What happened to the Amber Room?

The “Eighth Wonder of the World” – the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg – has still not been found. The traces of the Amber Room lead to Königsberg in 1945, to the chaotic final stages of World War II. Was it destroyed in the battles for the city? Or did the Nazis manage to hide a priceless masterpiece? Scientists and treasure hunters have begun their search again – in two new places. Marcus Wallen In the summer of 1941, the deceptive peace on the Eastern Front came to an end. On June 22, Nazi Germany and its allies launched Operation Barbarossa, a large-scale attack on the borders of the Soviet Union, extending over 2,9 thousand km. The rivalry between two totalitarian states promised to become the worst war in human history. It lasted almost four years, and when the war was finally over, Germany had suffered a crushing defeat. But in the fall of 1941, everything looked different. The German armies were rapidly advancing deep into the Soviet Union. Within a short time, the advanced units of Army Group North were already threatening the country’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Soviet soldiers and civilians desperately tried to strengthen the defense lines around the city in anticipation of a German attack. Residents of St. Petersburg faced a difficult ordeal – a terrible blockade that lasted 872 days. However, Nazi generals failed to break through the defenses, and German units never advanced beyond the suburbs. The Catherine Palace found itself behind the siege line, on the enemy’s side. Once upon a time, members of the royal families spent their summers in a beautiful Rococo palace near St. Petersburg, away from the city heat and bustle. And the palace had a unique treasure – the Amber Room. The Soviet Union was well aware that when German troops targeted St. Petersburg in the fall of 1941, this treasure too was under threat. Museum staff were sent to the palace in advance to dismantle and remove the decorative elements of the room to a safe place. But amber turned out to be brittle and fragile. Rough handling could damage the priceless panels. So the Amber Room was left in place in the Catherine Palace. The walls were just covered with fake wallpaper. It was a very clumsy attempt to hide one of the world’s most famous masterpieces. The Germans knew exactly what they were looking for when they entered the Catherine Palace. In less than 36 hours, the room was dismantled under the supervision of two experts. On October 14, a train arrived in the ancient capital of East Prussia, Königsberg, now Kaliningrad. From it, panel by panel, the Amber Room was unloaded and placed for storage in the old city castle. The room was shown as a temporary exhibition, after which it remained in the castle until the very end of the war. Gift to the king

The history of the Amber Room is rooted in Germany, namely Prussia, which at that time was an independent state. The room began to be created in 1701, and for some time it was located in the Berlin Palace. When Russian Tsar Peter the Great visited the city in 1716, the room made a huge impression on him. The Prussian friends who received him decided to give Peter the Amber Room as a gift in order to consolidate the pact concluded against Sweden. The Tsar’s daughter Elizabeth chose a place for the room, and German and Russian craftsmen installed it in the summer residence of the royal family – the Catherine Palace. After a series of reconstructions during the 18th century, the room became larger. The total weight of amber used to decorate the wall panels reached six tons. The decor was complemented with gold leaf and mirrors, and the room became known as the “eighth wonder of the world.” Estimates of its current value vary greatly. Some put the figure at approximately $400 million, while other experts are confident that the room is priceless. The trail ends in 1945

