Karel Ranke is a former Captain of the Czechoslovakian Secret Police. He was involved in the reading seminars conducted by Franz Bonaparta and Peter Čapek, and remained the sole care-taker of the Red Rose Mansion until Inspector Heinrich Lunge asked him to let the latter examine the house during his stay in Prague. He was also the uncle of Adolf Reinhardt, a boy with a fondness for cocoa and an old friend of Wolfgang Grimmer who had been one of the orphans interred at 511 Kinderheim in Germany, whose probable identity was possibly discerned at a later point.