The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  This report is bereft of any new evidence. It reveals how Kuchumov failed to explore the most obvious possibilities. Although he was at pains to describe the cavity where he found the stone mosaics as too small to house the amber panels, he did not even consider that the crates containing other sections of the Amber Room could have been stored elsewhere in the Knights' Hall (which was vast and still half empty by April 1945).

  Kuchumov made much of the fact that he could not find a single charred remnant of amber in the Knights' Hall, but in his analysis he ignored a fact he must, as an amber expert, have known: the melting point for amber (between 2oo°C and 38o°C) was far lower than that needed to incinerate the kind of stone used by Florentine carvers like Dzokki. If three stone and glass mosaics were reduced to a fine powder, including pieces of malachite that burns at L,O84°C and pieces of glass that burns at L,4OO°C, then there would have been nothing left of the amber panels themselves.

  Kuchumov highlighted his failure to find in the Knights' Hall other elements of the Amber Room (bronze candelabras, glass mirrors, glass and crystal pilasters). But he failed to consider that Soviet troops and trophy brigades had occupied the castle site for sixty-one days prior to Brusov's arrival in May 1945. The crime scene had never been secured. Almost a year passed before Kuchumov came to the Knights' Hall (in March 1946), plenty of time for the hall to have been swept clean of souvenirs of value by Soviet troops.

  Kuchumov would write in his 1948 propaganda articles that some soldiers had come forward with amber trophies, such as Misha Kulot, who admitted to carrying a nugget that he believed had come from the Amber Room all the way to Sakhalin Island and back again. And yet Kuchumov never mentioned the possibility that Soviet soldiers had looted as he drafted this report, one that is for us beginning to resemble a 'cheat sheet' in which the curator assembled the argument that the Amber Room had survived.

  Kuchumov assured Moscow that he had conducted a 'very scrupulous search'. But we now know that there was no more evidence. No great discoveries. Nothing. There were no additional technical data. The truth was that Kuchumov's investigation had been superficial and prejudiced.

  We can see nothing in this report that would have convinced Professor Brusov he was wrong. He must have been coerced into abandoning his findings by other means.

  We turn to the next page and find a collection of interrogation reports. Across the top Kuchumov wrote: 'Statements of citizens of Kaliningrad, collected by myself. 1946. Original papers in German'.

  The first interrogation was of Paul Feyerabend, the director of the Blutgericht restaurant, which occupied the cellars beneath the Knights' Hall. We already know that Kuchumov questioned Feyerabend on 2 April 1946, but here is a statement made by Feyerabend that we have never read before. The restaurant director told Kuchumov:

  At the beginning of April 1945 the packed Amber Room stood in the Knights' Hall. Several days later the city's resistance began. I was located in the cloakroom and the Knights' Hall and during the [Soviet] attack [of 7 April onwards] Alfred Rohde was nowhere to be seen. On the afternoon of 9 April... I was in the wine cellar with several servants. Later, with their agreement, I hung from the north wing of the castle a white flag as a sign of surrender.

  At 11.30 p.m. that night [9 April] a Russian colonel came. When I told him everything and gave statements, he ordered the evacuation of the castle. At 12.30 a.m. [LO April], when I left, my restaurant was occupied by artillery regiments of the Red Army. The cellar and Knights' Hall were not damaged at all. After I came back from Elbing, where I had been hospitalized, I heard from Alfred Rohde that the Knights' Hall and the restaurant [beneath it] had been burned down.

  This is extraordinary. According to Paul Feyerabend, the fire that incinerated the Knights' Hall had begun after the Red Army occupied Konigsberg Castle. The Amber Room was, according to Feyerabend, packed into crates in the hall when he surrendered to a Russian colonel. This can only mean one of two things: the Amber Room was removed by Soviet troops from the Knights' Hall after the German surrender or it was destroyed in a fire started by the Red Army.

  Kuchumov dismissed Paul Feyerabend as an unreliable witness who 'mixed up facts and dates'. He chose not to attach any importance to the restaurant director's statement. In fact he ignored it all together, making no mention of it in the reports to Moscow we have seen. The great curator was intent on providing only one view of history. Our view of him is changing.

