The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  One survivor, General Otto Lasch, the Nazi Kommandant of Konigsberg, would write a book about the last days of the city. In it he described how the castle briefly became a safe haven for German citizens until the Red Army attacked its main gates in the late afternoon of 9 April, forcing its surrender at 9 p.m. As lines of communication between the castle and his bunker on the city's Parade Platz had been severed, Lasch would not learn of the capitulation until 1 a.m. Early on 10 April, General Lasch and his fellow officers emerged on to the broken streets carrying bedrolls and knapsacks.

  Within three days Hitler had sentenced Lasch to death, accusing him of cowardice. Konigsberg had meant a great deal to Hitler. More than 50,000 German soldiers had died in three months of intensive fighting and 92,000 prisoners were taken by the Soviets in the campaign for East Prussia. Hitler warned all commanders on the Eastern Front that 'he who gives orders to retreat... is to be shot on the spot'.11 However, by 30 April, Hitler was dead and on 8 May Marshal Zhukov, mastermind of the Soviet assault on Berlin, received the German Chief of Staff's unconditional surrender in the officers' mess of a military engineering college in Berlin-Karlshorst.

  Soviet tanks on the streets of Konigsberg during the final attack, April 194s

  The surrender of General Otto Lasch (centre), 10 April 194$

  And so it was unsurprising that the Red Army still needed time to secure Konigsberg, and while they did Brusov readied his search team, recruiting two translators, Lieutenant Sardovsky and Captain E. A. Chernishov, of the Third Belorussian Front. In his diary Brusov wrote that Chernishov was '[aged] thirty, sympathetic, not a silly man. Studied at the department of foreign languages in Moscow. Musically talented. It is so pleasant and easy to work with him.'

  Brusov also looked for the officer whom Pravda claimed had located the Konigsberg Castle Gift Book, Colonel D. D. Ivanyenko. He was still in town but was being chaperoned by Major Krolic, a political commissar, and was not available for debriefing. The Gift Book 'appeared to have vanished', Brusov noted, perplexed.

  Brusov tried to interview some of the remaining German citizens. 'No one wants to cooperate with us,' he complained to his diary, having learned that Germans had come forward with information about looted art works to the Soviet Military Administration and that this intelligence was not being passed to him. One man who claimed to have found a Nazi stash, including large crates of amber, had been sent away, only to be found the next day hanged from a tree, his hands tied behind his back. Brusov discovered that two more German informers had died in the same manner, hog-tied and hanged, after promising to reveal the location of German treasure. It was difficult for Brusov to fathom what was going on.

  The German civilian population was being squeezed through a security sieve, although now there were only 193,000 people left in a city that was once populated by 2.2 million.12 The city was encircled by nine NKVD regiments sent by Stalin's security chief Lavrenty Beria, who had succeeded Karlik, after the Dwarf had himself become a victim of the purges in 1938. Beria's men were bolstered by 400 operatives from the NKVD's special department (christened SMERSH in 1943, a name chosen by Stalin that was an acronym for 'Kill All Spies'). SMERSH acted as the Soviets' counter-intelligence service, snuffling around Konigsberg for collaborators, fascists, double agents and traitors.

  On 2 June, Professor Brusov and Tatyana Beliaeva were permitted to begin searching the ruins, assisted by German recruits. They headed straight for Konigsberg Castle, whose barrelling watchtowers and arrow-slits still dominated the city. According to Brusov: 'It is in complete ruins. Only a few rooms remain untouched - in the north wing. On the top floor we are collecting things, using it as a storeroom.' Large sections of the roof had collapsed on all four wings of the gigantic cloisters that rose above the River Pregel. The sixteenth-century southern wing was smashed to pieces. The west wing, constructed at a similar time, was also largely destroyed. Only the north-western corner, the oldest part of the castle, dating to the thirteenth century, incorporating a ceremonial Knights' Hall, remained relatively unscathed.

  Beneath this hall was a complex of deep cellars, lit by chandeliers suspended from iron trapezes. The dank walls were lined with giant kegs of wine and beer and the flagstone floors were covered in planks upon which stood refectory tables and banquettes. Here the Nazis had eaten off red-rimmed china plates embossed with the Prussian eagle and the name of the restaurant, Blutgericht, the Blood Court.

