Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Three years after the end of World War II and almost fifty years after William Hughes Mearns wrote those lines, a man who wasn’t there was offered a chair. In 1948 officials in Munich arranged for Adolf Hitler to face a denazification tribunal. The judges considered the empty chair’s responsibility for the murder of millions, declared its nonoccupant a “major offender,” and confiscated part of his property. “I wish, I wish he’d go away,” continues the rhyme. But he wouldn’t. Since no death certificate had been issued for the Führer, his sister Paula could not receive items he had bequeathed her in his personal will. Beginning in 1953 a court in Berchtesgaden labored through bundles of testimony, and finally, on December 3, 1956, a death certificate issued by the exhausted magistrate became legally valid.…