The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  However, even this lowly offer of a scientific exchange failed to materialize. More than a year later, Seufert wrote that Enke was still waiting for his invitation. All that had been received from Professor Bojarsky (and therefore from the USSR) over the past twelve months was 'noncommittal cards with good wishes on the occasion of certain [public] holidays, without any obligation'.50

  But still the Stasi would not give up. Preserved in Generalmajor Neiber's files in the Ministry of Truth is a series of letters that reveal that while the deputy minister was 'rejected' by Moscow, Paul Enke (now retired on medical grounds) kept relations between the GDR and the USSR going by establishing a back-channel with Julian Semyonov. Most of their discussions concerned the ongoing work of George Stein.

  April [day blacked out] 1984. My dear Julian, There have been no sensational developments about the Amber Room but I am sure you have seen the article published by Stein in the periodical Die Zeit. It contained a lot of nonsense. Stein seems to be becoming dangerous, due to his unrealistic trains of thought with the resulting self-deception, to which he seems to fall prey. If he continues as he proceeds at the moment he will certainly become a case for treatment.51

  A search through Die Zeit's archive shows that in 1984 George Stein had revived his discredited Volpriehausen theory (that the Amber Room had been evacuated to a pit near the West German city of Gottingen). That year Stein also made new approaches for funding to West Germany's conservative coalition of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It declined but, aware of how previous governments had been portrayed as unrehabilitated nationalists, the coalition issued a holding statement: 'For some time the Federal Government has made efforts to clarify the whereabouts of the lost Amber Room [and] will continue her efforts to find it.'52

  Enke's letter to Semyonov continued:

  After an interruption of several months we are working again on the opening of an old mine for which there are indications that it might have been selected in 1944-5 as a depository for works of art. At the request of my comrades we have now decided to publish the provisional results of our researches. It will turn out to become two publications around which I currently negotiate with publishers. Due to the shortage of paper the print run may be too low. I embrace you and send you the warmest fraternal regards and messages of congratulations on the anniversary of the victory over Hitler's fascism.

  The Ministry of Truth files confirmed that in 1984 Seufert's 'Operation Puschkin' team was targeting a new site at Langenstein, a village in the foothills of Brocken Mountain, an area riddled with lead, copper and zinc reserves.53 It was miles away from the Erzgebirge and Enke's previous hypothesis and the dig site was surely symbolic, located near a high-security Soviet military base and a Stasi electronic eavesdropping station that overlooked the West German border. The Stasi would be seen digging by Russians and West Germans. We are pulled up short by the language Enke uses. 'We are working'. 'Our researches'. In fact Enke was at home with his incomplete manuscript, fighting to save Bernsteinzimmer Report from budget cuts. It must have been now that Enke called up Giinter Wermusch at Die Wirtschaft publishing house.

  Another letter from Paul Enke.

  15 May 1984. My dear Julian, I have heard that you have returned from South America to your native country. I do hope the large tour has been a success. Your readers and I myself will obviously be especially interested if you manage to trace the tracks of Martin Bormann. Following the forged Hitler Diaries, Der Stern of Hamburg has warmed up the legend that surmises that Martin Bormann could still be alive. Since Bormann was so obviously involved in the concealment of the Amber Room, the story would certainly create interest. I have just looked again at the correspondence between Martin Bormann and his wife. Extremely meaningful for the study of the psyche of this criminal. An author with whom I have become friendly claims to have located Gerda Bormann in Italy and to have spoken personally with her. He swore by all the saints in the calendar that this woman was really and truly Bormann's wife. You know my attitude to such 'sensations'. Comments are superfluous.54

  Another month, another letter to Julian Semyonov and another conspiracy for Enke, who clearly yearned for the respect of his brother writer. His own problems, over forgeries and the 'Rudi Ringel' debacle, seemed to have been forgotten.