  Amateur painting of the post-war remains of Konigsberg Castle

  It is hard to imagine the scale of the operation and the conditions under which the Soviet team toiled. The castle site was enormous and perilously fragile, with sixty-foot-high walls threatening to topple and fallen castel-lations so widely scattered that a rope was required to clamber over them. And then there was the dust, choking, all-pervasive, leaching into every crevice and pore, making work inside the ruin intolerable. Brusov and his comrades were starved of resources. He had nothing more advanced with which to excavate than a pair of shovels. There was no paraffin, he had been told by the military. And therefore there was little light by day or night. There was also no sign of the Amber Room.

  After a few days conducting random surveys, the professor came across an old German man. He was wandering through the castle rubble, a shambling figure who, with his penny-round spectacles, bore an uncanny likeness to Himmler, Brusov noted.

  Somehow this man had bypassed the security cordon Brusov had him arrested and under interrogation the old man admitted to having worked for the Konigsberg Castle Museum. He had come back only to see if the Soviets needed help clearing it. He identified himself as Alfred Rohde. Brusov thought little about him. Rohde cooperated but seemed distracted, repeatedly denying knowledge of Soviet treasures. In his former life he was possibly a figure of consequence, but now every time he pointed to the destruction around him his eyes welled up. Alfred Rohde had been severely traumatized, Brusov reasoned.

  Alfred Rohde

  It was only when the professor began to interrogate others who had worked in the castle and to study Rohde's demeanour that his view changed. 'Rohde looks like a very old man with a shaking right hand. His clothes are very shabby,' the professor wrote. 'But he is actually very experienced. An art critic. He has several scientific works published.' It is not clear how Brusov pieced the truth together but he eventually discovered that Dr Alfred Rohde was director of the Nazis' Konigsberg Castle Museum.

  When Brusov confronted him, Rohde barely reacted. 'Perhaps he is an alcoholic. Doesn't look like a man I can trust. I think he knows more than he tells us and when he talks he often lies,' the professor scribbled in his diary. 'When you look at him when he's not looking at you, his hand stops shaking. He always tells us that the best collections were evacuated but when we ask where to he says he doesn't know.' Professor Brusov had heard rumours of art works being stored at a castle in a nearby Prussian town and put them to Rohde. I suggested that they [the Germans] had sent things to Rautenburg and Rohde exclaimed: "Oh, have you found them?'" The old man was broken, infuriating and also probably concealing something.

  As they laboriously cleared masonry from the Albrecht Gate, Brusov became suspicious. 'Digging started for the Amber Room before I arrived,' the professor confided to his diary. 'They started in the south wing of the castle. I noticed the small hall was already excavated.' He was further concerned to discover that the Nazi Gift Book identifying the arrival of the Amber Room had been found by Colonel Ivanyenko on 25 April, almost three weeks before the news reached Moscow. During this significant interval unofficial investigations to find the Amber Room could have been conducted. But by whom?

  No time to think. They dug on. Since there was little left of the south wing, the Brusov team began knocking their way through the Queen Louisa Tower to reach the blocked-off north wing and the Knights' Hall. Pre-war photographs show a large vaulted chamber with a sweeping ribbed roof beneath which the Teutonic Knights conducted their ceremonies, watched over by the sombre portrai
ts of their forefathers.

  On the morning of 5 June, Brusov broke through into the Knights' Hall and, stumbling over blocks of stone and wooden beams, he and his team found there had been an inferno. The carved thirteenth-century columns were charred, the ancient banners incinerated, the glass was blown and distorted, the flagstone floor cracked by falling masonry. They crawled through the ash on their hands and knees. In one corner Brusov found some chair springs and old German iron locks. In another, recognizable Russian mouldings and frames. That night Brusov returned to his quarters and wrote: 'Found bronze hangings from the Tsarskoye Selo doors... Cornice pieces that could have been in the Amber Room... Iron strips with bolts with the help of which parts of the Amber Room were boxed into crates... We should give up looking for the Amber Room.'

