The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Dear Katya, We are here in Konigsberg for the third day. One and a half days have been taken up with bureaucracy. We found the grave of Immanuel Kant, remaining miraculously intact among absolute ruin, and visited a house where Richard Wagner had once stayed. We have now been allowed into the ruined castle. We begin to search through the rubble.9

  Several documents in our file are informal letters like this one, written by Stanislav Tronchinsky, who, despite being on a covert mission, obviously kept no secrets from his wife. Every three days he had sent an extraordinary missive to Katya in Leningrad, a fact that Kuchumov only learned of in the 1960S when Tronchinsky's widow gave the letters to him to assist in the research of his book about the Amber Room. The ambiguity and innuendo in them suggests that Tronchinsky was aware that a censor would read them, but he was presumably senior enough within the party not to be afraid of recriminations.

  Kuchumov wrote no such letters to his wife, Anna Mikhailovna. He confided only to his diary. Kuchumov is emerging as dogged and patriotic, putting to one side his personal life, while conducting the business of the state. Everything he typed went straight to the Ministry of Culture in Moscow, pages of reports, the carbon copies of which are here in these files.10

  'First, we have made a detailed inspection of the castle cellars and tunnels that lead out of its precincts,' he wrote. We can imagine Kuchumov at his hotel dressing table, squinting in the candlelight as everyone else slumbered. Wearing his Moscow-issue black suit, his fleshy body pressing at its seams, the itchy woollen fabric taking on a sheen having wriggled with the curator over broken beams and masonry. Kuchumov stabbed at the typewriter keys, making frequent mistakes, which he hatched over with Xs.

  The underground passageways were numerous and beguiling, Kuchumov noted. 'Many of them were flooded and all of them were dangerous.' Some had even been sabotaged, the water electrified or poisoned. Others were simply crumbling and filled with the smell of gangrene, the gasses of decomposition that could kill a man as easily. 'Forty Soviet specialists died,' Kuchumov wrote without comment, as if forty men killed in one incident was an unremarkable fact. Given what we know about the culture of checking, cross-checking and counter-checking in Moscow then, the incident was certainly investigated by another agency. We have no idea whether these deaths were connected in any way to the search for the Amber Room.

  When Kpichumov and Tronchinsky began inspecting the ruined castle itself, they immediately made discoveries. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow: 'In different parts of the structure that was burned and destroyed we found a great number of fragments of furniture from the Catherine and Alexander palaces (including furniture from the Great Hall, the Karelian Reception Room of Alexander I, the Chinese Room and many others).' Then, in the East Wing: 'Near the main gate, we discovered big bronze locks that had once belonged to the Lyons Hall of the Catherine Palace.'

  All of these pieces had been found within a few days and yet Brusov claimed in his report to have made a thorough search of the castle. But perhaps it was not entirely surprising, as Brusov was an archaeologist with no specialist knowledge about the Leningrad collections. And he had been working just weeks after the German surrender.

  According to Tronchinsky's secret letters home, he and Kuchumov soon discovered more:

  Dear Katya, we have found fragments of the Catherine Palace floor. Broken furniture from the Bolshoi Hall and the Chinese Drawing Room, as well as a cabinet from Alexander I. Anatoly Mikhailovich has to be careful. He was in the east wing when he fell through two floors, masonry pouring down on his head, he was only stopped from crashing into the cellars and killing himself by an old oak beam.

  Kuchumov wrote to Moscow: 'While surveying the castle, in a small ground-floor room in one of the semi-ruined towers in the middle of the south wall, we also found among the rubbish more copies of Rohde's official correspondence.' One of the letters was from General George von Kuchler, who in 1942 had replaced General Wilhelm von Leeb as commander of Army Group North, which was barracked in the Catherine Palace. Kuchler asked his 'good friend Alfred Rohde' about the safe arrival of the Amber Room 'that had been sent to East Prussia'. This new letter proved that Rohde had some useful and influential connections.

