by Adrian Levy
When Stein was admitted to hospital for the first time in 1987, having been found in a wood outside Hamburg with stab wounds, it was on Good Friday. When he was discovered three months later, bleeding in woods outside Starnberg, his injuries were similar. And when his corpse was recovered on 20 August 1987 from a clearing in Titting Wald, the wounds from which George Stein bled to death were in the same position on his abdomen. They were all masochistic mutilations.
Stein was compulsive, convincing and manipulative. Brilliant at first, he located the missing Pskov icons. Then he became careless and clumsy. Even Stasi agent Paul Enke warned of Stein's unreliability, his propensity to tamper with Nazi documents. One of the many doctors who treated Stein realized these qualities too late, writing to a colleague, just five days before Stein died: I have involved myself in this case perhaps excessively and certainly in a somewhat amateurish manner.'1
George Stein took his own life in such a dramatic fashion, bleeding to death in an amphitheatre of beech trees, that he ensured his name would forever be associated with the Amber Room riddle he had failed to solve. In choosing ritual suicide by disembowelment (a formal act known to Japanese warriors as seppuku), Stein had also found a respectable alternative to dishonour and defeat.
But these truths, like so many surrounding the Amber Room, have been suppressed and deceit has been allowed to fill the resulting vacuum. The Russian government and museum authorities continue to promote the 'German scholar' George Stein whose laudable attempts to find the Amber Room were 'interrupted' by his 'tragic death'. Russian and German newspapers still suggest that Stein was murdered and speculate about fascist assassins or Cold War hit-men. All of this keeps alive the unsupportable and yet widely held view that the Amber Room was stolen and conceded as part of a Nazi conspiracy that has destroyed so many of those who have attempted to uncover it.
Some of the same newspapers that publish these claims continue to fund costly searches for the Amber Room. In summer 2003, teams from Hamburg excavated the tail end of the 'Rudi Ringel' story in Kaliningrad, looking for the secret hiding place known as BSCH. Others were scouring the old fortifications of Konigsberg and the castle cellars beneath the 'Monster'. In Saxony, as we write, two competing expeditions are approaching one tunnel in the Nicolai Stollen silver mine from opposite directions. Heinz-Peter Haustein, Mayor of Deutschneudorf, burrows on the German side. Helmut Gansel, a mining entrepreneur from Miami, digs from the Czech village of Stechovice. And in the virtual tunnels and castles of Internet chatrooms, website editors continue to spin the Amber Room story. An e-mail sent to us in December 2003, from a website we had contacted that sponsors digs for the Amber Room in the German state of Thuringia, concluded: 'Please send some donations now. Give us what you can. We have made some major, ground-breaking discoveries and within a month, or two, will reveal the burial location of the Amber Room.'
However, the evidence, when we examined it, is clear. Soviet news footage shot inside Konigsberg Castle shortly after the city fell on 9 April 1945 shows that some rooms in the castle remained intact. German eyewitnesses hiding inside the castle told Soviet interrogators that it was not burned to the ground when they surrendered on the evening of 9 April, or in the early hours of LO April. Yet when the first official Soviet investigators arrived in Konigsberg, on 31 May 1945, they reported that the castle was a charred ruin and the city's storage facilities in disarray. Professor Alexander Brusov wrote in his diary in June 1945 that many of the hiding places carefully selected by Alfred Rohde, the director of the Konigsberg Castle Museum, were flooded, on fire and empty, having been opened, torched or vandalized after the German surrender by the Red Army.
We know the Soviet authorities were presented with these facts and advised by Brusov that, alongside many other treasures, the Amber Room had been destroyed between 9 and 11 April 1945. His findings were classified and buried for more than five decades, and in their place Leningrad curator Anatoly Kuchumov, who directed the campaign to discredit Brusov, fostered a fragile theory that depended for its success on no one examining it too closely.
The great curator feared that his failure to dismantle the room in the summer of 1941 would be judged as negligent. His guilty response fitted the needs of the Motherland: its Red Army stood accused by the Allies of wanton destruction and its museum storerooms were revealed to be brimming with looted German treasures. A great untruth was born and it enabled the Soviet people and their sympathizers in Europe and America to continue to believe that the East was the victim of the worst excesses of the West. The real story portrayed the Soviets as rapacious liars, something the leadership feared, given the instability across the bloc in the tumultuous decades after the war when Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia all threatened to break loose.
The story that the Nazis had concealed the Amber Room was given the backing of the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, the highest administrative organ of the Soviet Union. Who would be foolish enough to contradict it? The agony of the Soviet people was now enshrined in the missing Amber Room and it was enduring.
The world should remember Stalingrad, the 900 Days, the obliteration of so many Soviet cities, towns and villages, and the sacrifices made by the Red Army during the Second World War. But history is untidy, and as well as being the victim of unbridled German aggression, the Soviet state was a manipulative victor. Having seen their country burned, raped and robbed, Soviet soldiers became vengeful and careless.
There are only a handful of tangible truths in the saga of the Amber Room and they are enshrined in twenty-eight small pieces that fell off the walls, long before the Second World War. Today these broken amber nuggets are locked away in the Catherine Palace stores, having been glued on to a cardboard mount. They are all that is left of a Russian dream.
Last surviving pieces of the Amber Room
Notes
EPIGRAPH
1. Konstantin Akinsha and Gregory Koslov, Stolen Treasure, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, p. 233.
INTRODUCTION
1. Susanne Massie has researched an account of the evacuations of the Leningrad palaces. See Susanne Massie, Pavlovsk, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1990.
2. See Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Russie, Paris, 1866.
3. The Catherine Palace had some of its rooms transformed into a museum as early as 1918.
4. Hans Hundsdorfer, who served with the 6th Panzer Division, quoted in Paul Enke, Bernsteinzimmer Report, Die Wirtschaft, East Berlin, 1986, pp. 15-16.
5. See footnotes in Chapter 2 for a list of files to access in the National Archives, Kew, Surrey.
CHAPTER 1
1. Vera Lemus, Pushkin Palaces and Parks, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1984.
2. Ibid.
3. Alexei Tolstoy began his The Road to Calvary trilogy in 1922 and an English translation appeared in 1946, published by Alfred Knopf, New York.
4. We later found a report critical of the 1936 evacuation plan written by Communist Party Secretary Stanislav Tronchinsky: see Kuchumov archive, Central State Archive of Literature and Art - Tsentralny Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (TGALI) 468, Opus 1, File 108.
5. Anna Podorozhnik Akhmatova, Plantain, Petropolis, Petrograd, 1921. Nikolai Gumilev, Akhmatova's husband, was arrested and shot that year.
6. Geraldine Norman, The Hermitage, Jonathan Cape, London, 1997.
7. Ibid, for the best version of the culling of museum staff.
8. We found an original version of this document in the Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 108.
9. We later found a version of this report written by Communist Party Secretary Stanislav Tronchinsky: see Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 108.
10. Not much is known about Schliiter's family or his early years, but the best account is carried in Heinz Ladendorf, Der Bildhauer und Baumeister Andreas Schliiter, Deutscher Verein fiir Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin, 1935.
11. Ibid.
12. Winfried and Use Baer, Charlottenburg Pal
ace, Berlin, Fondation Paribas, Paris, 1995. Letter written on 12 November 1701.
13. J. M. de Navarro, 'Prehistoric Routes Between Northern Europe and Italy Defined by the Amber Trade', Geographical Journal, Vol. LXVI, No. 6, London, December 1925.
14. A. M. Kuchumov and M. G. Voronov, The Amber Room, Khudozhnik RSFSR, Leningrad, 1989.
15. Arnolds Spekke, The Ancient Amber Routes and the Geographical Discovery of the Baltic, M. Goppers, Stockholm, 1957.
16. Helen Fraquet, Amber, Butterworth, London, 1987.
17. Baer, Charlottenburg Palace.
18. Fraquet, Amber. Also see George and Roberta Poinar, The Quest for Life in the Amber, Addison & Wesley Publishing, New York, 1994.
19. Kuchumov and Voronov, The Amber Room.
20. Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz, OUP, New York, 1986, pp. 26-7.