After the Germans stole the Amber Room, it was kept in Königsberg Castle until the last months of the war. But in the spring of 1945 the trail ends. There are three versions of what could have happened to the masterpiece. Version 1: the most common hypothesis is that the Amber Room was destroyed during the battles for the city. At the end of the war, the British Royal Air Force carried out a massive bombing campaign which caused extensive damage to the town and its castle. The destruction did not stop there. In the spring of 1945, the remaining walls of the castle fell under artillery fire from the Red Army. There is evidence in Russian archives that hints that the Red Army found fragments of the Amber Room in the ruins after the Soviet attack. The Soviets probably sought to keep this secret. There were rumors that the communist regime intended to shift the blame for the disappearance (or destruction) of the Amber Room from the Red Army to the Nazis. But those who go there today in search of treasure will find nothing. The city ended up on Soviet territory and changed its name to Kaliningrad. In 1968, the head of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, ordered the old castle area to be razed to the ground, despite international protests. Version 2: The Amber Room rests at the bottom of the sea At the end of January 1945, the dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, gave the order to remove all art objects from Königsberg. While the Red Army was advancing and getting closer to the city, the henchmen of the Minister of Armaments Albert Speer took valuables and artefacts to safety. There are witnesses who claim to have seen with their own eyes how the Amber Room was dismantled and loaded onto the Wilhelm Gustloff liner in Gdynia. The passenger ship, carrying refugees from East Prussia, left the port on January 30, 1945. On the same day, the liner was fired at by a Soviet submarine with torpedoes. Only 1230 people were saved, and more than 9,5 thousand, including 5 thousand children, found their death at the bottom of the sea. Maybe the Amber Room shared their fate? Version 3: The Nazis managed to hide the treasure. In 1997, a fragment of the Amber Room was found. A piece of Italian mosaic, an element of its decor, was put up for auction. But he didn’t help find the rest of the room. It is believed that the piece belonged to a German soldier who stole it while transporting the room to Germany. Despite everything, some believe that the Amber Room still exists. Perhaps the Nazis managed to hide it, as they did with other looted treasures from all over occupied Europe. There are examples of how Nazi treasures that became useless were subsequently tracked down. The largest documented cache was discovered in the last days of the war by the soldiers of American General George S. Patton in the Merkers salt mine in Thuringia. Among other things, there were seven thousand bags of gold bars, coins and bills, as well as countless pieces of art. This find prompted many to start searching too. Perhaps there are other forgotten hiding places? Scientists, amateur archaeologists, and treasure hunters have explored icy alpine lakes, secret storage facilities, and underground bunkers. Over the past year, much has been written about the mythical golden train in Wałbrzych. Two Poles said they had used ground penetrating radar to provide evidence that the train was hidden in a secret underground tunnel. According to amateur researchers, the train is filled with gold and documents that the Nazis sought to hide during the final phase of the war. Experts conducted their own research and refuted the words of treasure hunters. In the summer they organized excavations and found nothing. Secret room in the bunker In general, little has changed since the end of the war. Only a few major finds were made. But the Amber Room is on everyone’s lips again and again. Some found traces of it in a silver mine, others in a lake or other places. So far, all the supposed hiding places have been empty. But in the summer, two new assumptions arose. Polish historian Bartlomiej Plebanczyk said that the Amber Room, in his opinion, is kept in an old German bunker near the village of Mameriki. Using ground penetrating radar, he allegedly discovered a secret room there. “Without a doubt, this room was designed to house treasure,” he told the Daily Mail. Research has begun in the area, but there is no news of success yet.

The last trace: underground aircraft factory Last week a message arrived from Thuringia, Germany. 80-year-old treasure hunter Klaus Fritzsche focused on the forests around Mount Walpersberg in his search for the Amber Room. At the end of World War II, the Germans tried to convert old mines in this area into an underground aircraft factory to produce fighters like the Messerschmitt Me 262. The underground tunnels were supposed to protect against bombing, which was a heavy blow to the German war industry. The plant was named Reimahg in honor of Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. The slave labor force – 12 thousand people from Italy and Eastern Europe – expanded the existing tunnel system so that it extended over 30 km. On February 21, 1945, the first plane took off from the runway at the top of Walpersberg. However, the factory never began to operate at full capacity and managed to produce only 20-30 aircraft before the end of the war. To establish the location of the plant, former engineer and entrepreneur Klaus Fritzsche used aerial photographs and documents from the Third Reich. They say that the East German communist regime of the GDR has already combed all the mines, but Klaus Fritzsche does not care. He is sure that they were looking in the wrong place before. According to Fritzsche, war trophies such as the Amber Room could have been hidden deep below in a room that was then protected with dynamite. According to him, there is evidence that the Germans brought a large number of sealed boxes here at the end of the war. Today, all entrances to the tunnels are closed to prevent anyone from getting lost or injured in the dark. But local authorities gave Fritzsche and his team of volunteers permission to search. The first attempt did not yield anything, but the entrepreneur does not think of giving up. “If she’s there, we’ll find her,” he told the Daily Mail. The copy took 24 years to create We just have to wait until he discovers something. In the meantime, it’s hard not to view his efforts with a grain of salt. But everyone who dreams of looking at the Amber Room at least with one eye can go to the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg. There is a copy there, created from old drawings and black and white photographs. The project took 24 years to complete and cost a huge amount of money. Another copy, albeit a smaller one, is available in the town of Kleinmachnow near Berlin. For now this is all we can see. The search for the famous Amber Room is similar to attempts to uncover the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle and unravel the secret of the “flying saucers”: there are much more sensational reports than real facts.