  It was a devastating conclusion. Three days into his mission and Brusov had gathered evidence that strongly suggested that the Amber Room had been stored in the Knights' Hall, where it had been destroyed by a devastating fire. Yet we already know that the search for the Amber Room would continue until the present day. This could not possibly be the end of the story.

  No one dared return to Moscow or the powerful SovNarKom empty-handed. No one - least of all Stalin - was in the mood for bad news. These were euphoric times with Soviet radio broadcasting on 5 June the sound of celebrations in Red Square as Stalin awarded the Order of Victory to Montgomery and Eisenhower.13

  Brusov returned to the ruins of the castle, surely determined to find more evidence before reporting his terrible finding that the Amber Room had been incinerated. He would have to try to find something else to mitigate the bad news, something of high value with which to sweeten his dismal conclusions. He recruited dozens more German volunteers to sort through the rubble in return for food.

  The professor's diligence began to pay off almost immediately, with caches of art extracted from air pockets in the rubble. 'We have dug continuously,' he wrote, 'and we have eventually found success: 1,OOO items, Italian paintings, porcelain and many silver items.' But still no sign of the Amber Room. The search was widened to incorporate other areas of the city.

  On 1O June, eight days after their dig began, Brusov and his team forced their way into a municipal building on the corner of Lange Reihe and Steindamm Strasse, the city's former high street. Here was evidence of a hasty evacuation. Tens of thousands of loose pieces of amber lay on the floor. Others had been packed into boxes. Besides them an inventory in German suggested that scores more crates also containing amber had already left Konigsberg 'in the care of Karl Andree'.

  After an initial flush of excitement, Brusov learned from one of his German workers that Karl Andree was director of the Institute of Palaeontology and Geology at Konigsberg's Albertus-University. Brusov concluded he had found the remnants of an amber collection once famed throughout Europe, consisting of more than 120,000 pieces, the most valuable being 'a life-size reptile carved from the resin'.14 Although Brusov had stumbled over something of immense value, this collection was not connected to the Amber Room.

  That evening the professor composed a communique to Moscow that was witnessed by Captain Chernishov and copied to the Soviet commandant in Konigsberg.

  We have examined a building on the edge of Lange Reihe 4 where there was a collection of items from the amber and geological museum. It seems that the Germans started packing but something disturbed them. Most of the items are labelled. It is probably a good idea to pack all of these items and transport them to somewhere safer, a protected building. It really is one of the best collections and perhaps could be sent to Moscow. Geological collection, beautifully systematized and very wide.

  Brusov was clearly thinking of his museum in Red Square and calculated that packing would take 'eight or ten days with the help of ten workers'.

  Brusov ventured further afield in search of anything connected to the Amber Room. He investigated claims of a Nazi stash at Wildenhoff Castle (today Zikova in Poland), the ancestral home of Countess von Schwerin, an East Prussian aristocrat. Dr Rohde claimed it was pointless. When the Soviet team arrived, Wildenhoff was in a dismal state. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen a retreating SS unit set fire to it. But not everything had been destroyed. 'In three chambers were heaps of remarkable documents, handwritten papers and legal articles from the sixteenth century, all in order with numbers. Because of our small car we could take only a few of these documents and will have to come back with bigger car on 16th,' Brusov wrote. But no Amber Room.

  The night before he was due to return to Wildenhoff, Brusov could not sleep. He was in his sixties and suffered from insomnia. Before dawn he went for a walk in the ruins of Konigsberg Castle where he noticed smoke rising from behind a broken wall. Clambering over the rubble to investigate, Brusov found Alfred Rohde, the German curator, crouched over a smouldering bundle. As he had cooperated with the Soviets, Rohde had been given special privileges. He was not locked up at night as other German prisoners were, although he had been ordered to observe a dawn to dusk curfew. 'Today I found some documents,' Brusov wrote, revealing that he had rescued from Rohde's fire thirty charred letters. Rohde claimed he was burning rubbish, but Brusov dismissed the excuse as 'plainly absurd'. Brusov would have to translate the papers that Rohde was so keen to destroy. But Captain Chernishov warned that he had little time as he was also attached to the NKVD, which was still processing German citizens.

  Brusov returned to the castle site now even more wary of Alfred Rohde, although the Soviet mission was determined to make progress. '21 June - all day we were searching and we found Italian and Flemish paintings,' Brusov wrote, noting that among the canvases were works by Andrea del Verrocchio and Brueghel the Younger.

