Forever Amber

Amber, trapped residue from beech trees, is found mainly in northeastern Europe, near the Baltic Sea Coast. Still today, amber jewelry can be found there, on every block, seemingly in every store. But the greatest amber treasure of all time, the Amber Room was, to make a long story short, a gift of the Prussian king to the Russian royal family, and wound up in Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin) in the Catherine Palace. An entire room made of amber.

During World War II, great efforts were made by all combatant European governments to safeguard their works of art from destruction or theft. The Amber Room, at first deemed too large and too fragile to dismantle, was covered with drywall in the hope that invading German troops would overlook it. The palace was badly damaged in the war, and there was no trace of the Amber Room after the fighting stopped and the Germans left the country.

This book tells the story of the Amber Room and, because it is very unlikely that any of my readers will read it, I will give away the end.

A couple of premises. First, extraordinary amounts of art were taken by all invading parties. For example, when the Russians finally gave back a large number of art works to Germany, the inventoried list was just under 2,000,000. Many of these were world class treasures; some had disappeared for decades only to be discovered, while the existence of others were known, but they were secreted.

But what of the Amber Room? It was a subject that, for 40 years, was the subject of expensive and extensive searches. It was never found. (In fact, it has now been reconstructed in Pushkin and the new Amber Room is open for tourists.)

The truth of the matter seems to be that the Amber Room had been dismantled in Pushkin, and taken by train to Koenigsberg, on the Black Sea, an East Prussian stronghold, where it was stored, along with much else, in the cellars and vaults of the Koenigsberg Castle. It also appears that, after the Germans were driven from Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in 1945, the Russian troops set fire to the Castle (now completely gone and replaced with a high rise building constructed for the Russian provincial government) and destroyed it. The Amber Room was destroyed by the fire, although no one knew it was there and certainly no one knew it was being destroyed.

Russian archeologist Alexander Brusov was given the task after the war of locating the Amber Room. He seemed to have understood what had happened, when the Soviets shut down his investigation, and had him completely discredited (as only the Soviets could do).

From here, the investigation took many turns. Had it been moved elsewhere in Kaliningrad, or was it still under the new governmental building in some of the unexplored vaults? Was it taken to Germany, and hidden in Saxony (where many stolen works of hard had been hidden in abandoned coal minds and quarries?

Teams of investigators. Russian communist party. KGB. Russian academics. East German citizens. Stasi. West Germans. Descendents of Russian royalty. All following various lines of thinking, and belittling others. Publishing theories. Creating correspondence that languished in closed archives, or in crumbling apartments scattered around eastern Europe.

The conclusion of the authors is as stated above: the Russians themselves had destroyed one of their own greatest treasures. Not the Germans, who had stolen it (to be sure), but who had not been able to move it beyond Koenigsberg.

But this conclusion would be of great embarrassment in the USSR, would adversely affect the complex stolen art negotiations being undertaken across the continent after the war, and blunt the accusations of wrongdoing by the Germans. So the Russian Communist party, knowing the truth, kept the lies alive by funding and supporting all of the attempts to locate a hidden Amber Room, and surpressing anything that resembled the truth.

An interesting story, involving not a handful of people, but vast numbers of people of all sorts of backgrounds. The complexity of the tale is overwhelming (more characters than War and Peace) and impossible to keep in mind. But as an example of Soviet disinformation at work, as an example of a story that captured the minds of geniuses and crazies alike, and as an example of how much activity took place in cataloging, securing, stealing, hiding, finding and arguing about the proper ownership of works of art, it is fascinating.

Oh, yes, the book is called "The Amber Room" and was published in 2004. It was written by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark.