The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Wermusch fetches three bottles of soda water and pops the lids. So what had Enke and the Stasi learned that made them certain that the Amber Room had been concealed somewhere in Germany, we ask?

  I don't know. I was not involved in the Stasi investigation,' Wermusch snaps. He stands and hobbles into the hall, reaching up to a shelf almost at ceiling height, where dozens of binders and files are stacked, their spines annotated with dates, all of them drafts of Bernsteinzimmer Report. 'Enke exercised total control over his material. All I have is what he showed me. There are many official papers about the search for the Amber Room and they must be in the Stasi files.' Yes, we know. That's the main reason we are here. His face takes on a sweaty sheen. 'Are you taping me?' No, we say. We need your help. To decode Enke's Stasi files. Wermusch giggles. 'You don't need me. You need someone who was on the inside.'

  We read out some of the names we jotted down in the Ministry of Truth. Generaloberst Beater? 'He's dead. 1982.' Generalleutnant Neiber? 'You'll never get him to talk, not since he was sued by someone he imprisoned.' Markus Wolf, the Stasi's foreign espionage chief? 'You can't afford him. Doesn't open his front door unless the cash is on the table.' What about Oberst Hans Seufert, is he still in touch with him? 'You're a bit late. He died two days ago. His wife called me.' Our timing could not be worse.

  We run through a list of codenames for Stasi informers and sources who worked on the Amber Room. 'Dead. Dead. Dead. Missing,' Wermusch recites. He is enjoying himself. 'Wait.' He stops at HIM 'Bernd' (a Hauptamtlicher Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or senior paid Stasi informer). I know that one. It's the codename for a mole in the 'Kripo' [the criminal police], an Oberstleutnant. He did the strong-arm stuff for Enke. He's around. Anyhow, he appears to be your only choice.'

  Will he help us, we ask?

  'Depends on whether he thinks you're worth it. He told the German government where to go when they came sniffing around for information about the Amber Room after reunification.'

  Is 'Bernd' reliable?

  'He did time in Bautzen prison - it was said that he tried to play both sides, got caught cheating on the Stasi, allegedly selling secrets, and then found out from prison that his boss was messing around with his wife.'

  So, the reason why he went to prison is unclear. We can't call him 'Bernd', we say. The Cold War is over. 'His real name is Uwe Geissler.'

  Wermusch shuffles into the hall. 'I'll call him tonight. Oh,' he says, poking his head around the door, 'you might like this.' He tosses us a copy of Bernsteinzimmer Report.

  We open it and read a few words from the introduction. 'The German fascists' robbery of Europe's cultural heritage was far worse than those carried out by the Persians at Babylon, the Romans at Athens or the Crusaders at Constantinople,' Enke wrote. And the Amber Room was 'the most painful loss of all'. We have read this passage before, in one of Enke's early reports to his Stasi masters. It made the final edit.

  9

  Two days later we find Giinter Wermusch blinking in the stairwell of his block, dressed for a field trip in a blue bomber jacket and combat trousers. 'How are my new friends?' he asks. His mood has lifted. 'I have some things for you,' he declares, passing us some papers. 'I typed out my theories last night. Just my small hobby. Not so important. Read them later.' He hands them over with an apology. 'Writing is too painful these days. Can't seem to hold a pen.'

  No one picked up the phone at Uwe Geissler's apartment near Allee der Kosmonauten in East Berlin. But Wermusch knows the location of Geissler's weekend bungalow, two hours south-east of the city, and he thinks we might find Geissler there. As we drive out, beside the River Spree, Wermusch explains that he got to know Geissler while accompanying him on trips around the GDR after Paul Enke's death, interviewing potential eyewitnesses connected to the Amber Room story. Wermusch is interested to see how Geissler has weathered, he says. We think to ourselves how curious it is that this Lektor accompanied a Stasi informer on official investigations. But we will broach that subject later.

  After an hour we arrive at Lake Krossinsee. Nearby is a red-brick village with a stagnant duck pond, a place Wermusch, who is now visibly sweating, says has become a favoured retreat among retired Stasi officers. A side road peters out into a sandy track that feeds a cluster of identical cement chalets running down to the shore. 'Uwe Geissler lives somewhere here,' Wermusch gestures, struggling to disentangle himself from the seat belt. Ahead is a signpost announcing Ziegenhals, 'Goat's Throat Village'.

