Heinrich Kaufmann II was a German archaeologist whose career reached its peak in the early 1900s. He is a mysterious figure and a key part of Dark Harvest's backstory. Due to his role in the founding of their beliefs, The Order acknowledges him as "The Discoverer".
Background[]
Total Board of ZdK 1903 vl, Karl Schmidtchen , Konrad Barth , Max Radestock (Chairman), Heinrich Kaufmann I (Secretary)
Kaufmann's father was born in Germany in 1864 and died in 1928. He was well-educated and a teacher, as well as an industrialist, ideologist, and financier.
Heinrich Kaufmann II was born in Germany but moved to England in his teenage years and eventually started work at a British university. He was the subject of controversy, as he believed that ancient civilizations were highly advanced, even capable of time travel and teleportation.
Kaufmann was able to acquire funding for a trip to Egpyt in search of a tablet said to contain the secrets of the ancients, which was buried in the tomb of an unnamed Pharoah. After one year of searching for the object, he successfully located it in a tomb beneath graven images depicting the Slender Man, amongst other things. According to the journal Kaufmann kept during his expedition, the locals began chanting "Gorr'Rylaehotep" when he found the tablet and warned him not to take it, although he persisted. When he asked his translator what "Gorr'Rylaehotep" meant, he was told that it was the name of a god that had supposedly come from another world and cursed the tablet.
Kaufmann then began translating the tablet's ancient encryptions into a common language (presumably either German or English). The archaeologist was later disgraced by his colleagues for supposedly forging his discovery of the ancient tablet and fled to New York in response. The tablet itself, along with the transcript containing Kaufmann's translation, ended up in a British museum, until they were stolen during the 1930s. The information on the tablet later served to establish The Order's belief system and was also used by Hans Freuhauf in the Princeton Experiment.
During the early 1990s, all information on Kaufmann was removed from textbooks for an uncited reason and the only biography written on him went out of publication in the 1970s, leaving him as a mysterious archaeologist.