The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Oberst Stolze wrote to Generalmajor Neiber, warning him of an even more worrying factor. In reviewing Enke's interrogations of old East Prussians, Stolze had discovered that virtually every German citizen questioned by the Stasi in connection with the Amber Room story had already been quizzed by the Soviets at the end of the war. Stolze wrote: 'It has been ascertained that in the post-war years, the Soviet Union... undertook intensive measures in the territory of the GDR to find the Amber Room. Many of the persons and objects of these searches, which had been undertaken at the time, have reappeared in our inquiry.' If the Stasi and KGB had the same motives in searching for the Amber Room, why had the Soviets not shared their findings, Stolze queried, and saved the Stasi time and money?15

  On 28 October 1980 the Stasi wrote to the KGB in Moscow to rectify the situation. 'In our efforts to obtain new hints, indications or documents which could lead to the finding of the Amber Room we are asking for any information from your archives, card indexes and other sources in the USSR in connection with the enclosed questionnaire.'16 Attached was a thirteen-page list of what the Stasi needed: intelligence on Nazi organizations, eyewitnesses and suspects. The request was copied to the chairman of the KGB and the KGB liaison in Berlin-Karlshorst.

  While it waited for a response, the Stasi recruited more staff to help comb through the old Amber Room files, dispatching a constant stream of briefing papers to deputy minister Neiber, including a twenty-three-page report dated 11 January E982 containing new indexes for locations, transport firms, digging sites, witnesses and names of former Nazis. There were chronological lists of newspaper articles, alphabetical tables of Nazi art depots, maps - scores of them, now sorted and classified - and photographs too. All of Enke's theories on the Amber Room's disappearance were anatomized. Buried towards the end of one of these reports was a significant concession: perhaps the Amber Room had remained concealed in Kaliningrad after all.17

  The Secretariat signed off a fifteen-page recommendation on 2E January 1982: 'Political-Operative Plan of Steps for Cooperation between Foreign Security Services for the "Operation Puschkin" investigation'. It was a plea to brother intelligence organizations to share information with the Stasi. The KGB in Moscow was petitioned again to open their files and the Polish security services were asked again for access to Erich Koch, who was still alive.18

  By February 1982 Generalmajor Neiber was actively involved. He proposed a top-level delegation, 'a business trip of a working task force by five MfS members to the Soviet Union's KGB'. Steeped in Mielke's lexicon, Neiber wrote: 'Duration - four days. To take place in May 1982...for the further harmonization, liaison and cooperation in the realization of the planned political and operational measures, necessitated through the Security Process "Puschkin" No. XV 3241/80 as controlled by the office of the Comrade Deputy Minister'. Translation: let's work together, please. Yet even in matters of international significance there was the old Stasi banality. Neiber signed off his report with a coda: 'It has been agreed that the delegation will travel by aeroplane to and from Moscow.'19 An attached letter - 'Berlin 02/1982, For Information Only, to Generalmajor Karli Coburger' - set out the delicate nature of the trip.

  The [Soviet] documents relating to persons and objects [that we have received] following a request to the Investigation Department of the KGB, which had been dispatched in October 1980, had been useful only in the partial clarification of some subjects in the range of investigations... The results transmitted remained within a narrow framework and did not lead to clarification of the basic matters of concern in this process.'

  Translation: the Stasi request to the KGB for help, made sixteen months earlier, had achieved little.20

  Neiber would sort out the trouble. He forwarded a list of key Soviet figures that the Stasi delegation would like to meet: 'Comrade A. M. Kutschumow, Comrade Xenia Agarfornova, Comrade Jelena Storozhenko (Geological-Archaeological Expedition, Kaliningrad), Comrade W. D. Krolewski (search commission, Kaliningrad), Comrade Julia Semjonow (long-term Soviet newspaper correspondent in the FRG and now in based Moscow)'.

