his fortune in a giant “money bin,” safe from the clutches of his canine enemies the Beagle Boys, and a vampish duck sorceress named Magica De Spell. He is single-minded in his quest for riches, fighting pirates for sunken Spanish treasure or swindling a candy-striped ruby from Bazookistan bandits. Uncle Scrooge first appeared in a 1947 Donald Duck story by the American comic-book writer and illustrator Carl Barks. The German translator of the comics made the Disney characters more complex: Dagobert speaks in grandiose language; his nephew Donald Duck often quotes the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Max Horkheimer, one of the foremost philosophers of the Frankfurt School, reportedly enjoyed reading Donald Duck comics before bed. For many West Germans, Scrooge McDuck became a humorous embodiment of capitalist greed.

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Among the most avid followers of Dagobert’s hunt were some of the roughly five hundred members of DONALD—the acronym for the “German Organization of Non-Commercial Devotees of Pure Donaldism”—a group dedicated to the study of Carl Barks’s Donald Duck comics. “The most important thing to know about German Donaldism is that we are not just fans but we take Duckburg seriously and investigate it with a scientific approach,” Susanne Luber, the organization’s current president, told me. Before now, the Donaldists had busied themselves debating how much Scrooge McDuck was worth, or why male ducks typically walk barefoot in Duckburg while female ducks wear heels. Now, some of them searched the comics for clues to catch a real-life criminal. A few Donaldists told the press that they believed Dagobert was modelling his capers on plots from the comics. “He doesn’t just copy the stories but he uses them as a source of inspiration,” Torsten Gerber told Der Spiegel. At least one of them claimed that Dagobert had detonated a bomb on June 13th because thirteen is a kind of magic number in the Donald Duck universe. (Scrooge, for instance, was thirteen when he arrived from Scotland in the United States on a cattle ship to make his fortune.) In “Three Dirty Little Ducks,” Donald Duck’s nephews escape bath time through a hatch underneath a bottomless chest, like the hole in the grit box.

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Hajo Aust, a member of DONALD, told reporters that, in the comic “A Christmas for Shacktown,” Scrooge McDuck’s grandnephews use a miniature train to retrieve lost money. When a Donaldist named Detlef Giesler gave a television interview on the subject, according to the group’s periodical, a caller suggested that Giesler himself was Dagobert.