  Kuchumov and Tronchinsky systematically worked their way through the north wing. The Knights' Hall was to be the focus of their investigation. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow: 'Here, according to Rohde, was where the Amber Room was located at different times.' Here too Kuchumov and Tronchinsky quickly found items that Brusov had missed. Kuchumov wrote: 'Our detailed searches of layers of soot, garbage and debris that covered the stone floor of the Knights' Hall where the Amber Room had possibly been burned have revealed gilded pieces of wood varnish and great amounts of furniture springs and iron parts from German wardrobes.'11 Kuchumov concluded that he had discovered more of Countess Keyserlingk's incinerated furniture collection - pieces that Rohde had told Brusov had been packed beside the Amber Room.

  Entrance to the Knight's Hall of Konigsberg Castle

  Hinges, cornices, iron strips. Kuchumov ventured that if the entire Amber Room had burned here then there would be far more evidence still lying in the rubble. There had to be something left of the twenty-two large and medium-sized amber wall panels, the four amber frames that contained the four Florentine stone mosaic pictures and the stone mosaics themselves, commissioned by Catherine the Great.

  Then, on 22 March, Tronchinsky wrote to his wife that Kuchumov had found something significant, something that they could directly connect to the Amber Room: 'Dear Katya, We found copper frames from the stone mosaics, but only three of them. Here they were, literally under my feet.'12

  Kuchumov made the formal report to Moscow:

  Near the entrance to the [Knights] Hall, where the staircase runs, covered in three layers of ash, totally burned and discoloured, we have found the mosaic pictures. Examining the profile of the bronze frames and the small decorative tendrils of wire that surrounded the stone pieces one could confirm that they were of Italian production and therefore the ones that once decorated the Amber Room.13

  The findings appeared to bolster Brusov's theory that the Amber Room had burned. But Kuchumov argued the reverse. Having learned about the mechanics of the Amber Room while researching his book, Kuchumov advised Moscow that he had left all four small stone mosaics in the Catherine Palace in June 1941, and only three had now turned up in the rubble of the Knights' Hall.

  The stone mosaics could be detached from the amber panels and the fourth might have survived elsewhere. If this fourth stone mosaic had been packed and stored elsewhere by the Nazis, then surely the possibility existed that the amber panels and thick carved frames that had comprised the Amber Room were still concealed alongside the fourth mosaic, in another location.

  Space. When it came to them, Kuchumov wrote that both men burst out laughing. Kuchumov had memorized the Amber Room's original dimensions - a dozen large panels twelve feet high, ten medium panels just over three feet high and twenty-four sections of amber skirting board. He knew that the large amber wall panels could not be broken down into smaller pieces and so, when they had been packed up by Alfred Rohde in January 1945, they would have required large, cumbersome crates. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow:

  More important than the number of stone mosaics is the issue of size. If we suppose that these stone mosaics were packed together with the large amber panels being still mounted upon them, all of which burned in the inferno [in the Knights' Hall], then the cases for the panels and mosaics would have had to be vast. And yet this place, between the two doors and the windows where we have found the three stone mosaics, is cramped and tiny.

  Tronchinsky and Kuchumov studied the pile of ash on the floor before them. In the searing temperatures, the stone mosaics had been perfectly preserved in a neat stack, although they were now more fragile than a spider's web. The picture on the uppermost mosaic was even discernible, until Kuchumov touched it and it imploded in a puff of ash. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow:
<
br />   If the mosaics had been stacked still hooked on to the amber panels, a layer of amber panel with its wooden backing, a layer of stone mosaic, and so on and so on, when the panels burned individual amber pieces would have separated as the glue that bound them melts at low temperatures, and the board that backed the panels ignites at around the same mark. Some trace of the amber, now loose and insulated by the stone mosaics, would have remained trapped. But we found nothing.

  Nothing. It was inconceivable that not a single piece of amber from more than a dozen twelve-foot-high amber wall panels, each one of which was made up of thousands of slivers of the resin, had survived. In addition, Kuchumov advised Moscow that the Amber Room was decorated with twenty-four mirrored pilasters that, according to Pravda, had been marked as received in the castle's Gift Book. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow: 'Above these pilasters were twenty-four bronze wall chandeliers. Inspecting the ash we did not find a single trace of bronze or mirrored pilaster.'