  In a correspondence file for the Stasi district office in Magdeburg we learn the fate of deputy minister Neiber's trumpeted mission to Moscow.21 It was cancelled at the last minute - by the Soviets. Magdeburg reported to East Berlin that it had uncovered a potential informer, 'Comrade M... who is capable of making a statement clearing up some details about the Amber Room'. Magdeburg was delighted with its find and wanted to know if it should interrogate Comrade M locally or send him to headquarters. But East Berlin advised Magdeburg to do nothing: 'The proposal for [Neiber's] trip to Moscow... has been rejected. Deputy Comrade Minister Generalmajor Neiber has decided that overall charge of the political-operational handling of the entire above-mentioned complex must remain in the hands of the "fraternal authorities"...' Translation: the Stasi was bowing to the KGB. 'With a large degree of probability the main part of the Amber Room had still been stored in 1945 in Konigsberg,' East Berlin informed Magdeburg, effectively telling the district office to stop looking for it in East Germany. All Stasi efforts to locate the Amber Room in East Germany had been a waste of time.

  However, the Ministry of Truth files do record that there was another visit to Moscow in the spring of 1982 concerning the Amber Room. A handwritten note dated 22 February reported that Comrade Enke had called in with some startling news: 'A ten-person commission led by FRG citizen George Stein has arrived in the Soviet Union to talk about the BZ.'22

  Moscow was courting a West German.

  We have come across George Stein before.23 Gerhard Strauss's son, Stephan, had told us that a 'George Stein' had been a frequent visitor to their house in Heinrich-Mann-Platz. We had also spotted the name on a grizzly dossier of deaths (said to be connected with the Amber Room) that had been shown to us by the staff of the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg (although we saw it so briefly we couldn't understand its meaning). And we have seen the name in a Ministry of Truth file, in papers that revealed the Stasi would have been familiar with George Stein too, since he had come to its attention during what Erich Mielke would have described as a 'favourable political-operative situation': the return to Moscow of missing Soviet treasure.

  In 1966 George Stein, a strawberry farmer from Stelle, a village south-west of Hamburg, had begun to scour West German archives in his free weekends, looking for information about the Amber Room. It was an exciting hobby for a man who had been raised in the former East Prussia.

  He began his research with the war. In state archives in Bonn he read how, despite the division of Germany into Allied zones at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, a race had ensued to reach the Nazi hoards. In April 1945 the US Army had beaten the Red Army to Thuringia (in the Soviet Zone) and removed the Reichsbank reserves, 'LOO tons of gold and silver bullion'.24 From the Soviet Zone US troops also took priceless German art collections, as well as Soviet treasures looted by the Nazis that had been stored beside them. Stein considered the possibility that the Amber Room had been found by US troops and taken back to America.

  Art works stolen by the Nazis, hidden in German mines and found by American troops in April 1945

  He read how the USA had tried to placate Stalin in 1945 by assuring him that all Soviet art would be returned, and between 1946 and 1948 the USA sent to the USSR tens of thousands of crates. There was, however, no apology for taking the gold and German art collections from the Soviet Zone. By March 1949, with Berlin blockaded, the wrangle over reparations and the bitterness felt by the Soviets at losing out contributed to the freezing of relations between East and West.

  Stein read in the Bonn archive how Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Occupation Forces, accused his American counterpart, General Lucius Clay, of 'deliberate spoilage or theft'.25 The US dismissed the claim as Stalinist propaganda, stating that the only Soviet items it continued to hold on to were politically sensitive documents, such as the Smolensk Communist Party Archive, which 'served their purpose as a tr
aining ground for American Sovietology'.26 If we have hoarded Soviet art, the Americans challenged Moscow, show us the proof.