  The chalet peeps over a manicured border of marigolds, tiger lilies and busy lizzies. Frogs burp contentedly beside plastic tulips. The lawn is a deep emerald green and rolled into checks and stripes. A short, pigeon-chested figure in a purple polo shirt and nylon trousers leaps up from his garden chair as we approach and rushes over to the knee-high picket fence. A neighbour has informed us that this is Geissler's spread. 'Scheisse,' he shouts, his forehead creasing as he attempts to recall whether these are faces he would rather forget. 'Mein Gott!' And then, as it dawns on him, he reaches out with a tanned hand. 'Wermusch? Wilkommen. Wilkommen. Und ...?'

  Geissler leads Wermusch off, down towards the lake. We can see them gesticulating vigorously, looking back, towards us, before Wermusch places a steadying hand on his acquaintance's forearm and guides him up the path. And as we squeeze around a small plastic table we notice the family of pottery gnomes peeking out of the shrubbery. For a retired collaborator at peace in his garden, Geissler's eyes are remarkably bloodshot. He complains to Wermusch that these days he cannot sleep. He lights a cigarette and dissolves into a whooping cough, while Wermusch stares longingly at the pile of stubs ground into the ashtray.

  Geissler sets some rules. Never betrayed anyone, got it? Was never a sneak, right? 'We've all been betrayed by the Ministry of Truth. I never spied. I was just trying to help. It's my natural impulse.' Wermusch stares into space. 'The Soviets were dealt such a terrible blow in the war, losing so much more than anyone else,' Geissler says. 'It was only right that we Germans help find what was stolen from them.'

  Geissler's eyes track a delicate woman with prematurely grey hair who emerges from the chalet behind us. 'Liebling, get our guests something to eat,' he barks. Geissler's liebling must be half his age and she silently shakes our hands with the grip of a jailer, before retreating into the chalet.

  What was Geissler's role in the Amber Room study group, we ask?

  'The "fraternal authorities" [KGB] were trying to locate all the old East Prussian aristocrats, those whom Alfred Rohde had corresponded with in 1944 as he struggled to find a hiding place for the Amber Room: Keyserlingk, Dohna, Schwerin. Also the high-ranking castle and museum officials: Henkensiefken, Will, Friesen, Gall, Zimmerman. Would you like a Danish butter cookie? Pass them around, liebling.' These names are becoming familiar to us. All are on Anatoly Kuchumov's list of missing Germans; in Freie Welt and Kaliningradskaya Pravda. We still do not know what role any of them played in the Amber Room story.

  So did you find them, we ask?

  Geissler isn't listening. He's talking. For a man who is supposed to have spent a lifetime keeping his mouth shut, he seems incapable of doing so. 'We were remarkably successful.' Wermusch shudders as Geissler wedges a large biscuit in his mouth.

  I tell you. The Soviets made a mistake throwing out all the eyewitnesses.' By 1949, the authorities in Kaliningrad had expelled all Germans from East Prussia, filling their homes and farms with Soviet settlers. Did Geissler ever point out the short-sightedness of the policy? 'Well, I could have done,' he splutters, 'but I was too busy. On the road. Rounding them all up again.'

  Dark clouds gather overhead and the candy-striped awning above us flaps loudly. We try and steer the conversation to what we have come here to learn. What was the new intelligence about the Amber Room that the security services had obtained? 'Freie Welt. More than 1,OOO eyewitnesses came forward after the articles were published and we went checking them all out. Soldiers who'd been looting in Leningrad. Konigsberg residents who'd seen th
e Amber Room,' he says, thunder echoing across Lake Krossinsee.

  But what was the impetus for publishing the articles in the first place, we ask? Freie Welt was surely the second stage. We recall Herr 'Stolz's' theory but do not mention it. Rain begins to whip the chalet, water pouring down off the awning. 'There are a lot of liars out there,' Geissler shouts above the deluge. 'Sad, deluded people who wanted to be part of the mystery, wanted to be part of something special. Some of them even tried to find the Amber Room themselves. We had to stamp on that right away.' Imagine sending a letter to the editor of The Times, we think, and finding an MI5 agent on the doorstep.

  Geissler's eyes flicker skywards. 'Looks like rain,' he says, noticing it for the first time, pushing past us into the cabin where his liebling kneels on the floor, picking crumbs off the carpet. He settles behind a smoked- glass coffee table, beckoning Wermusch and us inside. I was a specialist. Not like some of the creeps they employed. I was a criminal investigator.' He lights another cigarette. 'I'd only move in on an "object" when I was ready. Sometimes it took several attempts to break through their deception to the real story.' A nudge and a wink. 'We had to know more about them than they knew about themselves.' Geissler takes a slug of tea.

