The Amber Room Read online

  Tsar Peter I Having become mesmerized by the Baltic amber trade while touring incognito in 1696, Peter the Great of Russia waited another twenty years before receiving the Amber Room as a gift. His craftsmen were unable to assemble it in St Petersburg.

  (Rudi Ringely The code-name for a top-secret Stasi and KGB informer, 'Rudi Ringel' claimed that his father was an S S Sturmbannfiihrer and evacuated the Amber Room from Konigsberg Castle to a location known only by the call-sign BSCH, on the advice of Gauleiter Erich Koch.

  Alfred Rohde Writer, curator, amber specialist and director of the Konigsberg Castle Museum. Rohde took charge of the Amber Room in the winter of 1941 and was responsible for it until it vanished in April 1945. Rohde vanished too, some months later, along with his wife.

  Alfred Rosenberg Hitler's ideologue and the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, whose organization, the Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg, was involved in the transport of the Amber Room to Konigsberg. It was also accused of evacuating the room out of the city in 1945.

  Professor Dr Ivan Sautov A major figure in the St Petersburg cultural establishment and director of the Catherine Palace. Sautov oversaw the rebuilding of the Amber Room and presided over its opening on 31 May 2003.

  Andreas Schliiter Sculptor to the Prussian court. Schliiter came up with the idea of a room panelled with amber in 1701. He lost his job before the project could be completed in Berlin.

  Julian Semyonov Soviet writer whose creation was a spy named Maxim Stirlitz, the Eastern bloc's 'James Bond', who could speak almost every European language 'with the exception of Irish and Albanian'.

  Semyonov spent two decades searching for the Amber Room and denying that he had any connections with the KGB.

  Hans Seufert Oberst in the Stasi, Seufert was a career agent who supervised Erich Mielke's Amber Room investigation, 'Operation Puschkin'. Seufert was also agent Paul Enke's senior officer.

  George Stein Strawberry farmer from the village of Stelle outside Hamburg and Germany's most famous amateur treasure hunter. Of East Prussian descent, he spent a quarter of century hunting for the Amber Room, only to die bloodily, having apparently uncovered evidence that it had been secretly shipped to America.

  Jelena Storozhenko Head of the secret Soviet investigation into the fate of the Amber Room in 1970s and 1980s. Storozhenko led a team that worked under the cover of the Kaliningrad Geological-Archaeological Expedition (KGA), sometimes codenamed 'the Choral Society'. Storozhenko retired in 1984, disaffected after her operation was shut down.

  Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss Influential art historian and professor at Humboldt University in East Berlin. Strauss was closely connected to the Soviet and East German state investigations into the Amber Room.

  Vladimir Telemakov Journalist for a car workers' daily in Leningrad, Telemakov spent decades researching a biography of Anatoly Kuchumov that has yet to find a publisher.

  Stanislav Tronchinsky A Pole by birth, Tronchinsaky worked as a senior cultural bureaucrat in Leningrad and also held a high-ranking position within the Leningrad Communist Party. He assisted Anatoly Kuchumov in his hunt for the Amber Room during the critical mission of 1946.

  Paul Wandel GDR Minister for Education during the 1950s. Wandel was the person to whom Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss reported and was the inspiration behind the early searches in East Germany for the Amber Room.

  Giinter Wermusch Editor at the former East German publishing house, Die Wirtshaft. Wermusch worked on Bernsteinzimmer Report, Paul Enke's influential book on the Amber Room.

  Gottfried Wolfram Master craftsman to the Danish court. Wolfram, an ivory cutter by trade, travelled to Berlin in 1701 to work with Andreas Schliiter on the original Amber Room, only to see the project collapse twelve years later.

  Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov Leader of the Red Army offensive against the Third Reich, as well as a key player in the battle for Berlin, Zhukov's subsequent military and political career in the Soviet Union was ended in 1946 by allegations of looting during the Second World War.

