The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  We read in the Ministry of Truth files that within days of the funeral the Stasi approached Giinter Wermusch: 'After the unexpected death of Comrade Enke it became essential to find a person suitable to continue his work who would at the same time be acceptable to the public. Comrade Wermusch, who identifies himself totally with this task, has been persuaded by Seufert to accept the job.'11 So Wermusch was more than just an editor and had gone on to run part of the Amber Room inquiry.

  His first job was to process and reply to all Bernsteinzimmer Report correspondents, aided by 'Bernd', a.k.a. Uwe Geissler, the Stasi informer we had met in 'Goat's Throat Village'. So this was how they knew each other. We recall that Wermusch had told us that he had travelled the GDR with Geissler after Enke's death, but he had not said it was on Stasi business (although nothing in the files indicate that Wermusch was a paid employee of the ministry).

  Seven months after Enke's death, someone else we know well contacted Wermusch. We found this letter in the Ministry of Truth files. 'Villa Askania Nova, Schloss Strasse, Vaduz.' Baron von Falz-Fein.

  18 July 1988, Dear Mr Wermusch! My German secretary is on holiday and I am thinking in French and Russian. I do hope that my [German] lines are comprehensible to you. George Stein: I do not know whether you are aware of my close cooperation with Stein. We were introduced ten years ago by Julian Semyonov in Bonn. As a five-year-old I saw the Amber Room and I was enthusiastic about its splendour. As a Russian I set myself an aim to help both of them wherever I could. I am sure you are aware that I spent a lot of money on Stein's trips and researches.

  The same old story the Baron told us. Everyone connected to the Amber Room was regrouping and the Baron continued:

  Archive Stein: I used to help Stein's children bridge the economic emergency they found themselves in and that is why I received [Stein's archive] after his death. It is now in the Sovetskaya Kulturnaya Obschestvo [Soviet Culture Fund]. The last information I have received was that the people engaged in translation have found many positive and interesting matters relevant to their researches. Paul Enke: a huge loss for us researchers. Julian Semyonov has given up on our work and taken off to Yalta.

  In the absence of Enke, Semyonov or Stein, the Baron had a proposal:

  International Commission. Such weekend hobby enthusiasts as we are, without experts like Stein and Enke, we cannot be totally successful. Official help is required otherwise the case is finished. My dear Mr Wermusch, as a Russian I thank you for the great help you have accorded to Mr Enke and that you as a German wish to restitute that which your countrymen destroyed and that brought shame on your culture. Your hobby collaborator, Eduard.12

  The Stasi barely had time to consider the Baron's proposal, as two weeks later its attention was drawn elsewhere. News arrived that the Soviets had begun digging for the Amber Room again, in Kaliningrad, even though they had told the Stasi two years before that they had given up the search. 'The Scent Leads to Ponarth,' declared Izvestiya.13 Vlad Lapsky, its Berlin correspondent, wrote: 'Another version of a hiding place of the Amber Room emerges. There will be confirmation of this new scenario soon.' Then a report from TASS, dated 2 August 1988, read: 'Amber Room found in Kaliningrad?' And twelve days later Aktiillen Kamera (the GDR state TV news programme) reported: 19.30 hours.

  14 August 1988. Kaliningrad. Population 400,000. City on the Soviet Baltic coast. An unusual search started this weekend here at the [Ponarth] brewery, which took us back to the last months of the war. A group of experts, students and workers, led by operation director Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, are hoping to find the world-famous Amber Room.'14 By the second week of August 1988 there was so much publicity surrounding this new Soviet dig that Erich Mielke, the Minster for State Security, felt compelled to write to Viktor Chebrikov, the chairman of the KGB:

  Dear Comrade Tschebrikow! The TASS report about the location of the Amber Room has finally brought about my writing of this letter. The alleged facts of the case emanated from a female citizen of the GDR. You are aware that the GDR and especially the [Stasi] have been pursuing the traces of the Amber Room since 1945 in order to return this work of art to its legal owner, the Soviet Union.