  'I'd say, "If you have looted stuff, that's acceptable. Everybody nicked stuff in the war. But if you've killed people, well, that is a different matter. Not so easy to forgive."' Geissler grins. 'It was a great trick. Worked every time. So they would all eventually admit to looting, but then we would have them. Stupid pricks didn't realize we were looking for looters all along, particularly anyone connected with the Amber Room.' He bunches his hands into fists and Wermusch slips outside with a cigarette. 'There was this one guy who admitted to having stolen something quite valuable. When he realized that I was going to report him, he pleaded with me. Said he'd never told his wife and now she would find out from the Stasi. I had to call the ambulance.' Geissler is laughing and tears well in his eyes. 'The guy had a fucking heart attack.'

  Geissler's liebling grabs her purse and marches out of the chalet, sending a beaded curtain flying. We are beginning to understand why GDR citizens would never have responded to Freie Welt if they even suspected that the Stasi was its source.

  Is it true, we ask, that you spent time in Bautzen (a high-security Stasi prison nicknamed 'Yellow Misery' by those cast into its urine-coloured buildings)?1 We have heard enough bravado.

  Geissler reaches for a cigarette. 'It was all a misunderstanding. That's what my boss, Oberst Hans Seufert, said when he got me out in 1977. Served three years. All of it in solitary. Listen to my cough. My parents died and they would not even let me out to bury them. They accused me of selling Stasi secrets.' Did you? 'Never. A Stasi officer was giving my wife one. Wanted me out the way. I was framed. Seufert told me, "You've done your time, now shut up. If you argue you'll go back inside." It worked out all right in the end. I found a new wife, a younger one. And I was brought back into the Amber Room team.'

  Geissler goes on the offensive, jabbing a finger towards us. I know many important things,' he shouts, motioning to an imaginary store at the back of the cabin. 'Government people came looking for me in 1993, the Ministry of the Interior and the head of the Berlin CDU. They were so impressed by what I knew about the Amber Room that they offered me money to write it all down.' His face reddens. 'Money too for my Stasi documents about the Amber Room investigation. I told them all to piss off.'

  What documents, we ask? 'My papers are my pension. Took them in January 1990, when it all went to hell.' Oberst Seufert once told Giinter Wermusch that his Amber Room study group generated 180,000 pages of intelligence and yet we know from the functionary at the Ministry of Truth that the files she has recently acquired run to only E2,ooo.2 Someone is still sitting on the rest.

  But what story do these documents tell, we ask? Geissler cannot keep it to himself: 'The Stasi had intelligence that the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, had successfully evacuated the Amber Room from Konigsberg Castle to Germany. When Freie Welt came out, the intelligence was substantiated by one of the letter-writers. A man wrote that his father, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer, had overseen the evacuation of the Amber Room on Koch's orders.'

  Could this possibly be true? The existence of a plan to evacuate the Amber Room had been glimpsed by Kuchumov, confirmed by Strauss and plotted by Enke, but this is the first positive confirmation we have had that someone ordered it and that the task was accomplished. We are not yet ready to believe it. Geissler's revelation opens up a staggering range of new possibilities. We begin to wonder if we started our research at the wrong point in the wrong country, chasing the wrong line. We need to pin Geissler down. Can he show us the evidence?

  He smiles, sucks in a deep lungful of smoke and then leans forward until his head is barely an inch from ours. We can see every oily pore and his chipped incisors. 'Wouldn't that be interesting? Worth something a little extra.' We have not yet discussed money. Geissler settles back into his chair. 'I'll give you a taster. For free. The letter-writer only found out his dad's secret when he discovered wartime documents hidden in a leather pouch in the family's cellar in 1949, a couple of years after his father died. He had never spoken about these documents until he read the article in Freie Welt.'

  What did these documents state, we ask? We must keep Geissler talking.

  'There was a receipt confirming the handing over of forty-two crates and packages to the letter-writer's father and an order to take the Amber Room to a secret storage facility codenamed BSCH. Another document was a transcript of a radio message reporting the implementation of that order and it read: "Action Amber Room concluded. Storage in BSCH. Accesses blown up. Casualties through enemy action." There was also a map. But there was confusion over what location these documents identified. And there was a much more serious problem. The letter-writer was just a kid when he found them and he was so frightened by what they said - there were regular round-ups of old Nazis going on 1949 - that he burned them.'

