The Hitz estate was reported at $10 million in 1965, counted at 30 to 50 million bolivars in the Caracas press, and higher still in the European accounts. Adjusted to today's money, that is roughly $150 million. No one in the family ever collected it. That is not a legend polished by retelling. It is the documented spine of the family archive, and the reason this story has never closed.
What is documented
The fortune was real: properties in Caracas, companies, jewels and securities in bank safe-deposit boxes, and accounts in Venezuela, Switzerland and New York, all attested in court proceedings and press coverage across five countries. The theft was procedural, not dramatic. The assets sat in other people's names and bearer shares, the will surfaced with the dead man's name misspelled, and the grave, when opened, was empty.
The keystone is a piece of paper that does not exist: a Venezuelan death certificate completed in the form Swiss banking authorities required. Without it, the Swiss accounts were never opened. Swiss banks do not lose accounts. They hold them, they charge their fees, and they wait for the proper documentation. They have been waiting since 1958.
My mother remembers the inheritance as a landscape. Weekends in Caracas were spent visiting empty buildings and land lots that belonged to the estate and could be neither sold nor bought, including a tall office tower in Plaza Venezuela, one of the city's main business districts, that stood abandoned for all the years she lived there. The fortune was visible from the street. It just could not be touched.
What is still open
Three things, and the family holds the paper on all of them. The Swiss accounts, never opened for lack of that certificate, with sixty years of interest behind them. The legal claims, never finally resolved. And a diary: Othmar Hitz's personal journal, kept from 1922 onward in his own precise handwriting, in German with notes in Spanish and French. It has never been read in full. It sits in a safe place, and it may contain nothing, or it may contain the map.
People assume the book exists to chase the money. It exists because the story was nearly lost; the money is simply proof that the family was never delusional. But the questions are real, they are documented, and they are the engine of the memoir and the series: a $150 million question, sixty years old, with the answer possibly sitting in a vault that only paperwork can open.
The full accounting, names, numbers, documents, is in the memoir, and the 144-piece archive behind it is described in the archive. For rights and adaptation, start here.