  These activities reveal our continued interest in the fate of this work of art. I would therefore be grateful to you if you could let me know the results of your search in Kaliningrad. In the event that you have achieved success, we would call off our searches.15

  Translation: the trials and tribulations of the Amber Room were as much a part of the GDR as they were of the USSR. But the most feared man in the GDR, someone who had risen to power by forging the closest possible ties with Moscow, suspected that he was so far out of the Soviet loop that even if the Amber Room was found, he might learn of it only from the newspapers.

  While he was on the subject, there were other matters of concern. Mielke continued:

  I also believe it could serve our joint purpose if we could have sight of the archive accumulated by the FRG citizen and hobby-Historiker George Stein, which has been passed to the Soviet Culture Fund. The same also applies to certain fascist files that are held in Soviet archives. It could prove useful if an exchange of information between the experts in the search after missing works of art could be set up.

  I wish to ensure you the GDR and her MfS will not rest or relax in their search for the whereabouts of the Amber Room and other treasures of world culture.

  Erich Mielke promised to give the Soviets his all, even though he surely now realized there was only one possibility, that all the German versions of the Amber Room story were spent and the answers if there were any, lay with the Soviets, who were not going to share their findings with anyone.

  There are no more files in the Ministry of Truth for us to decrypt and it is as we feared. Mielke must have felt trapped by the Amber Room saga, or at the very least misled by Moscow. Perhaps the Soviets were using their German comrades to distract attention from the one direction in which answers lay.

  We too feel that the German version was a snare, serving to bog us down and distract us from the real work in Russia.

  12

  The cherry-lipped Pulkova Airlines stewardess has had years of experience shuttling passengers from St Petersburg to Kaliningrad, and before the Tupolev takes off she emerges from the galley with a tray laden with vodka and beer.

  'A can for you, sir.' 'A shot for you.' Eight fishermen on their way back to a fleet of rusting hulks that plunder the cod banks of the Baltic rise like a swell in the rows behind us. The sour stench of Baltika beer fills the cabin.

  Through the fatigued plastic portholes we watch a snowstorm whip us along the runway. It is early March 2003, ten months after our last trip to Russia, and we are heading towards the source of the mystery of the Amber Room: the former East Prussian city of Konigsberg, which fell to the Red Army on 9 April 1945.

  Professor Alexander Brusov went there in May 1945, only to conclude that the Amber Room had been destroyed. Anatoly Kuchumov and his friend Stanislav Tronchinsky followed in March 1946 and argued that Brusov was mistaken. Kuchumov returned in December 1949 to interrogate Dr Gerhard Strauss, who claimed to know where the Amber Room was but then forgot. A decade later it was the local newspaper, Kaliningradskaya Pravda, which broke the story that the Amber Room had been concealed in a secret bunker and was being hunted for, setting Europe abuzz with excitement about lost treasure. Within weeks GDR citizen 'Rudi Ringel' had emerged and was brought to Kaliningrad to be interrogated by Anatoly Kuchumov as the Soviets struggled to locate SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel's' hiding place, codenamed BSCH.

  After 1959 an untold number of secret Soviet investigations dug for the Amber Room in the province, but their findings were never published. If it is true what they say about Kaliningrad, that tens of thousands of Soviet citizens were brought here by force after the war and none of them ever left, then some of those involved in these investigations should still be around.

  Once airborne, the fishermen all light up cigarettes and pound the
backs of our seats as they regale one another with holiday tales of losing their hearts to girls on the Gulf of Finland. 'No-smoking flight,' the stewardess barks across the PA. Half a dozen figures stagger off to the toilet cubicle.

  By the time we descend into Kaliningrad International Airport, the beer and vodka have gone and the fishermen are agitated. As the Tupolev makes its final approach, one of them picks up his kitbag and staggers down the aisle. When the plane touches down and the engines flick into reverse thrust, he collides with the galley. A loud cheer resounds as the stewardess steps over his prone body to open the cabin door.

  A wrought-iron hammer and sickle spins like a weather vane on top of a hangar containing a single metal desk. Although opened up to the world in 199 L, hardly anybody visits Kaliningrad. The immigration officer lazily stamps our paperwork and we emerge into the forecourt to face a wall of leather-coated taxi drivers.