  And then, with only a few days before the Brusov/Beliaeva mission was due to return to Moscow, Chernishov appeared with a rough translation of a selection of the documents partly burned by Rohde. According to Brusov's diary, one of them was a draft letter to Berlin written on 2 September 1944, confirming that the Amber Room had been packed into crates, having narrowly escaped an Allied air raid on the night of 27-28 August 1944. Rohde's office in the castle had been flattened and he noted that he was now working from his home in Bickstrasse. Among the other charred fragments were travel permits issued to Rohde, including one for a five-day trip to oversee the evacuation of Countess Keyserlingk's 'furniture, weapons, marble sculpture and LOO paintings' from Rautenburg to Konigsberg Castle. There was also correspondence between Rohde and other East Prussian aristocrats, among them Prince Alex Dohna-Schlobitten of Elbing and Countess von Schwerin. There was a passing reference to Soviet pictures from Kiev. Another missive mentioned paintings taken from Soviet museums in Minsk.

  Chernishov was puzzled by one document in particular. In it Rohde wrote to Berlin that he had lost the key to an underground palace storage facility called the Hofbunker. Rohde had never mentioned a Hofbunker before. Brusov immediately summoned the German curator. Had the remains he had found in the ruins of the Knights' Hall been placed there as a decoy? Was the Amber Room in fact concealed in this secret Hofbunker?

  Rohde was nonchalant. 'He said the Hofbunker was on Steindamm Strasse and that he would lead us there. He said he had now found the key,' Brusov wrote in his diary. The professor and Rohde walked there in the last week of June, accompanied by a young Red Army lieutenant, Ilya Tsirlin, who had been asked to come along as a witness. Near to the corner of the crossing with Rosen Strasse, they found a cellar, four storeys deep, on the left side of the street and a long staircase that led down 'until we found ourselves in a very well-equipped bomb shelter'. This was no ordinary air-raid bunker. Brusov wrote: 'Here were rooms for sleeping and things thrown over the floor. There were paintings and sculptures. We chose two or three of the better things and then left.' Although there was nothing to indicate that the Amber Room had ever been stored here, Brusov still could not give up hope that it was hidden elsewhere.

  As Rohde had lied about this Hofbunker, Brusov decided to interrogate him formall
y. He forced the German curator to sign a confession: 'Destiny of Museum Treasures for Which I was Responsible'. We have it before us.

  The German curator's story changed. Rohde admitted that Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's ideologue and the head of the Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg (ERR), an art-looting organization, had used Konigsberg as a store for plundered art works. In autumn 1941 Rohde had been sent works stolen from the Minsk Museum, 'eighteenth-century paintings from the historical dept, items from the heritage of the tsar's department, including furniture'. All of them 'became the target of Anglo-American aviation attacks in August 1944 and were destroyed' in the eastern wing of Konigsberg Castle. In the summer of 1943 Rohde received 'the properties of the museum of Kharkiv, Western and Russian paintings as well as icons'. These had been sent to Wildenhoff, only to be transferred back to Konigsberg in January 1945, when the Red Army loomed. Treasures from Kiev arrived in December 1943, 'packed in ninety-eight boxes and sent to Wildenhoff Castle. There were about 800 icons - the most significant collection of icons in the world.' All had now vanished.

  But what about the Amber Room? Rohde finally addressed the central issue. 'Yes,' he admitted, he had personally 'received the Amber Room from the Tsarskoye Selo' in November 194 L, 'which I placed in Konigsberg Castle in a suitable hall'. So the Gift Book (now missing) had been a true and accurate record of all things received at the castle. But, Rohde added, 'four weeks before the Allied air attack' the room had been 'transferred to a safer place to make sure it would not be damaged'. Some time later, Rohde ordered the room be returned to the castle and he 'packed it in boxes and placed it in the north wing of the castle and there [the crates] were preserved until 5 April 1945', along with pieces of furniture belonging to Countess Keyserlingk. The Red Army had by then encircled the city. All plans to evacuate the Amber Room were abandoned, frustrated by time, Soviet bombers and troop movements.