  If Feyerabend was telling the truth, then Kuchumov knew as early as 1946 that the Amber Room had been stolen or burned by the Red Army. Yet he chose to promulgate a line that would lead to a search across the Soviet Union and Germany in pursuit of Nazi thieves and their hiding place.

  If Feyerabend had recalled correctly, then George Stein, the West German hobby-Historiker, had been remarkably close to the truth when he threatened to go public in 1975, accusing the Soviet and GDR government archives of sitting on data that would solve the mystery of the Amber Room.

  If Feyerabend was right, then so was Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, and it is more than likely that the Ministry of Defence archives in Podolsk contain documents that would corroborate the story that units of the Red Army or trophy brigades inadvertantly destroyed the Amber Room and stole any pieces that survived the fire.

  Tucked at the back of Kuchumov's report, 'Destiny of the Amber Room', are a few loose documents written on graph paper that take the story back to the beginning. The summer of 194 5.

  We have before us 'Extracts from report notes of Professor A. Brusov to Special Committee of Cultural and Educational Institutions. Note: It concerns the fate of the Amber Room, which was gifted to Peter I and located in the Tsarskoye Selo and moved by the Germans from there.'15

  We have previously seen only an extract from Professor Alexander Brusov's diary of his mission in 1945, sent to us from the Leninka, the Lenin Library in Moscow.

  This document might hold the key. In this report, Brusov wrote:

  I was lucky to learn the following. Packed into cases, the Amber Room was placed in the Knights' Hall of Konigsberg Castle beside another collection, the furniture of the Countess Keyserlingk. In the spring of 1945 ltwas decided to evacuate the Amber Room to Saxony (document attached) and for this reason Rohde visited Saxony...

  Brusov described how, after returning from Saxony, Alfred Rohde prepared the room for evacuation but then fell ill: 'For some weeks he did not appear in the museum, according to witness Paul Feyerabend, who ran the Blutgericht...' By the time Rohde had recovered, there were no train carriages available to take the room to Saxony, a story that Brusov verified with local people, who told him that the last chance to evacuate anything to central Germany by train had been at the end of January.

  Brusov reported: 'The same Paul Feyerabend was in the castle up until the capture and says the Amber Room was in cases at the moment of surrender and burned there later during a fire that destroyed the north wing of the edifice.' When Brusov inspected this area he found 'traces of fire, ash heaps and ash covering the entire floor' and also 'small pieces of burned wooden strips and parts of cases and some parts of mouldings and copper hinges from the doors, which were taken by Germans from the Tsarskoye Selo and moved to Konigsberg along with the Amber Room'.

  He drew a clear conclusion: 'Summarizing all the facts, we can say that the Amber Room was destroyed between 9 and 11 April 1945 since some officers of the Red Army who inspected the castle on 21 April could find no cases in the Knights' Hall.'

  Kuchumov had kept this crucial report that repeated Feyerabend's evidence and yet when Feyerabend told Kuchumov exactly the same story one year later, the curator chose to dismiss it.

  Kuchumov also transcribed, on this graph-paper addendum, extracts from Brusov's diary that extend beyond the entries we have read in the photocopies from the Lenin Library.

  On 25 June 1945 Brusov wrote: I can't get anything out of Alfred Rohde. He barely talks. I would like [the NKVD] to interrogate Rohde.

  I would like them to
talk to him seriously rather than treating him with kid gloves. I believe that Rohde will not say anything when you are nice to him as he is a committed fascist.'16 So when Kuchumov told Moscow in 1946 that 'the mistake of Professor Brusov was that he believed easily the words of Rohde... forgetting that he was dealing with a Nazi fanatic', he had already read this entry in Brusov's diary and knew his accusation to be false.

  In another extract, dated 2 July 1945, Brusov wrote:

  We asked General Pronin, commander of Konigsberg, for a car to collect the archive of Castle Wildenhoff. He refused, saying there was not enough petrol. But around us everyone is using cars. For want of twenty-five litres of petrol the archive is going to die. rst Moscow Division is using [Wildenhoff] Castle as barracks. Storerooms are never locked. What can I do? I must try and persuade the military to go to the archive, but I am not confident.