  We pick the man whose car seats are covered with fake Siberian tiger fur. 'It was a shock when I first arrived too,' Valery, the taxi driver says, grinning at us in the rear-view mirror. 'Got sent here from Minsk in the 1960S. It was like a lottery. And I lost. I had to leave everything behind for our new frontier.'

  News footage from after the war showed garlanded Soviet farmers and their families jiggling into the new Kaliningrad on party-issue tractors. And then the province sealed itself off from the outside world: the ancient amber pits of Palmnicken becoming the Yantarny Mining Combine No. 9, while the Teutonic town of Pillau was levelled to become Baltiysk, new home to the Baltic Fleet. Hundreds of thousands of troops converged on Kaliningrad to transform it into one of the Soviet Union's most secure military bases. Only party officials would come and go, holidaying in exclusive spas that popped up along the seashore.

  'Now everyone is trying to leave,' Valery murmurs. Disconnected from Moscow by 1,000 miles, the amber capital of the world is plagued by poverty and a trigger-happy mafia, and is best known as Europe's epicentre of gun-running, drugs and AIDS.

  We bump along a raised road to where the city begins and the potholes open up, patches of cobble poking through the meagre Soviet crust of asphalt. East Prussia refuses to die. Old photographs show Konigsberg as a bustling medieval town hunched over canals and rivers, dominated by God and the rule of law, the forbidding cathedral and the dark turrets of the castle.

  Now the signs of Kaliningrad's Teutonic antecedence are more subtle: the battered iron tramlines, the manhole cover embossed with a Prussian eagle, the avenues of linden trees, antiques shops stuffed with white crockery stamped with a crimson swastika and the logo of the Blutgericht, the Nazi's Blood Court restaurant, which once occupied the cellars of Konigsberg Castle.

  Pre-war Konigsberg

  The 'Monster'

  Where Leninsky Prospekt (the road once called Steindamm Strasse) merges with Ulitsa Shevchenko, Valery the driver points to a giant concrete tower-block, the windows of which have all been blown out. It is a building so eye-blindingly hideous that it provides the dour residents of Kaliningrad with a moment of levity every time they sit here in the traffic and contemplate it. 'Monster,' Valery declares, telling us how the city council spent years building it upon the ruins of Konigsberg Castle without having surveyed the flooded cellars, into which their 'Monster' immediately began to sink. It was on this junction that Kuchumov and Tronchinsky must have posed for one of their photographs taken in 1946, trouser bottoms stuffed into socks, a pork-pie hat and a black beret.

  We have an appointment with the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, an organization whose name suggests that it can tell us something about the state investigations into missing art works. We pull up outside a pebbledash 193os-style villa. We ring and hear a scraping as a key is inserted in a lock. We follow a silent woman upstairs.

  'The Colonel isn't here,' she announces, as we enter a darkened office, lined with maps and locked cupboards. 'But he knows you have arrived.'

  Who is she talking about, we ask?

  'Colonel Avenir Ovsianov. He runs the centre. He'll be back tomorrow.'

  The last time we had seen Colonel Ovsianov's name was in a news report from August 1988 that revealed he was heading a dig in the suburbs of Kaliningrad city for the Amber Room (the same report that drove Erich Mielke to write in haste to the chairman of the KGB).

  At the Kaliningrad Hotel a receptionist offers us a view for a few dollars extra. We reach the third-floor room and pull back the curtains to see an expanse of concrete and, rising from it, the 'Monster'.

  We close the curtains. We were in St Petersburg's airport just long enough to catch up with Our Friend the Professor. She thrust a large envelope into our hands as she waved us off. All the papers come from the literature archive and concern Kaliningrad, she said. Our reader's tickets have expired but she has gutted the Kuchumov files and will post on the rest of the documents when she has translated them.