“Treasury protected by these runic signs”

Kaliningrad historian Sergey Trifonov in a conversation with journalists from the Zvezda TV channel, he stated that the Amber Room is located in the bunker-dugout of the last commandant of Königsberg Otto Lyasha. According to Trifonov, Lyash’s bunker was connected to the Royal Castle, and parts of the Amber Room could have been removed from there. The historian substantiates his assumptions with inscriptions on the gate in one of the parts of the bunker. “There are 88 runes on them. The most curious thing is that when these runes were translated and interpreted by Belgian experts, some of them showed that this is a real treasury protected by these runic signs,” Zvezda quotes Trifonov as saying. According to him, he spent several years studying the basement of the bunker, making holes in the walls and passing a probe with a video camera at the end through them. In the flooded room, Trifonov was able to make out unidentified large boxes, in which, according to the historian, panels of the Amber Room could be stored.

The Last Commandant

The last commandant of the Königsberg fortress, Lyash, was appointed to his post in January 1945. In April 1945, Soviet troops took the fortress, considered impregnable, in a four-day assault. Lyash himself, in his memoirs, described the last hours of the defense of Koenigsberg as follows: “Towards the end, information began to arrive more and more often that the soldiers, who had taken refuge with the residents in the basements, were losing the will to resist. In some places, desperate women tried to snatch weapons from soldiers and hang a white flag from the windows to put an end to the horrors of war.” On April 9, the commandant of Koenigsberg decided to surrender the garrison. After news of the fall of the fortress was received in Berlin, repression fell upon Lyash’s relatives. His wife and daughters were thrown into prison, his son-in-law, who commanded the battalion, was recalled from the front and handed over to the Gestapo. Hitler sentenced the general himself to death in absentia. In the USSR, a commandant who had previously participated in hostilities on the territory of the Soviet Union was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes. In 1955 he was released and sent to Germany. The German general died in Bonn in 1971, having written two books of memoirs. However, he did not touch upon the topic of the missing Amber Room.

German “marriage” given to Russia

The history of the Amber Room began at the end of the 17th century. In 1699, the new chief architect of the Prussian royal court became Andreas Schlüter. To rebuild the Grand Royal Palace in Berlin, he decided to use amber as a finishing material, which no one had done before. The implementation of the original plan was facilitated by the royal collection of amber, which included three richly ornamented amber frames with mirrors. King Frederick I was dissatisfied with the interim result and fired Schlüter. After the death of the monarch himself, parts of the unfinished cabinet were sent to a Berlin warehouse. In 1716, the “amber cabinet” was presented by the King of Prussia as a gift to the Russian Emperor. Peter I, very fond of such original things. However, it arrived in Russia with a shortage of parts and was again left collecting dust in boxes. Peter’s daughter, the Empress, remembered the gift from the Prussian king Elizaveta Petrovna, who decided to use the panel to decorate one of the rooms of the Winter Palace. In 1743, these works were entrusted to the master Alexandru Martelli, general management went to the chief architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli. By 1746, the Amber Room was assembled and served as a place for official receptions for nine years. Then the Empress ordered the room to be moved to the Great Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo. After Elizabeth’s death, she made her own changes to the appearance of the room. Catherine II. The Amber Room acquired its classic appearance in 1770.

Kidnapping and search

Due to the capriciousness of a material such as amber, the room had to be regularly restored. The next restoration was planned for 1941, but the Great Patriotic War intervened in the plans of specialists. The rapid attack on Leningrad led to the fact that not all cultural values ​​could be removed. Dismantling the Amber Room took time, and therefore it was simply preserved, covered with paper and cotton wool. The city of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoe Selo) was occupied by the Germans already on September 18, 1941. It was not possible to hide the Amber Room from the occupiers. In 1942, the Nazis took the Amber Room to Konigsberg, where it became a decoration of the local palace. In 1945, the Germans dismantled the masterpiece, and there is still no reliable information about its further fate. The search for the Amber Room was popularized by a famous Soviet writer, a master of political detective work. Yulian Semenov. He founded the International Committee to Search for the Amber Room, which included many famous people, including writers Georges Simenon and James Aldridge. Over many years of searches, various versions have been put forward. Semenov himself and his like-minded people worked very deeply into the theory that the Amber Room could have been taken to South America. The writer met with knowledgeable people, including Wehrmacht veterans, but was unable to obtain reliable information.

What was Gauleiter Koch silent about?

Another assumption is that the Amber Room could have been taken out of Konigsberg on the ship Wilhelm Gustloff, which on January 30, 1945 was torpedoed by the submarine S-13 under the command of Aleksandra Marinesko. Some eyewitnesses claimed that they saw large boxes with panels of the room being loaded onto the ship. In the post-war years, scuba divers examined the wreckage of the ship located at the bottom, but did not find any hints of the Amber Room. One of the most reliable sources could be the Gauleiter of East Prussia Erich Koch. Captured a few years after the war, he was extradited to Poland, where he was sentenced to death. The sentence, however, was not carried out, and Koch spent the rest of his life in prison. He died in 1986 at the age of 90. He was interrogated many times, but nothing was achieved. Either the Gauleiter really did not know where the room was kept, or he valued this secret more than life and freedom. Some suggest that the Amber Room could have been hidden in Koch’s homeland, North Rhine-Westphalia. But apart from inferences, there is no evidence for this. One of the conspiracy theories suggests that the Amber Room did not disappear at all. Allegedly, Soviet representatives, having discovered it, transferred the rarity to the Americans as part of Lend-Lease deliveries, having agreed with the new owners that it would be considered lost.

Pit on the Jutland Peninsula, tunnel in Poland, cave near Dresden

But most often it is assumed that the boxes with the room are still hidden in a cache that has not yet been discovered. Messages about the revelation of the secret come regularly. In 2013, a 90-year-old Wehrmacht veteran Wilhelm Kraft told German journalists that after being wounded he was in the northern part of the Jutland Peninsula, in the village of Asaa. By order of the officers, Kraft and his comrades had to dig large holes on the outskirts of the village. When the work was completed, certain boxes delivered by rail were buried in the pits. Kraft believed that this could be the Amber Room. This version, however, was not confirmed. In October 2017, researchers from Germany suggested that the Amber Room could be hidden in one of the caves near Dresden, where they were able to discover traces of steel cables, with the help of which the cargo could be lowered to depth. Alas, things didn’t go further than speculation here. In June 2019, RMF FM radio reported the possible discovery of a secret tunnel among former Nazi fortifications in Poland, citing local search engines. Enthusiasts were convinced that there was an Amber Room inside. But here, too, the sensation remained only in words. And the fact that the boxes with the room are still stored in abandoned or flooded underground fortifications of the former Koenigsberg is reported several times a year. That is why such statements are perceived with skepticism, because public detectives do not have any really significant evidence that they are right.

Twenty years ago, a fragment of the Amber Room was returned to Russia

Twenty years ago, Germany handed over to Russia two authentic fragments of the stolen Amber Room: the Florentine mosaic “Smell and Touch,” one of four commissioned in 1787 Catherine II, and an amber chest of drawers, made in 1711 by Berlin artisans and which occupied one of the central places in the furnishings of the Amber Room. In 1997, the mosaic was confiscated from a German notary, to whom it was given for temporary storage by a German officer who participated in the removal of the Amber Room from Tsarskoe Selo. The notary tried to sell it, but he was put on trial, and the right to own the mosaic was recognized as his daughter. She renounced her claims to the amber panel, transferring all rights to it to the city of Bremen, which returned it to the Tsarskoye Selo museum-reserve. However, this discovery only indicated that German officers were good at stealing even what had already been stolen, but did not shed any light on the mystery of the disappearance of the masterpiece.

Is the new version better than the original?

Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, Semyonov’s comrade-in-arms on the International Committee for the Search for the Amber Room, eventually came to the conclusion that the Amber Room was destroyed in a fire in Königsberg. The baron passed away in 2018: during a fire in the baron’s house in Vaduz, the 106-year-old owner suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. Conspiracy theorists, of course, object: obviously, he still found out the secret, and they got rid of him. At the end of the 1970s, the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR decided to begin work on recreating the Amber Room. The work itself began in 1981 and took more than two decades. In essence, the artists had to create a new Amber Room. Dozens of specialists were involved in the work; about 11 and a half million dollars were allocated from the budget for recreating the room. In addition, the German company RuhrgasAG allocated $3,5 million for the work. Work to recreate the Amber Room was completed in 2003. On May 31, 2003, on the final day of the main celebrations in honor of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, the official opening of the Amber Room took place. Since June 2003, everyone can look at the Amber Room. By the way, Baron Falz-Fein, who saw the original room with his own eyes as a child, claimed that the new version created by domestic specialists turned out to be much better than the missing one. Despite this, the search for the Amber Room will most likely never stop. How they never stop solving the riddle of the Bermuda Triangle.