  Three mosaics not four. A tiny space in which to store only the smallest crates. No bronze or mirror fragments to be found in the ash. Nothing sandwiched between the stone mosaics. Kuchumov's reasoning was at times hard to follow but he argued that the evidence - much of which he had decided not to burden Moscow with - pointed to the Amber Room having been packed up and stored in multiple locations, or at the very least not solely in the Knights' Hall, where Dr Rohde and Brusov had said it was. Rohde's correspondence made it clear that the Germans had separated parts of the Amber Room as early as August 1944, when six sockel-platten, part of the amber skirting board, had been destroyed by fire in the south wing, while all other pieces had survived.

  On 25 March 1946 Tronchinsky wrote again to his wife: 'Dear Katya, We have to work very hard indeed. We walk and run each day about six miles. We have revealed something.' But he did not tell his wife exactly what they had discovered.

  But three days later, when he wrote again, he was in an altogether different mood: '28 March, Dear Katya, Yesterday was a week since we arrived in this city. We have walked now about 90 miles. Results of our work are small. We did not find the main thing: the mystery of the Amber Room has not been revealed to us.' Tronchinsky had good reason to be deflated. '[Rohde], the castle director is dead. He died three months ago. We cannot find any other collaborators.'

  The man at the centre of the Soviet inquiry. The well-plotted thirty-three questions. The mystery of the evacuation to Saxony. Kuchumov and Tronchinsky were to have squeezed Alfred Rohde hard. No one had seen Rohde since December 1945. Not General Vasilev. No one at the NKVD headquarters in the Moscow Hotel. None of the SMERSH operatives. It was thought to be impossible to get in or out of the city and yet Alfred Rohde, together with Use, his wife, and Lotti and Wolfgang, his daughter and son, had vanished.

  A German informant claimed that they had died from malnutrition. Kuchumov found this hard to believe as the Soviets had been feeding Rohde emergency rations to keep him alive. ' Werwolfs, members of the secretive Nazi resistance, had taken or executed them to conceal the secret of the Amber Room,' an anonymous letter that found its way to Kuchumov stated.14 He dismissed this out of hand. Tronchinsky knew that Germans who offered to collaborate had been hanged and that there were now ten such incidents under investigation. However, Kuchumov conducted his own inquiry and wrote to Moscow: I have learned that Alfred Rohde committed suicide. His wife is also dead. That's what people in the hospital have told me.' But Kuchumov also admitted in the same report that he had been unable to find the graves, the post-mortem reports or the death certificates. No doctors in Konigsberg could recall treating Rohde or any of his family. This was a city living in terror where it was virtually impossible to keep a secret, a city that had dematerialized along with Alfred and Use Rohde and their children.

  But Tronchinsky and Kuchumov struggled on and on L April Tronchinsky wrote to his wife:

  Dear Katya, we once again have found tracks of the Amber Room... If the room was demolished... it was not here in Konigsberg [Castle]... We have also found important furniture from the Amber Room... and are about to go on and follow the trail left by the Amber Room... We shall go to Moscow on 10 or 12 April.

  Kuchumov wrote to Moscow that he and Tronchinsky had located three of Rohde's close associates. Paul Feyerabend, owner of the Blutgericht, the Blood Court historical restaurant that Kuchumov noted with distaste was 'located for 200 years in the old Teutonic Order's torture chambers beneath the Knights' Hall', had come forward claiming he was a Communist who had been forced to conceal his party card. Feyerabend claimed to have witnessed a puzzling event in July 1944. The interrogations were attached.

  Blutgericht, the Nazi restaurant located in the former torture chambers of Konigsberg Castle

  Feyerabend. Statement 1, 2 April 1946: July 1944 - two cars entered the castle yard, heavily loaded with cases. Small cases among the larger load were then placed on the ground. But the rest, the huge cases, were left on the cars. I asked Rohde what were these gigantic cases and Rohde said to me they were the amber walls from Russia.15

  Feyerabend described how Rohde was called to an urgent meeting with Dr Helmut Will, the Oberburgermeister or Lord Mayor of Konigsberg. Kuchumov noted: 'Find Helmut Will.'