  1. Konigsberg Castle, pre-April 1945

  2. Kaliningrad, c.2004 (Historic names are shown in brackets.)

  3. East Prussia, c.1945

  4. Germany, c.2004

  5. St Petersburg and environs, c.2004

  6. USSR, post-1947

  THE AMBER ROOM

  Introduction

  An urgent order arrived just after midday on 22 June 1941: pack up Leningrad. The Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union at 4 that morning without a declaration of war. So rapid was the advance that the Kremlin calculated Leningrad's southern gateway of Moskovsky Prospekt would be overrun within weeks.

  But 22 June was a radiant Sunday, the first in what had been a lousy year. Weekend revellers strolled along the banks of the River Neva, popping bottles of sweet Soviet champagne, or headed out to the suburban estates of the former tsars, their hampers filled with herrings and pickled mushrooms. The scale of the crisis only filtered through the city by 6 p.m. Grinding across the Soviet Union was the greatest invasion force in history: 4 million German soldiers, 207 Wehrmacht divisions, 3,300 tanks.

  Evacuate Leningrad's treasures. The order came from LenGorlsPolKom (the city's executive committee). Everyone was listening now. Collections from the city's palaces and museums had to be saved. But there were 2.5 million exhibits in the State Hermitage, and hundreds of thousands more in the Alexander, Catherine and Pavlovsk Palaces as well as the collections housed at Peterhof, Oranienbaum and Gatchina.

  A curator at the Catherine Palace in the town of Pushkin scribbled in his diary: '22 June. Flown through the halls this evening, packing what we can.'

  But there was too much work: '24 June. Comrades having nosebleeds from leaning over the packing crates. Run out of boxes and paper... Had to use the tsarinas' dress trunks and their clothes to wrap up our treasures.'1

  And what should they do with the city's most unique treasure, an artefact that was often said to encompass old Russia's imperial might? At the centre of a chain of linked halls on the first floor of the Catherine Palace, where salon opened into salon, stood a gorgeous chamber made of amber, a substance that, at the time of its construction, was twelve times more valuable than gold.

  The idea of panelling a room entirely in amber had first been mooted at the Prussian court in 170L. The resulting radical and complex construction came to symbolize the Age of Reason in which it was conceived. Tons of resin, the Gold of the North, had been fished in nuggets from the Baltic Sea, then heated, shaped and coloured before being slotted together on huge backing boards like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. When, sixty years later, the panels of the Amber Room were gifted to Russia, they were heralded by visitors to the court in St Petersburg as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'. 'We have now reached one of the most remarkable rarities - I want to tell you about the Amber Room,' wrote a French novelist. 'Only in The Thousand and One Nights and in magic fairy tales, where the architecture of palaces is trusted to magicians, spirits and genies, can one read about rooms made of diamonds, rubies, jacinth and other jewels.'2

  Even after the Revolution, when the estates of the tsars were transformed into Soviet museums, the Amber Room remained Leningrad's most popular exhibit.3 But by the summer of 1941, the installation of central heating had made the amber brittle and the Catherine Palace staff feared dismantling it. When, eight days after Germany invaded, the first Soviet train loaded with exhibits steamed out of Leningrad and east towards Siberia, the Amber Room was not on board.

  The curators left behind had no more time to think about it. They were enlisted to bolster the town's defences. One wrote in her diary: 'We carry out the work of guards, office workers, cleaners. All walls are bare.' Apart from the walls of the Amber Room.

  By the end of August, the Nazis had taken Mga, a railway terminal 10 miles south of Leningrad, isolating two million citizens who would not see the outside world for almost 900 days. It was now too late to evacuate anything else. By 1 September a Nazi perimeter bristling
with munitions had fenced the city in. The British monitored the advance: '9 September. XVI Panzer Korps is moving to Leningrad.'

  On 13 September the town of Pushkin came under fire. 'Koluft Panzer Group Four now in Detskoye Selo [Pushkin].' The following day, the attack came from above. 'Fliegerkorps have landed. Attack on Pushkin has been carried out. All bombs have landed in the target area.'