  In 1972, Stein found it. In the Ministry of Truth files, we come across a report on Stein's researches, written by Paul Enke, that stated Stein had discovered in the Bonn archive (a place barred to the Soviets and East Germans) a letter dated 27 April 1955 from Dr Clemens Weiler, director of West Germany's Wiesbaden City Museum. In the letter, Weiler explained how he had been made responsible for numerous art works left behind by the Americans after they had closed their central art collection point, which was based in Wiesbaden, in E951. Four years later Dr Weiler was offering some of these art works, specifically a collection of Russian icons, to another West German museum, the Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen.27

  Stein probed and found more correspondence about the Russian icons, this time letters from Clemens Weiler to Ardelia Hall, head of the US Restitution Program at the Department of State in Washington. Weiler reported to Hall his intentions to pass on the icons and Hall advised him to dispose of them as he saw fit, requesting only that they be made 'as accessible to the public as possible'. There was no discussion about returning the icons to the Soviet Union.28

  In 1972 Stein drove to Recklinghausen and discovered that the deal had gone ahead. In fact the Russian icons were still there, locked up in a third-floor store. He contacted a family friend who had been part of the wartime resistance in Konigsberg, Marion Donhoff, the famous 'Red Countess of East Prussia', who after the war had become the publisher of Die Zeit newspaper. The story Marion Donhoff printed forced the Recklinghausen museum to defend itself. Its spokesman claimed that the wooden icons had been locked away only 'to avoid infestation with moths' - hardly a convincing argument - and failed to answer the question of what icons belonging to the Soviet Union were doing in a West German museum in the first place. The West German government too made little effort to apologize. Helmut Rumpf, a Foreign Office spokesman, issued a statement: 'You know what it is like, the personnel in charge changed, the files were taken to the archives and then all was forgotten.' Rumpf also turned on George Stein, describing him as 'a zealous whinger looking for a life's task'.29 West German newspapers agreed, accusing Stein of being a traitor, a liar and a fantasist.

  But the story would not go away. What Stein had found was one of the Soviet Union's most precious missing devotional treasures, the Byzantine icons from the Mirozhsky Monastery in Pskov. They had been stolen by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941, packed into crates along with ruby-studded crucifixes, bishops' crowns encrusted with precious stones, and gold and silver chalices, and shipped to Castle Colmberg in Bavaria in 1944. There they had been discovered by American forces, who had taken them to Wiesbaden in April 1945.

  As soon as the story went public, the Soviets lodged an appeal for the return of the treasures and the West German Foreign Office was forced to back down. On 14 May 1973, amid a barrage of negative publicity in West Germany, where curators called for Moscow to hand back items allegedly looted by the Red Army in 1945 (including a Gutenberg Bible, stained glass from St Mary's in Frankfurt an der Oder, the 'Trojan Gold', drawings by Diirer and the entire collection of the Bremen Kunsthalle), the Pskov icons were repatriated to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the West German Consul-General presented them to Patriarch Pimen, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who then awarded George Stein the Star of the Order of St Vladimir Second Class, a cross worn around the fruit farmer's neck on which was embossed the motto 'Usefulness, Honour and Glory'.30

  Lionized in Russia, George Stein returned to West Germany in June 1973 to be belittled as a meddling hobby-Hist or iker by bristling and chauvinistic elements in the West German press. But according to the Ministry of Truth files, what the Stasi had identified as a 'favourable political-operative situation' (the Soviets and East Germans portrayed as preyed upon by the greedy West, which was forced by one of its own citizens to return stolen art) rapidly deteriorated into a 'politically hostile situation' (the Soviets and East Germans demonized by that same citizen - George Stein).

  Stein learned from irate West German museum curators that extensive files concerning secret Nazi art storage facilities and the fate of the Amber Room had been amassed by the USSR and GDR. He began demanding access to them and in particular he repeatedly wrote and called the State Archives Administration in East Berlin (the place where the Stasi's own Amber Room expert, Oberstleutnant Paul Enke, worked undercover as researcher Dr P. Kohler).