21. Heinz Ladendorf, Der Bildhauer und Baumeister Andreas Schliiter.
22. Kuchumov and Voronov, The Amber Room.
23. Ibid.
24. Diary of Peter the Great, second part, Hermitage Library, St Petersburg, 1772.
25. Kuchumov and Voronov, The Amber Room. One taler was equivalent to just under an ounce (23.4 g) of silver.
26. Ibid.
27. 'The Amber Room of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace', Ruskii Vestnik, November 1877, Vol. 132, p. 391.
28. The Letters of the Russian Tsars, Hermitage Library, Moscow, 1861, p. 5.
29. M. P. Putzillo, 'The Beginning of Friendship between Russia and Prussia: Russian Giants in Prussian Service, 1711-1746', Ruskii Vestnik, March 1878, Vol. 134, pp. 376-92.
30. Ibid., p. 391.
31. Ibid.
32. Russian State Archive for Ancient Documents - Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov (RGADA): Collection 11, Inventory 53, File 1, p. 9.
33. RGADA: Collection 9, Inventory 33, File 103.
34. RGADA: Collection 2, Inventory 34, File 417, p. 404.
35. O. N. Kuznetsova, The Summer Garden and Summer Palace of Peter I, Lenizdat, Leningrad, 1988, pp. 22-4.
36. Pravda means 'truth' and Izvestiya means 'news', literally the 'News of the Councils of Working People's Deputies of the USSR'.
CHAPTER 2
1. Author interviews with professor from Leningrad University.
2. Personalities of St Petersburg, www.ceo.spb.ru.
3. V. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures', unpublished manuscript, 1986.
4. National Archives (NA): HW/5/29, Commander Saunders, 9 September, 1941.
5. PRO: CX/MSS/237, Commander Saunders, 13 September 1941.
6. Kuchumov Archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 108, contains a similar account by Curator Popova.
7. Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Viking, London, 2002.
8. W. Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, Basic Books, New York, 2000.
9. Anna Podorozhnik Akhmatova, Plantain, Petropolis, Petrograd, 1921.
10. Telemakov, Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures.
11. Helen Dunmore, The Siege, Penguin, London, 2001.
12. Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight.
13. RGADA: Collection 467, Inventory 2 (73/87), File 87b, pp. 523-4.
14. Ibid.
15. Approximately 100 lb of silver.
16. RGADA: Collection 470, Inventory 6, File 30, pp. 18,19 and 32.
17. RGADA: Collection 470, Inventory 1 (82/516), File 9, p. 1 (1746).
18. Henri Troyat, Catherine the Great, Phoenix Press, London, 2000.
19. Ibid, and Laurence Kelly, St Petersburg: a Travellers' Companion, Constable, London, 1998.
20. A. M. Kuchumov, and M.G. Voronov, The Amber Room, Khudozhnik RFSSR, Leningrad, 1989.
21. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Russie, Paris, 1866.
22. Dr Norman Paul Forster's testimony, given at Nuremberg, 14 February 1946.
23. Author archive.
24. Unpublished letters from Anatoly Kuchumov, author archive. For more letters, see Susanne Massie, Pavlovsk, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1990.
CHAPTER 3
1. Kuchumov archive: TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 123.
2. A selection of Gorky's letters, including this one and several others to Stalin, is in the Library of Congress's Soviet Archive. A facsimile of this one can also be found on www.ibiblio.org/pjones/russian/outline.html.
3. W. Derham, The Philosphical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr Robert Hooke, London, 1726, p. 315.
4. Adam of Bremen, quoted in A. Spekke, The Ancient Amber Routes and the Geographical Discovery of the Baltic, Stockholm, 1957.
5. J. M. de Navarro, 'Prehistoric Routes Between Northern Europe and Italy Defined by the Amber Trade', Geographical Journal, Vol. LXVI, No. 6, London, December 1925.
6. Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina, Venice, 1539. See also Olaus Magnus, De Gentibus Septentrionalibus, Rome, 1555
7. P. J. Hartmann, Succini Prussici, physica et civilis historia, Frankfurt, 1677, appendix 1, translation into German of Simonis Grunovii's 1521 account, entitled Amber and Its Sources.
8. Gotthard Treitschke, Origins of Prussianism: The Teutonic Knights, G. Allen and Unwin, London, 1942.
9. Central State Archive of Moscow: Collection 8, Opus 659, File 2.
10. Antony Beevor, Berlin, The Downfall 194s, Viking, London, 2002.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Paul Enke, Bernsteinzimmer Report, Die Wirtschaft, East Berlin, 1986.
15. Files of the National Archive in Washington: OSS Art, US Assets. XX 8775-6.
CHAPTER 4
1. Henri Troyat, Catherine the Great, Phoenix Press, London, 2000.
2. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 119.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Russian translations of all letters by Alfred Rohde contained in Kuchumov archive, TGALI, Collection 468, Opus 1, File 119, pp. 39-47.
6. The letter carried a reference: '323 I-5'.
7. V. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures', unpublished manuscript, 1986.
8. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 122.
9. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures'.
10. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 48.
11. Ibid.
12. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures'.
13. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 48.
14. Heinrich Himmler planned to raise an army of Werwolf s that was to fight a guerrilla war from secret bases in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps.
15. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 48.
16. Alfred Rohde, Bernstein ein Deutscher Werkstoff, Denkmaler Deutscher Kunst, Berlin, 1937.
17. Alfred Rohde, 'Monatsschrift fiir Freunde und Sammler der Kunst', Pantheon, Vol. XXIX, F. Bruckmann, Munich, July-December 1942.
18. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures'.
19. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 48.
CHAPTER 5
1. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 253.
2. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, Anchor Books, New York, 1996.
3. Ibid.
4. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 108.
5. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 119.
6. Ibid.
7. V. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures', unpublished manuscript, 1986.
8. Konstantin Akinsha, and Gregory Koslov, Stolen Treasure, Weidenfeld &: Nicolson, London, 1995.
9. Ibid.
10. Telemakov, 'Secrets of Saving Museum Treasures'.
11. Ibid.
12. Radzinsky, Stalin.
13. Story told to authors by professor at St Petersburg University.
14. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 121.
15. Author archive.
CHAPTER 6
1. Quoted by J. O. Koehler, Stasi, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1999.
2. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 119, pp. 15-23.
&n
bsp; 3. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, Anchor Books, New York, 1996.
4. See also Helmut Miiller-Enbergs, Wer war Wer in der DDR?, Christopher Links Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
5. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 119, pp. 15-23.
6. Ibid.
7. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 48.
8. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 48, p. 1.
9. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 120, pp. 22-3.
CHAPTER 7
1. Alexandra Hildebrandt, The Wall, Verlag Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 2002.
2. Data supplied by Forschungs und Gedenkstatte Normannenstrasse, Berlin.
3. For the history and administration of the Stasi, see J. O. Koehler, Stasi, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1999, and Timothy Garton Ash, The File, Flamingo, London, 1997.
4. BBC News reports, March 2002.
5. The Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Sevice of the former GDR - Die Bundesbeauftragte fiir die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU) AV14/79.
6. Helmut Miiller-Enbergs, Wer war Wer in der DDR} Christopher Links Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
7. Ibid. See also Paul Enke, Bernsteinzimmer Report, Die Wirtschaft, East Berlin, 1986, for an account of Strauss's archival and Saxony investigations.
8. Grafe interview, 'Spasennie shedevri' (Saved Masterpieces), Sovetski Khudozhnik, Moscow, 1977.
9. Also quoted in Enke, Bernsteinzimmer Report.
10. Ibid.
11. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 45.
12. Kuchumov archive, TGALI 468, Opus 1, File 123.
13. Sefton Delmar, Trial Sinister and Black Boomerang, Viking, New York, 1961 and 1962.
CHAPTER 8
1. BStU, KSII404/82, pp. 1-17, dated 1 October 1964.
2. Schmalfuss was the director of Stasi Department z.
3. BStU, KSII404/82, pp. 1-17.