  Inside the Catherine Palace, a handful of curators continued to work, attempting to safeguard what they could, scattering sand on the floors to protect the precious inlaid wood, packing all but the most cumbersome pieces of furniture into storerooms. But there was still one thing that no one had properly secured.

  Couriers carried reports from Pushkin back to the city authorities in Leningrad. The last came on 17 September at 5 a.m.: 'The park and north of the town are battling hard. Everyone is moving to the west. We have even taken the typewriters. We will leave nothing for them.'

  Apart from the Amber Room, which was hidden in the dark beneath another, plainer room constructed out of muslin and cotton. Rather than evacuate it, Catherine Palace staff had decided to conceal the delicate treasure in situ. The irreplaceable amber walls had been covered over with layers of cloth and padding. If the Nazis managed to force their way into the Catherine Palace, it was hoped they would be deceived into thinking that here was just another ordinary, empty room.

  Within hours the palace was overrun. One German officer described how almost immediately crude signs were nailed to the gilded doors, listing them 'reserved for the Lst Company etc., etc. ...'4 Everywhere there were 'sleeping [German] soldiers with their muddy boots resting on the precious settees and chairs'. The Nazi advance had been exhaustingly rapid. Then a cheer went up and the German officer raced to see what his men had discovered. On the first floor, in a room in the middle of a long corridor, 'two privates in curiosity toiled in tearing protective... covers off [the walls]. They revealed wonderfully shining amber carvings, the frames of a mosaic picture.'

  When Soviet curators returned to the Catherine Palace in March 1944 they entered through the buckled iron gates and across a courtyard strewn with barbed wire and Nazi graves. Up to the first-floor suite of rooms they climbed - not by the marble stairs, as they had been blown to smithereens - and discovered that where they had concealed the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' there was now just a void. The Amber Room had vanished. All the Nazis had left behind were bare boards and a tangled mystery.

  In the Autumn of 2001 we pieced together this much of the story about the Amber Room using a handful of published sources and the declassified Enigma files at the Public Records Office in London, in which are recorded some of the 2,000 signals intercepted every day by the Ultra project that eavesdropped on German communications throughout the Second World War.5

  Our curiosity about the fate of the Amber Room, then a subject of which we knew very little, had been roused by a stream of press releases and news stories coming out of Russia and Germany. In 1999, a German company had stepped in to help the Russians construct a replica of the original Amber Room with a gift of 3.5 million dollars. Now, one and a half years later, the project was almost complete and the stage was set for a grand unveiling.

  The St Petersburg and Moscow authorities gushed about their new Amber Room, describing it as a memorial to everything the Soviet Union had lost in the Second World War. Publicity from the German sponsors extolled the rebuilding project as a symbol of the new Europe, without a Wall or Iron Curtain. The Kremlin announced it would invite forty heads of state and government to the opening, which was set to coincide with the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg on 31 May 2003. The event was to be televised live from a specially constructed press centre that could house L,OOO journalists. The budget for the celebrations would run into billions of roubles. So much was being invested in the new Amber Room and yet no one seemed able to resolve the fate of the original masterpiece. It was now said to be worth more than 250 million dollars, a figure that made it the most valuable missing work of art in the world.

  There are, we discovered, many different types of treasure hunters. Key 'Amber Room' into an Internet search engine or any online newspaper library and see over 800,000 entries pop up.

  A group of salvage experts have for years been scouring the catacombs that run beneath the German city of Weimar in the belief that the Amber Room was secretly transferred to the Baltic city of Konigsberg and then on to Weimar by Nazi agents acting for the Gauleiter of East Prussia.

  Divers regularly explore the rusting wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff a German liner torpedoed on 31 January 1945 as it sailed from the Baltic port of Gotenhafen, north-west of Danzig. The liner was evacuating LO,582 wounded Germans away from Konigsberg and the advancing Soviet front. It was also said to be carrying the Amber Room.

  Mining experts regularly congregate in western Saxony and Thuringia where the countryside is honeycombed with deep ore and potash pits in the belief that as the Nazis had used mines and caves to hide important art works, the Amber Room too had been secreted in the subterranean tunnels.