  Even in 1945 Professor Brusov was worried about the behaviour of the Red Army, believing that treasures were at risk.

  According to these extracts from Brusov's diary, he was not the only one concerned at the melee. On 8 July 1945 Brusov wrote: 'General Galitsky of the LLth Guards Army arrived and gathered a meeting of trophy brigades, treasure hunters and komandirovochnya [people on komandirovat trips] and in very rough speech called everyone "free-marketeers". Galitsky said: "I will not allow anything else to be taken from the city. I will cancel the guards in all the store places."'

  Trophy brigades and komandirovochnya, treasure hunters part-time and professional, exactly the scene in Konigsberg described by Colonel Avenir Ovsianov. Even General Galitsky had become concerned at the level of looting, threatening to throw all the thieves out of Konigsberg. The Soviets would have to stamp on the story.

  Brusov continued in his diary:

  We are still working in the castle. We have found very interesting Chinese, Meissen and Berlin porcelain and two marble busts given by Mussolini. What is going to happen to all these things? My mood is spoilt. Why should we continue working? Should I go back to Moscow?'

  This was a very different Konigsberg from that conjured by Kuchumov in his propaganda articles of 1948. Brusov's city was occupied by thieves and nothing in it was safe, as all of them were wearing the uniform of the Red Army. Kuchumov's Konigsberg was a crime-free zone where the Soviet troops struggled to piece together the shattered legacy of the tsars.

  Brusov's last diary entry was dated 13 July 1945. He wrote:

  I found four boxes with very good porcelain that fell down from the [castle's] third floor to the second. Lots of things were broken but forty pieces survived. I have packed them into five boxes for Moscow. I have stopped searching. Everything is packed into sixty boxes. I will give things to the archive where they have special security.

  We know from reading previous extracts from Brusov's diary that among the items in these crates were thousands of pieces from the Konigsberg Albertus-University amber collection. Brusov told Kuchumov that he had handed these sixty crates to a Red Army guard, and they had subsequently vanished. It was another incident that Comrade Krolevsky (a.k.a. Dmetriev) would distort in Kaliningradskaya Pravda in 1958, accusing 'Barsov' of the theft.

  Kuchumov kept something else we had never seen before, a 'fourteen-page defence', written by Brusov after Kaliningradskaya Pravda published its assault on him. Professor Brusov was incandescent: 'This story is portrayed in the most fantastic way. So many facts are distorted and of course as I appear in the story, thinly disguised as "Barsov", I am strongly against this rubbish.'17 Brusov repeated his concerns about indiscriminate Red Army looting and added that, far from not thoroughly investigating the bunker on Steindamm Strasse (which Kuchumov would develop into his major theory of the 1960S and 1970S), he had visited it in 1945 and discovered that 'Some people had got there before me and taken all the important things.'

  The 'people' were undoubtedly Soviet troops or trophy brigades and their reports are probably in the closed section of the Podolsk archive.

  Kuchumov wrapped distorted evidence around his theory of 1946 to make it fly. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 and wrote stories about the Red Army that he knew not to be true. He rail-roaded Brusov in 1949, forcing him to recant, and was closely connected with the Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles of 19 5 8 that destroyed Brusov's character and conclusions. Kuchumov steered all subsequent Amber Room searches to follow his reasoning. In the early 1970S, he forged a conspiratorial relationship with the KGB, reporting to it far more intimately than he did to his colleagues in Kaliningrad. While Brusov sank, it was Kuchumov who would be embraced by the Motherland, feted by Gorbachev with the Lenin Prize. And then of course there were the regrets of an old man, the embarrassment and shame hinted at in his book, The Amber Room.

  Anatoly Kuchumov had lied. His die was cast on 30 June 1941 when seventeen train carriages pulled out of Leningrad bound for a secret location in Siberia without the panels from the Amber Room. At this moment the life of the inexperienced curator, who had concealed the Soviet's unique treasure rather than evacuate it, changed for ever. We know from his book that Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov was haunted by his decision, realizing that, had the panels from the Amber Room been evacuated to Siberia, they would have been returned to Leningrad in 1944, with all the other saved treasures, and reinstalled in the Catherine Palace when it was restored.

