For years Wilhelm Stieber had been one of Prussia's most ruthless and successful policemen. Stieber and his colleague, the veteran police inspector Friedrich Goldheim, had extracted a signed confession from Carl Techen, a former army lieutenant with an exceedingly shady reputation. In October 1855 the police had revealed that certain private papers belonging to Leopold von Gerlach and Marcus Niebuhr had been secretly transcribed and their contents transmitted to third parties. At the beginning of November two servants of Gerlach and Niebuhr were arrested and charged with making and selling copies of their masters’ correspondence and diaries. Techen was temporarily arrested in late October, but was quickly released. After several months of investigations, Techen was again arrested on 29 January 1856.