  These different theories and their backers, a league of treasure hunters from Europe, the United States and Russia, have spawned thousands of potential leads and a dizzying world of conspiracy. As we write this, there are more than a dozen German digs under way, each underpinned by a different theory.

  However, in Russia there is an information black hole. Almost every official directly connected to the original Amber Room is dead or missing. Political and economic conditions have led to their files, diaries and memorabilia being broken up, stolen, concealed and classified. Even after glasnost and perestroika, the most important Russian archives that might contain material on the official searches for the Amber Room are arcane. The museum authorities in Moscow and St Petersburg are awkward and often inhospitable (especially to those who come without offers of international funding or research exchanges).

  We had no previous experience of working in Russia or the former Eastern bloc, but had for more than a decade earned a reputation for chasing difficult stories, researching out in the field and inside archives in America, Britain, China and India, for British newspapers and broadcasters. Russia seemed like the best place to start. It was vast, obstreperous and secretive. It was also therefore likely to be the place that had retained the most secrets, even if they were difficult to extract.

  In December 2001 we flew to St Petersburg and made slow progress through official channels. However, friends from the former Leningrad University, experts at living creatively, suggested another, more lateral strategy. They helped us piece together a network of subordinate characters, Red Army veterans, old comrades, serving and retired museum curators. 0 ne knew another. An introduction led to a dinner invitation. Slowly - so slowly at times that we felt as if we were going nowhere at all - we reached back in time and unearthed the stories of those directly involved in the Amber Room mystery.

  In dachas and apartments, on park benches and in faceless offices, memories came alive, loosened by vodka, sweet black tea and white beer. For every official file, diary or briefing paper said by archives and libraries to be missing or inaccessible, we found draft or duplicate documents stashed away in living rooms and in hallways. For every government album that had been emptied or was lost, we discovered framed photos above mantelpieces and in bedroom drawers.

  Six decades of secret and often frantic searching for the Amber Room came alive, as did the extraordinary efforts of those who struggled to suppress the truth about its fate. Our first faltering weeks in Russia grew into a two-year investigation and finally, having travelled thousands of miles from St Petersburg to Moscow, London to Washington, and from Holland, through Germany to Liechtenstein and Austria, following a paper trail that took us into the parallel worlds of the KGB and the East German Stasi, we arrived in the beat-up Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and at the heart of an extraordinary cover-up.

  It was here, in a dying city on the Baltic, as the
winter began to thaw, that the final pieces of the Amber Room mystery came together and we were forced to confront the truth about a story that would challenge the way we perceive the Soviet Union and its place in the Cold War.

  1

  I am a complicated man,' he says through teeth that gleam like May Day medals. A little finger prods at the bridgework, poking the Soviet dental engineering back into shape. I committed fifty years to the Great Task - the reason why you are here. Correct?'

  The old man's rolling Russian Rs clatter like falling pencils, reminding us that we have not yet explained why we are here, where we should not be, in the staff quarters of a palace museum on the outskirts of St Petersburg. We have barely recovered from getting in: squeezing between the guarded great gates crowned by double-headed eagles, tapping in a key code at an inconspicuous door, talking our way past a babushka huddled against the December freeze in five coats who, in her fur-lined hood, swayed like a cobra. Once inside we clanked up four flights of cast-iron stairs, past gargoyles with broken noses - casualties of war that have waited more than sixty years for restoration - until we found the old man sitting in silence in his vast studio, sporting a fine, red jersey. On the wall behind him hangs an intricate blueprint, a curious bird's-eye view, labelled: 'Imperial Prussian Study'.

  Straight away he begins, a series of disconnected thoughts springing from thin, dry lips: I could have retired, like some I could name. But a man like me, whose work is of national importance, can never really retire. Then I had my second heart attack.' He accentuates the words as if reading from a public copy of the Leningradskaya Pravda, which the state once pasted to the notice-boards beside Ulitsa Nekrasova, where, we have been told, he used to sip bitter coffee in a Georgian cafe called Tblisi.