  Feyerabend said:

  Following the meeting, the cars, still loaded down, left the yard and Rohde then arrived at the Blutgericht restaurant to order a case of wine from me, telling me that he would be away for several days. He came back three weeks later and I saw him again. Rohde told me that he had been to a big country estate. Some time later he told me that his mission concerned the amber hall from Russia, which had been packed on these cars.

  Following Kuchumov's prompts, Tronchinsky tore into Feyerabend. There was no evidence that Rohde had made any trips out of Konigsberg until the air raids of 27-28 August 1944. Rohde had told Brusov that after he had dismantled the Amber Room in July 1944, it had been stored in the cellars of the castle's south wing. What was the date of Rohde's expedition with the room? 'July 1944,' Feyerabend insisted.

  The restaurant owner was asked to think hard about his statement, but he had nothing to add or take away. He could, however, recall other conversations he had had with Rohde after that date: 'Rohde told me many times that the room should and would have gone to Saxony in the end, but due to logistical problems in March [1945], it had not been moved there. Gauleiter Erich Koch had wanted it evacuated to Saxony too, but the tight military situation would not allow it.' But was Feyerabend in a position to know, Kuchumov asked? He might have poured wine for the elite but did he drink with them? How likely was it that a man of Rohde's intellect would trade secrets with a restaurateur?

  The interrogation continued but the transcript before us abruptly finishes. We make a note to find the missing pages.

  The next interrogation was of Ernst Schaumann, a war artist and friend of Rohde. He described Rohde as an amber expert. Rohde had written a seminal book known as Bernstein in 1937.16 'Must get a copy,' noted Kuchumov.

  In April 1942 Rohde had also prepared an article illustrated with photographs for Pantheon, a German art digest, to celebrate the Amber Room going on display in the second-floor gallery in the south wing of Konigsberg Castle.17 'We must get this too,' Kuchumov wrote. Schaumann came up with the name of a new witness for the Soviets to find: Jurgen Sprecht, a Konigsberg restorer who had been sponsored by Rohde to study in Berlin. 'He was later assigned to work on the Amber Room,' Schaumann told Tronchinsky. 'Find Sprecht,' Kuchumov wrote.

  Schaumann recalled one notable conversation he had had with Rohde: 'After my return from France in October 1944, I asked Dr Rohde about the destiny of the amber and picture collections,' Schaumann told Tronchinsky. 'He answered that by order of the authorities in Berlin they were packed and transferred to safe places at estates in East Prussia and Saxony. Later, at the time when Konigsberg was surrounded by the Red Army, Rohde repeated the claim.' Tronchinsky lost his cool. Feyerabend and Schaumann could not both be right. The Amber Room was either evacua
ted or not. One of them was lying. Kuchumov said nothing. He could not decide if Schaumann was credible or confused.

  Finally, Otto Smakka was called. Smakka worked as a translator for the fisheries in Konigsberg. He confirmed the Amber Room had been on display. 'Yes, I saw it in the summer of 1942. It had obviously suffered in transportation. Several pieces of amber were either stolen or lost. Even the printed information sheets mentioned that parts were missing in the walls. It occurred to me that they were probably stolen.' The vast and opulent room that we have in our mind's eye, candles blazing, walls glowing, as it appears in the glass plate we were shown by Kuchumov's granddaughter, was not the Amber Room that had reached Konigsberg in the freezing winter of 1941. Since then, Kuchumov had established that three of the four Florentine stone mosaics had been destroyed, as had parts of the amber skirting board. Kuchumov noted that the scale of the Amber Room they were searching for was significantly different from the one installed in the Catherine Palace. But it did not affect his general conclusions that the space in the Knights' Hall, where the stone mosaics had been found, was not large enough to have accommodated the amber panels themselves.