  We open a file. The first page is stamped 'For Official Use Only'. In the top left-hand corner is written: 'Approval of the chairman of the Committee on Searching for Museum Treasures, Deputy Minister of Culture for the Russian Federation, Comrade Vasily Mikhailovich Striganov, 1969.'1

  As with all the papers from the Kuchumov archive, the readers' slip confirms that we are the first to study this file and we expectantly turn the page. Here is the material that the Stasi was never permitted to see, a table of Soviet officials who searched for the Amber Room in Kaliningrad from December 1949 to January 1984. It is also material that previous Amber Room researchers have been prevented from reading, since the original copies of all documentation connected with Kaliningrad search committees remain classified in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow.2

  Vasily Striganov's report fills twenty pages. It lists search sites covering the entire province, teams sponsored by almost every organ of the Soviet state, a secret exercise in discovery that was extensive and frenetic (churches surveyed, thirty-five; former Nazi offices visited, forty-seven; major excavations conducted, sixteen).

  Striganov's report confirms what the Stasi long suspected: that the Anatoly Kuchumov-Gerhard Strauss mission of December 1949 was the beginning of intensive Soviet investigations in Kaliningrad, not the end.

  Even while Kuchumov was interrogating Gerhard Strauss in the freezing Hotel Moscow about the location of the Amber Room, a powerful provincial search committee was already being formed. It was led by Comrade Veniamin Krolevsky, the Secretary of Kaliningrad ObKom (the oblast or provincial committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and slotted between the technical experts were agents of the security apparatus including the provincial KGB chairman and the director of Kaliningrad UVD, its Department of Internal Affairs or security police.

  While it was standard practice for intelligence agents to be attached to every civil organization, office, factory and college, the fact that such high-ranking officials sat on Krolevsky's committee suggested that its work was being closely observed.

  We see that against Comrade Krolevsky's name Kuchumov has written in pencil 'a.k.a. Vladimir Dmetriev'. This is a vitally important piece of information.3 We immediately recall the July 1958 Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles written by Vladimir Dmetriev of July 1958, in which he claimed: I was really involved and excited. I had never done anything so interesting before. We reported every day to ObKom our measurements of the castle and during the evening analysed results, as if it was a difficult crossword... This was vital work...'

  We could find no record of a journalist called Vladimir Dmetriev and had assumed (incorrectly) it was a pseudonym for Anatoly Kuchumov. But here we see that Vladimir Dmetriev was a nom de plume for the Secretary of the Kaliningrad Communist Party, one of the most powerful men in the province, Veniamin Krolevsky. This means that the articles Kaliningradskaya Pravda published and Freie Welt regurgitated had emanated from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This puts the claims made in them in a different light.

  It was the party, then, th
at had revealed that the Amber Room had survived and was being secretly hunted for. It was the party that publicly humiliated and defamed Professor Alexander Brusov, who, the Party claimed, had incorrectly concluded that the Amber Room had been destroyed. And it was the party that decided to keep Kuchumov's name out of print, shielding his role in the Amber Room investigation for some reason.

  It is beginning to look as if Brusov was sacrificed for some greater purpose. So eager was the party to keep the Amber Room alive, while punishing the man who had killed it off, that it begins to feel as if the Soviet authorities were covering something up.

  Striganov's report continued. It revealed that on 9 September 1959 Party Secretary Krolevsky's committee was subsumed by another, more powerful one led by his superior, Comrade G. I. Harkov, the vice-director of OballsPolKom (the Kaliningrad Executive Committee of the People's Deputies).

  Harkov enlisted a twelve-man team, pooled from practically every Soviet security, party and defence organization: the vice-director of the Cultural Department, two vice-directors of the Kaliningrad Department of Internal Affairs [UVD], a vice-commander of the Baltic Fleet DKBF (building committee) and the provincial KGB deputy. A column marked 'Findings' stated: 'No archive documents available.' Perhaps they had found nothing and wanted no one to know, or perhaps they had found something that they wished to keep a secret.

  On 11 March 1967 Comrade Harkov's search was also taken over. An executive directive issued by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation, the highest executive body of state, ordered a new search team be formed.4 We have before us the minutes of its first meeting, on 25 March 1967: