Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

  The ‘primitive mentality’ to which Herzog referred in a 1949 speech to distinguished members of the University of Chile was accompanied, however, by a much higher-than-average intelligence, as confirmed by Gustave Gilbert, the American Military Chief Psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials. Despite his high intelligence, Sauckel as Gauleiter of Thuringia, without a second thought, ordered the digging-up of the remains of the two great authors Goethe and Schiller for their removal to the nearby city of Jena to be destroyed on the entry of American forces into Thuringia. Fortunately, this barbarity was never carried out.

  On July 1st 1949, Lord Justice Lawrence, President of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, formally announced that Fritz Sauckel had been sentenced to death by hanging for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The once-feared Gauleiter of Thuringia was executed three months later, at dawn on October 16th.

  His friend Erich Koch just managed to avoid that fate. It seems that their friendship dated back to their meeting in Weimar in 1937, when Koch - the Oberpräsident of East Prussia - arrived in the city with the first group of three hundred prisoners sent to begin the construction of the huts and barracks of KZ (Konzentrationslager) Buchenwald.

  Koch was born in East Prussia on June 19th 1896 and was appointed Gauleiter of his home region in 1938. Three years later, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he was appointed Reichskommissar of the Ukraine. According to The Ukrainian Weekly of November 10th 1996, Koch was directly responsible for the deaths of over four million people, including practically the entire Jewish population of the Ukraine. Under his government, and with the enthusiastic collaboration of Fritz Sauckel, a further two and a half million people were deported to Germany to work as slave laborers. Following the forced Nazi withdrawal from the Ukraine in late 1943, Koch returned to his job as Gauleiter of East Prussia until the German surrender to the Allies in May 1945, when he disappeared until being discovered and arrested four years later in the British Zone of Occupation.

  He was deported to Poland for trial and, although the trials of war criminals in the rest of the Soviet-dominated areas were rapidly organized and their sentences (usually fatal) carried out within only a few hours, Koch had to wait ten years to be tried, and his inevitable death sentence was never actually carried out. The Polish government commuted it to life imprisonment on grounds of ill health and held him for the last twenty-seven years of his life in surprisingly good conditions at Barczewo prison, where he died peacefully on November 12th 1986, at ninety years of age. At no point during this whole period did the Russian authorities demand his extradition so that he could be put on trial for the appalling crimes he committed as Reichskommissar of the Ukraine, nor did they even pressure the Polish government to carry out the original death sentence.

  I looked away from the screen and, as the printer began to spit out page after page, started wondering how on earth somebody could be capable of killing four million people. The sheer size of the slaughter was scooting around unstoppably inside my head. I couldn’t even imagine myself killing one person, just one, let alone four million. Four million dead human beings! Not to mention the Ostarbeiter, the slave laborers who also perished from disease, from accidents or simply from exhaustion. If each dead person was represented by just a single coin, and we put four million of them inside a single room, imagine how huge the pile would be. Unthinkable. What went on in somebody’s mind to make them capable of doing something like that and not giving a damn about it? It scared the living hell out of me.

  The last member of this group of three was the young Helmut Hübner. Born in Pulheim near Cologne in 1919, he studied economics, ancient languages and history at the University of Bonn and became an active and enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. Not long after war was declared, he joined the Luftwaffe with the rank of lieutenant and soon became a celebrated fighter pilot. In 1943 he was the pilot with the most confirmed kills in his squadron and, despite being shot down on four occasions, he parachuted safely to ground every time. For all these achievements and more, he was awarded the highest military decorations, including the Iron Cross. According to the Athens War Museum database, Hübner was widely acknowledged as a supremely skilled handler of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Heinkel He 219, and he developed a brilliant attack maneuver so effective that it soon came to be included in the Luftwaffe’s training manuals. He picked his target from the enemy aircraft, went into a controlled high-speed nose-dive, pulling out of the dive five hundred yards below his target’s tail, and then climbed at a low angle, losing speed to improve the accuracy of his aim, until opening fire with his 20mm cannon from a hundred yards and downing the target. He then climbed back up to a safe height at full power at a twenty-degree angle to the horizon and chose his next victim.

  At the beginning of 1944, Hübner was posted to the Luftwaffe’s Air Service Command I, based in Königsberg, integrated into General Reinhardt’s Army Group Center and tasked with the defense of East Prussia. The Soviet General Staff’s plan for the East Prussian Offensive involved two coordinated attacks on the exposed flanks of the Army Group Center in a pincer movement to the north and to the south of the Masurian lakes. The Russian advances towards Marienbad and Königsberg were designed to cut off the Army Group from the rest of Germany, leaving them only one supply line from the sea, then to besiege and defeat them, and finally occupy the whole of East Prussia. Hübner was in command of a squadron of Stukas, the famous Junkers Ju 87G dive-bombers, and fought bravely against the Soviet armored columns but was unable to prevent the overwhelming Allied air raid which destroyed half of Königsberg on August 31st, 1944, let alone the final collapse and surrender of the city on April 9th, 1945. The future industrialist was set free after a lenient trial in Munster six months after the end of the war, and was believed to have returned to his family home in Pulheim. There he kept his head down until his re-emergence in 1965 as a prosperous bakery magnate.

  The final jewel in this not-so-glorious crown was Vladimir Melentyev, the art collector who had asked us to deliver him the Krylov painting. I have to say here that Läufer’s research on Melentyev was his absolute masterpiece. He hacked a ride onto the mainframes of two major American software companies, both household names, which he accessed indirectly by piggybacking onto a dozen untraceable computers. With this massive number-crunching capacity at his fingertips, he launched a coordinated assault on the classified files of the Stasi, KGB and FBI, and discovered that Vladimir Melentyev’s real name was Sergei Rachkov, born in the small Russian village of Privolnyy, near Stavropol, in 1931. Rachkov joined the army when he was seventeen years old, and served as a military policeman in prisons, forced labor camps and psychiatric hospitals until he was twenty-five. At that point, he was signed up as a special agent of the recently-created Committee for State Security, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti - better known as the KGB. For the first few years, he earned his daily bread checking out members of the Russian armed forces for their loyalty to the communist regime, until in 1959 he was suddenly withdrawn from this everyday secret police work and assigned to a much higher level operation codenamed ‘Peter the Great’. Despite Operation Peter the Great being officially an initiative of the MVD - the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del or Ministry of Internal Affairs - it was in fact under the direct control of the central governing body of the Soviet Union, the Politburo, and run in person by the new chairman of the USSR’s council of ministers and all-powerful president, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

  Unfortunately, their security was so good that Läufer, however hard he tried, couldn’t find out what Operation Peter the Great was all about. Documentation of the operation simply didn’t exist. All searches resulted in just the occasional brief reference to it, without turning up a single file out of the millions scanned by Läufer’s virtual investigators which contained any useful information on the scope and content of what looked to have been one of the most important and most secret projects of the now-dissolved Soviet Uni
on. Neither Khrushchev’s death, nor the arrivals of Leonid Brezhnev, then Yuri Andropov, then Konstantin Chernenko and finally Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 made even the slightest difference to the active status of Operation Peter the Great. Which sent Melentyev-Rachkov in the guise of a simple prison guard named Stanislaw Zakopane to Barczewo Prison, shortly after the arrival of a certain Erich Koch.

  My capacity for surprise was already so overloaded that the odd extra shock or two just couldn’t raise my adrenaline levels any further, as I ploughed my way through every single one of Läufer’s documents. He had been sweet enough to have had the last set automatically translated from the Russian, thank goodness. But there still were a few more bits of useful information in Melentyev-Rachkov’s personal file stored in the old KGB computer system, sketching out his extraordinary life of high risk, daring and downright criminality. Judging from the files, Rachkov was an intelligence agent with sophisticated tastes and habits, who was perfectly fluent in several languages and utterly cold and heartless towards his fellow human beings.

  With the accelerating collapse of the Soviet system in the light of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, Rachkov rapidly transformed himself into a corrupt power broker, taking full advantage of his access to privileged information as a KGB agent. He had left Poland when Koch died in 1986 and returned to a Moscow already socially and economically disintegrating. He and many other KGB officers soon got involved in the many Russian crime syndicates which became increasingly rich and powerful in a very short time. According to the FBI, it took Rachkov a little less than a decade to fight his way to the top of one of the mafia gangs which specialized in supplying Russian and South American drug cartels with submarines, armored attack helicopters and surface-to-air missiles. He soon took a controlling interest in various banks conveniently located in Caribbean tax havens, which he used to launder the enormous sums of money accumulated through his criminal activities. This money funded his purchases of some of the most successful nightclubs and casinos in South Florida, not to mention various hotel chains all over the world. Now, at sixty-seven years old, he had again reinvented himself, this time as Vladimir Melentyev, an elegant art collector, respected businessman and all-round philanthropist, who lived quietly in his beautiful castle close to Tbilisi, in the Republic of Georgia, between Armenia and Turkey. Internationally-respected firms of lawyers and accountants handled his many business affairs, while their day-to-day management was left in the capable hands of his son, Nikolai Sergeyevich Rachkov.

  I read and re-read my way through the huge pile of pages I had printed out. I could see the clear connections between all the different stories, and all the many loose ends as well. There were things which so far made no sense at all, for the lack of some key bit of information, but other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to come together in a perfect fit. Koch and Sauckel, Sauckel and Koch. The Second World War, Helmut Hübner, Krylov’s Muzhiks, a KGB officer, Operation Peter the Great. What the hell could all this mean? What kind of explosive cocktail did the mix of all these ingredients add up to?

  To cap it all, the night before our next Group meeting, I finally received Uri Zev’s translation of the Jeremiah inscription which I had decoded with the Atbash cipher and sent to Roi. Of the resulting three German words - Bernsteinzimmer. Gauforum. Weimar. - I only understood the third. But enlightenment was soon to arrive, and it wasn’t pretty.

  That night, as I was going over all the documentation, I realized that something seriously significant and almost certainly highly dangerous lay behind the tangled web of data we had unearthed. Why else would Melentyev have hired the Chess Group to get hold of the Muzhiks at this particular point in time? In October 1941, German commandos had stolen the Krylov painting from the State Museum in Leningrad and it had been brought to Königsberg, where Koch was king. On August 31st 1944, Allied bombing practically destroyed the city. The war’s ending with German defeat already seemed more than likely, if not inevitable, and it made sense to assume that Koch had started thinking about how to save his looted treasures. In early 1945, with the Red Army closing in on Königsberg, Koch sent the painting along with all the rest of his considerable plunder to his good friend Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia. During his trial in Nuremberg, Sauckel declared that all those works of art had been removed from Weimar and sent to Switzerland. But in 1965, twenty years later, the Muzhiks suddenly reappeared in the catalog of the then modest private collection of a certain Helmut Hübner, who as an ace Luftwaffe pilot and squadron leader had been stationed in Königsberg in 1944. The Krylov canvas remained in that private collection until persons unknown (well, OK: yours truly) snatched it away to deliver it into the hands of an ex-KGB agent who, disguised as a prison guard, had worked for twenty-seven years at Barczewo prison, where Eric Koch was serving out his sentence.

  At some point in this complicated saga, Koch himself, or possibly someone else, had pasted the Jeremiah piece to the back of the Muzhiks. It must have been done after 1949 (the year it was painted), while the former Gauleiter of East Prussia was living undercover somewhere in the British Occupation Zone in Germany, with Sauckel already dead and Hübner still in quiet obscurity at his house in Pulheim. All of which made it crystal clear that Krylov’s Muzhiks had not only never arrived in Switzerland, as Sauckel had suggested, but had probably never even left Weimar, the city whose name appeared in the message Koch left encoded in the Jeremiah inscription.

  By this time my head was in a whirl, and I stumbled sick and dizzy along the unlit hallway, heading for the kitchen. I badly needed a change of space and something to eat, anything at all just to wake me up a bit. My study was soporifically warm and full of cigarette smoke, and I had been on the point of flaking out. I turned on the cold white neon lighting in the kitchen and, dazzled by the sudden brightness, stepped back without thinking and leant against the doorjamb just to stay on my feet.

  I was a hundred per cent certain that what Melentyev was really after was not the Krylov but its phoney lining, Koch’s Jeremiah, and that what interested him most about that was the message in the inscription. Somehow he had found out about the message, which possibly had a lot to do with Operation Peter the Great or which was maybe what the whole damn operation had actually been all about. Its overall aim hardly seemed to be a big mystery: to recover the treasures Koch had stolen and which had then gone missing in Weimar in early 1945. It made sense that successive Soviet dictators had been interested in getting back what the Nazis had plundered, and had placed an agent close to Koch for so many years. That was clearly the reason why his death sentence was never carried out, in the hope that he would spill the beans - although it eventually turned out that he never did. Which then begged the question: why didn’t they force Koch to talk? Why didn’t they use torture or some other equally effective method to make him reveal his hiding place? After all, courtesy and the loving touch were hardly the Soviets’ standard modus operandi when they wanted results. Why the hell had they been so feeble and laid-back with Erich Koch?

  My body sleepwalked into the middle of the kitchen, completely of its own accord. It clearly needed to make some kind of movement, if only to break out of the total immobility that my humming brain had left it in. The two slowly began to get to know each other again, although my brain was still working overtime as I got a clean glass out of one of the closets, opened the icebox door and poured out an unknown liquid which luckily turned out just to be cold milk.

  And what was Helmut Hübner’s role in this whole story? He must have got to know Koch in Königsberg in 1944 and they must have become pretty good friends, good enough for Koch to entrust him with the Muzhiks with the Jeremiah already stuck on the back. Which also confirmed that Koch and Hübner had been in contact after 1949. Maybe Hübner visited him in jail and it was there that … Hang on a minute! That was impossible. The Russians sent Melentyev to Barczewo as soon as Koch arrived there, so if Koch had given Hübner something, the KGB man would have known immediately. Not
to mention that, in every prison in the world, visitors are physically searched on their way in and on their way out again, and much more thoroughly in Barczewo where Koch was the star of the show. It was even less likely that Koch had managed to make the switch during the ten years from 1949 to 1959 that he was awaiting trial because, if anything, the security on him would have been even tighter. Which meant that he could only have delivered it to Hübner during the short space of time between painting the Jeremiah and his arrest later that year - implying a connection between two previously unrelated points. Was Pulheim in the British Occupation Zone? Did Koch spend his four years in hiding at Hübner’s place? I needed to check this out immediately.

  Now fully awake, I hurried back to the study and pulled out the old atlas that I had been consulting while making notes and collating all the information. It confirmed that Pulheim had been within the British Occupation Zone in post-war Germany, so my new theory could be right, although of course it still needed proof.

  It was also becoming clear to me that Hübner hadn’t known about the Jeremiah hidden behind the Krylov painting. If he had known of its existence, he surely would have used it to get his hands on the treasure after Koch died in 1986. But the fact that Melentyev hired us to steal the Muzhiks for him was evidence that possession of its secret was still worthwhile, Which in turn suggested that Hübner had had no idea at all of what he had been hiding in his private collection for thirty-three years.

  I switched off the computer and the desklamp, and walked out of the study yawning as I headed for my bedroom. One more thing was puzzling me as I pulled back my bedcovers and settled down to sleep. What the hell did Bernsteinzimmer and Gauforum mean?

  Still, tomorrow was Sunday, thank goodness, and our next Chess Group get-together was scheduled for nine-thirty in the morning.