  Enke continued:

  Last month George Stein called at the State Archives Administration in Potsdam. He also tried to make contact with P. Kohler. But Kohler had been at the time on an extended journey to Cuba. I therefore had to represent Kohler and look after Stein... discussions that lasted four days. He informed us extensively about his work and about the clues he has been following, whereby I am afraid, regarding the Amber Room, the tracks followed were more in the realm of wishful thinking than in the region of reality. In spite of all this, it is still regrettable that although in this way a so-called German-Russian dialogue and exchange of experiences on the subject of the Amber Room has materialized it is, however, only in Berlin instead of in Moscow.

  In creating his persona of a senior researcher at the Ministry of the Interior archives, Stasi officer Enke had borrowed the identity of a real employee, a man George Stein thought he had telephoned and even quoted in his articles, without realizing that he was actually dealing with a Stasi agent. Now Stein had arrived to meet Kohler in person and, with the real archivist on leave, Enke was brought out of retirement to maintain the deception. Enke obviously felt comfortable enough in his relationship with Semyonov to bemoan the state of play that had reduced the Stasi and KGB dialogue on the Amber Room to a circuitous correspondence, with Stein acting as witless intermediary.

  'Translation from the Russian. Dear Paul' - an undated letter from Julian Semyonov to Paul Enke:

  I was happy to receive a letter from you, many thanks. Following my Latin American impressions - I had been from January to April in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua - I have in spite of everything arrived at the full conviction that Bormann had been alive here. Especially since they mentioned to me the day of his death in Asuncion. He died seven years ago from [line blacked out]. He was too old (he did not deserve to live that long). The matter of George Stein is more complicated: his wife had died and this had affected him very much and then somebody - this has been my feeling - had begun to work against us, to try and influence him subtly against us, because he knew too much about the Nazis - this is very rare in the West. I am not going to write anything about this in the letter, better when we have a chance to meet face-to-face. I embrace you [name blacked out]. Kindest regards to all the buddies, comrades and friends, until we meet again, Julian Semyonov.55

  What had led Semyonov to write in such a conspiratorial tone? We search newspaper archives in Hamburg and discover something shocking. Two years before this letter was sent, George Stein had reported to the police that on Good Friday he had been attacked by masked men who had stormed his house in Stelle, drugged him, tortured him and interrogated him about the Amber Room. Stein woke up later covered in blood and found a sheet of paper lying beside him on the floor with a strange motto in Latin scrawled upon it: 'If your disgraced servant is White, then Christ should spray his blood. If he is Red, Christ should extinguish him. If he is Black, Christ should let him die.'56 Another newspaper report revealed that, in the following summer, Elisabeth Stein was found hanged in the cellar of the family home. Semyonov claimed that Stein 'knew too much' and that 'somebody had begun to work against us', and yet while he suggested that Stein's injuries and his wife's death were somehow connected to the Amber Room search, he didn't want to write down who was responsible, possibly fearing that the letter would be intercepted.

  We had taken lightly the Kaliningradskaya Pravda claim that Alfred Rohde had been murdered to stop him revealing the location of the Amber Room. In the 1960S it was revealed that his children, Lotti and Wolfgang, had in fact survived the war and were living in West Germany. Yet Semyonov was hinting at another possible murder. Was someone so desperate to keep the location of the
Amber Room a secret that they were willing to kill? We read on and see that the last letter to Julian Semyonov was from an entirely different correspondent in the West. We have no idea how it ended up in the Stasi files.