  In the Ministry of Truth we found this report, written by Paul Enke:

  [day and month blacked out], 1975. in connection with problems of exchange of works of art, my department has unofficially learned that George Stein is...trying to force the USSR and the GDR to make available and accessible information that is closed about the hiding place of art treasures and especially the Amber Room of Pushkin. In 1974 and on 3 July 1975 George Stein has asked our Documentation Centre of the State Archives Administration for assistance in his search for the Amber Room. On 18 August 1975 he received a reply that in spite of detailed researches there is no information about the Amber Room in the archives of the GDR.31

  But the Stasi had underestimated how tenacious George Stein could be. When he received the letter from the State Archives Administration on E 8 August 1975, brushing him aside, he turned to press contacts he had made after recovering the Pskov icons. He called up 'Red Countess' Marion Donhoff of Die Zeit, Anthony Terry at The Sunday Times in London and reporters on the Washington Post. He accused the East German and Soviet governments of withholding sensitive information about the Amber Room, hobbling those who were making genuine attempts to find it. Stein's accusations immediately picked up speed, as the Freie Welt and Kaliningradskaya Pravda stories had by now percolated into the West, creating great interest in the Amber Room.

  In the Ministry of Truth files, the Stasi's alarm was palpable. Enke's boss Generaloberst Biichner and Stasi deputy minister Generaloberst Beater immediately demanded further intelligence about the activities of George Stein. Beater and Biichner were advised by Enke:

  West German hobby-Hist or iker George Stein is talking to the English and American press, saying that the GDR and USSR are hindering attempts to find art works like the Amber Room, that the GDR and USSR have information about the hiding places of art treasures that they do not want to publish. We cannot allow this threatened press campaign by Stein to interfere with the cultural agreements being negotiated between the GDR and FRG.32

  West German citizen George Stein had blundered into Ostpolitik. West Germany had held out its hand to Moscow, making peaceful overtures, and for its part Moscow and East Berlin were being made to look recalcitrant. George Stein would have to be headed off.

  The files show that it was Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss who was brought in to handle the delicate negotiations. Strauss called George Stein to say that the GDR and USSR were keen to share information about the search for the Amber Room. He invited Stein to Heinrich-Mann-Platz for dinner (which must have been when Stephan Strauss, Gerhard's son, met him) and in the course of the evening explained that the GDR was not being obstructive but was a stickler for protocol. All future inquiries should be directed via him to a Dr Paul Kohler, senior researcher at the Documentation Centre of the State Archives Administration. Dr Kohler would provide relevant documents in exchange for sight of Stein's own research in Western archives and he would even pay for the material.

  Stein must have been flattered to be courted by such a prestigious East German cultural scholar as Strauss and to be offered money for what he had so far had to fund from his own pocket. He readily agreed, but could not have known that Paul Kohler at the archives was Paul Enke of the Stasi.

  The watchers in the East would now manipulate George Stein. A Stasi report noted: 'Based on Stein's inquiry at the State Archives in Potsdam we have the possibility of establishing specialized contacts via Comrade Enke which have been useful in giving Stein hints about objects and persons in [West Germany] which he c
ould follow up much better than we could.'33 The portal operated in both directions. Stein would be fed information that the East wanted publicized and fetch from the West that which the East couldn't reach.

  Within two years, evidence of the success of this strategy would appear. On 23 April 1977 the West German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel carried an exclusive story: 'One of the most famous collections of amber in the world that belonged to Konigsberg University, considered to be lost in the last days of war, has been found in Gottingen University.' During a spring-clean at the geological department, staff at the West German university were said to have broken open two wooden boxes to find 1,1oo exceptionally fine pieces of amber. They bore handwritten labels in Gothic script: 'Institute of Palaeontology and Geology, Albertus-University, Konigsberg, East Prussia'. We recall that part of this collection had been found in Konigsberg by Soviet investigator Professor Alexander Brusov in 1945. At the time Brusov had advised Moscow that the best pieces of this collection had already been evacuated by Nazis from the city. Now they had turned up in West Germany, where it appeared that Gottingen University had been sitting on them for thirty-two years.34