  It is a lot to believe. How did you corroborate the letter-writer's story, we ask?

  'He was vetted. By the author of the Freie Welt articles, Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss.'

  That name again.

  'Dr Strauss reported back that he thought the letter-writer was telling the truth. He had little to gain by exposing his father's Nazi past. We agreed to disguise the letter-writer's identity and he became source 'Rudi Ringel'.

  Where was BSCH?

  Geissler brushes our question aside: 'After Strauss had finished with "Rudi Ringel" he was whisked off to Kaliningrad so the Soviets could check him out too. Comrade K. Lebedev, the chairman of the district committee on arts affairs, was in charge. All intelligence connected to "Rudi Ringel" was sent to Comrade Veniamin Krolevsky at the Kaliningrad Party Secretariat.'

  You said the evidence pointed to Germany, so why take 'Rudi Ringel' to Kaliningrad and channel all of your information to the KGB, we ask?

  I told you there was some confusion over the location of BSCH because the documents were burned. The "fraternal authorities" agreed that "Rudi Ringel" was probably telling the truth but deduced that BSCH was a location in Kaliningrad. Of course we were not in a position to contradict them and while they did their work we did ours, checking out all the remaining Freie Welt letter-writers. Finally, "Rudi Ringel" came home to the GDR.'

  What happened next, we ask?

  Silence. The windows of the cabin are dripping with condensation, the rain is thundering on the corrugated roof and Geissler's wife appears at the front door, soaking wet, bearing a box of cherry pies.

  'Liebling. Let's have a break from talking. Let's eat and drink together.' The pot is brewed. The coffee is poured and it is not until Geissler is sated that he continues. 'Enke grilled "Rudi Ringel". I did the sister and the mother. We were all over like them like a virus.' Thankfully, Geissler is unstoppable. 'We found many references in Nazi records that supported the "Ringel" family's stories.' He lights another cigarette. 'And the
se references revealed what we suspected all along, that the documents "Rudi Ringel" had found in the family's cellar had been misinterpreted by the KGB. BSCH could not be found in Kaliningrad because BSCH was here in Germany.'

  How did the Stasi locate BSCH? What were these clues, we ask?

  'That would be telling and telling equals money, but what I will tell you for free is that Enke proved that "Rudi Ringel's" father had evacuated the Amber Room out of East Prussia. The radio message - "Action Amber Room concluded. Storage in BSCH. Accesses blown up. Casualties through enemy action" - was broadcast from a location in Germany.

  'Paul Enke went to Oberst Seufert but the boss was cautious. Didn't want to clash with the "fraternal authorities" who were digging in Kaliningrad. Seufert said that if we found more evidence then he would back an application for funding a dig in Germany. But - ' Geissler takes a mouthful of pie - 'there was a problem. Enke identified in the GDR 700 possible locations for BSCH: salt mines, coal-mines, quarries, caves and underground bunkers. The Stasi Secretariat ordered us to whittle the list down. We went back to "Rudi Ringel" but he said he knew only what he had seen in the documents. His father had died two years after the war without ever talking about the location of BSCH. The only living person who could confirm the location of the Amber Room was the man who issued the orders, the Nazi war criminal Gauleiter Erich Koch.'

  Geissler looks at his watch. 'Time's up. Nothing more for free. I'm back in the city on Monday. Call me and we'll talk cash,' he chirps. 'You'll have to. I'm the only one connected to the Amber Room study group still alive.'

  Liebling struggles to hold the door and slams it shut behind us. 'Goat's Throat Village' sinks beneath the deluge.

  On 28 May 1949 the Daily Telegraph reported the arrest of a farm labourer called Rolf Berger in the village of Haasemoor, north of Hamburg, after a tip-off from suspicious neighbours. 'In his trouser pocket was found a glass phial of cyanide of potassium, the kind issued to leading Nazis. A similar phial was used by Himmler after his arrest in 1945,' the Daily Telegraph revealed. Under interrogation, the labourer admitted that he was Erich Koch, the former Gauleiter of East Prussia, and that he had been living incognito for four years in the same sparsely populated northern-most German state where Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue and Reich Minister for Occupied Eastern Territories, had been run to ground in May 1945.