  By the time Kuchumov was sent to reinvestigate the fate of the Amber Room in March 1946, he had good reason to be worried about his error of judgement. The literature archive files show that Kuchumov was monitoring the fate of a colleague, Ivan Mikryukov, the former director of Pavlovsk Palace, who had been exiled to Kazakhstan, accused of having packed his palace treasures too early and being 'defeatist'. It would soon be well publicized in the Soviet Union that a team of Nazis had taken only thirty-six hours to dismantle and carry off the Amber Room. Working in a climate of spiteful recriminations, Kuchumov must have felt extremely vulnerable.

  He had no choice other than to dedicate the rest of his career to bringing back to life that which he had lost, spending thirty-nine years looking for it and forty-eight years writing about it in a book that concluded with the words 'the Amber Room did not die'. It could not have been 'deliberately destroyed'.

  But the reason why the Soviet authorities were so ready to dismiss Brusov's conclusions of 194 5 in favour of Kuchumov's ramshackle theory of 194 6 is less obvious and has to be prised from the history of the Cold War.

  We know that in April 1945 the US Army broke its agreement with the Soviet Union, stalking into the Soviet Zone of Germany to take the Reichsbank gold and priceless caches of German art. But we also read in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington and in war-time papers kept at the Public Records Office in London that when Berlin fell in May 1945, Allied intelligence immediately began picking up reports that the Soviets were plundering the British, French and US sectors in retribution.

  By 18 October 1945, when the International Military Tribunal opened at Nuremberg, emotions were running high. A favourite story doing the rounds among British and American prosecutors was that the Soviet Union only erected fences around its military camps to give the animals in the woods some peace. The Soviets countered with a saying of their own (reminding all that it was the USA that had first broken international compensation agreements by seizing the Nazi gold): 'While we were taking the Reichstag,' the Soviet slogan went, 'who was taking the Reichsbank?'18

  However, soon there were so many priceless things missing from German collections in regions swarmed over by the Red Army that allegations of wanton behaviour by Soviet trophy brigades and regular troops would not go away. Where was the 'Pergamum Altar', American journalists asked, referring to the ancient Hellenistic altar of Zeus that had been on display in Berlin until it was evacuated to an anti-aircraft tower in the capital? Where was the 'Trojan Gold', excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and bequeathed in 1881 to the Pre and Early History Museum in Berlin as 'a gift to the German people for
ever to be shown in the German capital'.19 It was last seen on i May 1945 in three crates that were also stored in a Berlin anti-aircraft tower. Where was the Bremen Kunsthalle collection? The L,715 drawings, 3,000 prints and fifty paintings by Diirer, Goya, Titian, Rembrandt and Cezanne had been evacuated to Karnzow Castle, a country estate north of Berlin. And the list went on and on: a Gutenberg Bible (one of only forty still in existence); the stained glass from St Mary's Church in Frankfurt an der Oder; the entire Dresden State Art Collections (including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, as well as Raphael's Sistine Madonna). The Red Army was implicated in all of these disappearances.

  In 1946 Dr Hermann Voss, director of the Dresden State Art Collections, had told American interrogators, preparing evidence for Nuremberg: 'Immediately the Russians occupied Dresden, a commission called the Trophy Organization [sic] appeared to make a choice of the best works of art belonging to the Saxon state... Almost all... were selected by the Russians and disappeared.'

  The Soviets denied any responsibility but, to assure the Allies, Stalin ordered an investigation into the behaviour of his trophy brigades, appointing Alexander Porivayev, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as inquiry chairman.20

  In February 1946 the USSR opened its case at Nuremberg, calling to the stand Joseph Orbeli, then director of the State Hermitage museum in Leningrad, who drew the world's attention to German looting and the destruction of Leningrad's cultural trophies as acts that encompassed all Soviet suffering. Orbeli talked of 'intentional wrecking', the burning down of great halls, the stealing of parquet floors, priceless treasures ripped from the walls. These palaces were not military installations, Orbeli said. They were ambassadors of Russian culture that spoke on behalf of the Motherland. They should have been accorded the privileges due to them under international law.