  8 December 1984. My dear Julian, I have not heard from you for some time. I do hope your health has improved. Good health is the most important thing in life... Amber Room: I am often corresponding and telephoning Stein. He really has no more money to carry on with his research trips and I am the only one who supports him financially. The sums I have lent him are already considerable. I do hope the two of us achieve positive results soon otherwise it would be a great pity for the pair of us to have made such a big effort. I wish you and your family a Happy New Year. Please tell your cousin Serge, I will bring his stomach pills with me when I visit in the spring (I have just received his order through TASS). Eduard.57

  The letterhead is embossed with a crest: two horses rearing above a name and address, Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, Villa Askania Nova, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. We have never heard of him, but for someone who clearly knew Stein intimately we are surprised that he makes no reference in this letter to Elisabeth Stein's recent death or to the attack on Stein himself. We are also surprised to see that George Stein must have been receiving two wage cheques for his Amber Room investigation from opposite ends of the political spectrum, one from the Stasi and another from a baron whose villa was named after a region in the southern Ukraine, making it possible that he was a White Russian exile. Maybe Stein was playing one off against the other and someone had had enough. Maybe this was the reason Stein was tortured and his wife found hanged.

  There is one document left in our Ministry of Truth file, a KGB communique to the Stasi Secretariat. It abruptly states:

  We... wish to let you know that according to a statement received from the authorized department at Section 5 of our Establishment, the search for the Amber Room has been discontinued on the territory of the Soviet Union... This decision was taken according to a resolution by the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic], adopted in October 1983. All the Organizations and Authorities which took part in the measures and searches will no longer occupy themselves with these tasks.58

  Barely a year after George Stein was brutally assaulted and just months after Elisabeth Stein was found hanged, the Council of Ministers, the highest executive body in the Russian Federation, ordered the end of all searches for the Amber Room, bringing to a close thirty-seven years of secret investigations in a single paragraph. But for some reason they had failed to tell the Stasi for over two years, since this KGB communique was dated 15 April 1986.

  11

  The Hamburg phone book brims with 'Stein's. But there are none with the initial 'G' listed as living in the village of Stelle. Maybe the family fled the tragic house in whose cellars Elisabeth Stein was found hanged and in whose living room George Stein was drugged and tortured by men apparently seeking or protecting the Amber Room.

  There is nothing to do but ring them all.

  Do you know George Stein, we ask repeatedly. One male voice eventually answers 'Who's this?' At least he hasn't hung up. We are calling in connection with the Amber Room. Das Bernsteinzimmer. 'My father can't speak to you,' the man replies.

  His father? Have we reached the right number for George Stein? 'Well, I - 1 suppose so. I - 1 - 1 am his son. I better see you. Not at the house, it is impossible. I - I will meet you outside Hamburg station tomorrow night. I sell strawberries in the day. My name? I am Robert, Robert Stein,' the man stammers in broken English, before replacing the handset.

  George Stein's son had volunteered no description of himself and the next evening thousands of commuters mill around the Hamburg terminus. But at 8.10 p.m., as a stream of roller-bladers swoosh past, a lopsided man with wild hair and a beard, his black jeans held up by leather braces, wades through their midst, sending them flying, his eyes zeroing in on the copy of Bernsteinzimmer Report we hold in our hands.

  'Ja, ja, Robert Stein. Sorry, I - I missed the train,' he mumbles. We sit at a station cafe and he looks over his shoulder before talking. 'Das Bernsteinzimmer broke our family. My mother said to my father, "You're a fruit farmer." Four children and 4,000 bushes. But our father ignored us and now I work on another man's farm. People say I - 1 am like him, that I am crazy. No, it is not true. I am finished with das Bernsteinzimmer story. I - I do not want to be a lost-treasure artist. I sell strawberries. Police came to the house in Stelle and took away thousands of pages from my father's archive. They said he had stolen them. "Good, I said. Take it all away."'

  Had the authorities come to the house as a result of Elisabeth Stein's death, we ask? Had the family sold the house in Stelle soon after? I will never go back to Stelle. There is too much there to remind me of what happened,' he says distractedly.

  What happened, we ask, trying to settle him down? Robert Stein's eyes are fearful: 'People came to the house. I - 1 don't know names. All the time my father, he goes away. I don't see him.' He is staring mournfully at his empty beer glass. 'The Baron, he finds people who say they know where is das Bernsteinzimmer. He asks my father to run all over Germany. My father spends all our money. He sells our bushes, he sells our land, he sells our farm, our home.'

  Is he talking about Baron Falz-Fein, the man who wrote to Soviet crime writer Julian Semyonov about George Stein and the Amber Room in December 1984, we ask? I cannot talk about the Baron, you must ask him yourself.' So the Baron is still alive. Robert Stein starts rambling again. 'My father was always afraid. I don't know of what, but it started in Konigsberg in the Second World War.' He curls strands of hair around his fingers, singeing the ends with a roll-up cigarette. 'He broke my mother's heart. She murdered herself. Too much blood.'

  Desperate for precision, we ask directly if Robert Stein's mother killed herself. Was her death connected to the Amber Room? 'Of course my mother's death was connected to das Bernsteinzimmer. To my father's search for it,' he says. 'Everything comes back to the das Bernsteinzimmer. Three days before my father was in blood, a man came to the house. I rang this man later and he denied having been there. Why? I learned from many people that my father had been in touch with Paul Enke. You may have heard of this man from the Stasi. My father went to see him in the GDR. He was on his way to see him again in E987.'

  What does Robert mean his 'father was in blood'? Is George Stein dead? Does Robert believe that the Stasi killed his father? Robert produces from his jeans pocket a used white envelope that might have once contained a bank statement. I have learned to say, "It's enough."' He smooths the envelope on the table.

  Without saying another word Robert Stein stands up and walks off, leaving the envelope. We see he has drawn on it rows of crosses with the letters RIP written beneath each one. Across one corner he has scribbled: 'Deceit. Lies. Fear.'

  Robert Stein does not want to answer any of our questions or is incapable of doing so. We have no idea why he agreed to meet us. All we can see is that he is haunted by the Amber Room and the catastrophic effect it has had on his family. Faint and distorted, flickering like a light bulb about to pop, Robert Stein is overshadowed by whatever happened to his parents.

  There is a Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein listed with international directories at Villa Askania Nova, Liechtenstein. Before calling the number we check the Ministry of Truth files to see if the Stasi was interested in him too.

  It was. We find a report from 1987 to Stasi deputy minister Neiber.1 Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein was obviously a significant player. Here he was described by a Stasi watcher as 'a descendant of Tsar Nicolas II, a cousin of Vladimir Nabokov, and last in line to a boyar title from Askania Nova, in the southern Ukraine'. The report stated:

  Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein uses his entire influence to return looted Russian works of art to the Soviet Union... It is known that he maintains contacts up to the highest Soviet leadership. For instance, he travelled with Comrade Gorbachev on his trip through the Baltic Soviet Republ
ics in the spring of this year [1987]. [Falz-Fein] spoke on Soviet television and he took part in discussions lasting several hours with the Soviet Minister of Culture about the search for stolen works of art.

  So this would explain his connection with the Amber Room. We call. 'My dears, who did you say you were?' asks a reedy voice. Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein says he is busy packing his travelling wardrobe. 'I'm sorry, dears, but I have a very important tea appointment with Prime Minister Yushchenko in Kiev on Thursday. Yush-chen-ko. That's it.'

  Can we talk about George Stein, we ask? 'Oh.' The line goes quiet. 'George Stein.' A lengthy pause. 'That was a long time ago. If you can make it down here tomorrow, then I'll see if I can squeeze you in. But I have a young lady to escort to Switzerland at i p.m., so I won't be back until L.30 p.m.' He lives in a small world, a principality of sixty-two square miles squeezed between Switzerland and Austria. 'Have your lunch before you come, dears. I'm a simple bachelor of ninety-one years old and I don't entertain. You'll find my little place up Schloss Strasse, the last house before the castle. Look for the name, Askania Nova, my beloved birthplace.'

  In Vaduz, Liechtenstein's capital, where the air is filled with a rich scent of warm milk and the gentle thrum of cash machines, we find the Baron's white stucco villa wrapped in wisteria, overlooked by that of his next-door neighbour, Crown Prince Hans-Adam II, ruler of the tax haven.