by Adrian Levy
Strauss continued:
When the room arrived in 1942 or 1943, it was installed in the museum in the south wing of the castle, in a room with only one window, facing the river on the third floor. The panels were in a very good condition. It was installed with care, the broken pieces glued back together and the mosaics were put in place. The walls were sixteen feet high and it seemed as if they shone with yellow-brown light beaming from them. On a cloudy day it created a rather grotesque impression.
Kuchumov has marked another small asterisk here. He had learned from his interrogation with Otto Smakka, translator for the local fisheries, that the Amber Room was already badly damaged when it reached Konigsberg,. Strauss's dates for the room's arrival also conflicted with Smakka's evidence and with the Gift Book found by the Soviets in 1945. But Kuchumov gave Strauss the benefit of the doubt.
Strauss was pressed to expand his comments and responded with a caveat. He had never seen the room before, 'so I couldn't tell if all the parts had been delivered to Konigsberg'. He supposed that 'it was complete' since Dr Rohde didn't say anything about losses. 'Dr Rohde believed that the Amber Room might ultimately return to [Pushkin]. Despite the fact that its beauty was overwhelming, I was quite depressed and worried that I was an accomplice to that robbery.' Another small asterisk. Perhaps Kuchumov was becoming irritated by Strauss's clumsy attempts at ingratiation.
What could Strauss tell Kuchumov of the evacuation plan? Strauss claimed that he had attempted to get the Amber Room out of Konigsberg in the spring of 1944. 'It was then that I warned Rohde for the first time that it was dangerous to keep it on the third floor of the castle as it could be destroyed. There was an obvious danger of aerial bombing.' But, according to Strauss, Rohde was reluctant. 'Only after several warnings from me did he agree to board up the window to prevent shrapnel from getting in. But even so we only boarded up the bottom third of the castle window.'
Strauss said that his persistence led to the room eventually being dismantled, packed into crates and moved to the south-wing cellars, only days before the first Allied air raids - 27-28 August 1944. Yet another asterisk. Kuchumov wrote a name beside it: 'Castle restaurateur Paul Feyerabend'. He had told Kuchumov that Rohde had temporarily evacuated the crates to an undisclosed location outside the city in July 1944, before the air raids.
Was Strauss sure about his dates? 'Yes,' he replied. He knew this was the case because, although he had missed the bombing raids, he had returned to Konigsberg on E September 1944 and gone straight to the castle. 'It was entirely burned but the outside walls were still standing. I met Dr Rohde by chance in the castle yard outside the entrance to the south-wing cellar. He was surrounded by boxes, big and small, and told me the room had been stored in the cellars during the raids and wasn't damaged.' If it had not been for Strauss's insistence, then the Amber Room would not have been moved and would have taken a direct hit.
And then? Kuchumov was plotting times, dates and places. What happened next? Strauss thought for a moment. In December 1944 Rohde began to travel, Strauss said. Another mark in the margin. From Rohde's reconstructed correspondence, saved from the fire by Brusov, Kuchumov knew that it was in November 1944 that Alfred Rohde began looking in earnest for hiding places outside the city.
Strauss corrected himself. Yes, now he remembered. It was November 1944. Rohde had made a few local trips to find hiding places for the castle treasures in that month. But in the end these stores in castles and manors were not safe enough. Strauss had heard it said that Rohde had written in a letter that he intended to evacuate the Amber Room to Wechselburg Castle in Saxony. So did Rohde carry out the plan? 'About the moving of the room from Konigsberg, I don't know,' Strauss replied.
Kuchumov asked about the Knights' Hall, where Brusov concluded that the Amber Room had burned. Was it used as a temporary store for the Amber Room? Strauss replied: 'Maybe [Rohde] told me that he wanted to put the boxes in the Knights' Hall, I'm not sure.' Strauss was becoming defensive but Kuchumov would not let up and asked about the last time that he saw Rohde. 'Some time between 11 and 15 January [1945]. But I cannot recall if the Amber Room was even discussed,' was Strauss's vague response.
Suddenly the pace and direction of the interrogation transcript changed. The cool-headed doctor asked to return to Berlin. He claimed that he needed to winkle out more witnesses. Not Nazis, but Germans, like him, silent, concealed opponents of Hitler who had weathered the final weeks of the war. 'Ernst Schaumann, for example, lives in Berlin. His address I can figure out and somebody can check it,' Strauss suggested to Kuchumov. 'Maybe it's possible to ask the general [Lasch] who capitulated and was taken as a POW? Maybe Lasch knows something about the Amber Room,' he said.
Strauss had only just arrived and, from the correspondence and files that surrounded the preparation for this trip, it had been arranged at significant political and financial cost. It was unlikely that the Soviets would let him go so quickly. We contrast Strauss's imprecise responses with his letter to Major Kunyn: 'But I know more.'
Strauss had one last thought: 'If it was lost, I suppose that such a room could be re-created with the help of photographs?' It was an unhelpful suggestion that could not have been made at a worse time.
Session Two: '12 December 1949. What I know about Soviet pieces of art taken to Germany (translated by Captain Shukin)'.
Take the pressure off the witness. Let him relax. Talk him through areas that he feels more comfortable about. Seduce him. Knead his ego. Make yourself small. Kuchumov seemed to be calming Strauss as the next session began. What had Strauss witnessed during his wartime office as an air-raid warden with access to bunkers and storerooms? Strauss replied: 'Dr Rohde showed me things he had been given by Gauleiter Koch for safekeeping: things from Minsk, Kiev and Rostock. They came in 1942, or was it 1943? It was forbidden to talk about or show these items.'
What items? More precision please? Strauss replied: 'Pictures: eighteenth and nineteenth century. Also Chinese porcelain and vases manufactured in St Petersburg. Icons too.' Names? Descriptions? Strauss couldn't recall: 'Everything was in a good condition but they were not great works. We supposed at that time that only a small section of [Soviet] treasures was in German hands, that the most famous things had been hidden by the Russians.'
Where were these small number of Soviet items kept? 'Everything was located in the first floor of the round tower in the north-west corner of [Konigsberg] castle; the entrance was through the Knights' Hall.' Anything more? 'Well, there were church bells from Latvia. In 1942, or was it 1943? And not long before the end of the war, famous silver treasures from Riga and Danzig.'
Fearing incrimination, Strauss added: I got this information from Dr Rohde and members of his staff. This is all I know. I didn't work at the museum. I was only interested from a political and scientific point of view.' His answers were beginning to take on a defensive tone again.
Kuchumov placed yet another asterisk against this last statement. We know from his notes that the great curator had read some of the Nuremberg depositions concerning looted art, including that of Hermann Voss, director of the Dresden Gallery, who, according to his American inquisitors, relied constantly on 'failure of memory to explain discrepancies in his testimony, a tactic that did not improve the atmosphere of the interrogation . . .' Voss's captors had concluded: 'He takes the profoundly German attitude that art history is pure science, and that one can pursue it without exterior moral responsibility.'
Session Three: '12 December 1949. Where could the Amber Room be located? (translated by Captain Shukin)'.
Kuchumov returned to the events of January 1945. Strauss began: 'According to Rohde's letter of E2 January, the Amber Room was still in the city.' Asterisk. These letters were found by Brusov and passed on to Kuchumov, who knew that Strauss could not possibly have seen them. At best, he had heard about them from gossiping German museum curators.
If this information was third-hand, then what else in Strauss's statements was begged and borrowed? St
rauss struggled to defend himself: 'Before 15 January [the Amber Room] could have been delivered by rail to Germany, after that it would have only been possible by sea or plane.' Asterisk. Wrong. Kuchumov had researched train movements out of Konigsberg. He knew that the last one left for the German heartland on 22 January 1945.
Did Strauss believe that the Amber Room remained in the castle until the fall of Konigsberg? Strauss was even more evasive: 'Dr Rohde was a lover of amber. There is no doubt that he would have tried to save the Amber Room. But I didn't see him again. I heard only gossip about hiding places at Gorlitz. But there were many hiding places in East Prussia too, you know.'
Gossip. Maybe. Perhaps. If Strauss was so misinformed, why had he tried four times to gain the attention of the Soviet authorities? No answer. Then Strauss volunteered: 'There was a bunker.'
Kuchumov was very interested in bunkers - he recalled Brusov's mention of the Hofbunker. Rohde had talked about this hiding place in a letter to his superiors in Berlin, but showed it to Brusov in 194 5 only after this letter was pulled by Brusov from the fire. In 1946 Brusov had told Kuchumov that he feared he had not thoroughly searched the Hofbunker after being distracted by Rohde and a story about lost keys. Was the Amber Room concealed in the Hofbunker? Strauss replied: 'Pictures from Konigsberg Museum were supposed to be stored there. That is all I know.'
Where was the bunker? Kuchumov wanted an address. Strauss blurted out: I think, maybe on Lange Reihe or on a street in Nasser Garden. Precisely where I don't remember.'
We recall a phrase from Soldier Kazakhov's letter in which he wrote to Kuchumov about Strauss: 'they will send the doctor to Kaliningrad along with someone else to investigate this place, because either he really did forget or he is pretending he cannot remember.' It seems possible that Kazakhov was referring to the Hofbunker and Strauss's inconsistency.
On the defensive, Strauss now launched into a list of other potential hiding places in East Prussia. 'The nineteenth-century city bastions are many: Wrangel Tor, Rosegarten Tor, Friedlander Tor. All were used. There was also a room in the main railway station. And the safe of the Reichsbank near the castle.' The fortress at Pillau, had they tried there?
'But I suppose that was unlikely since it was full of wounded soldiers. Lochstadt Castle... what about that castle?'
But what about the Hofbunker, Kuchumov persisted? The other sites that Strauss mentioned had been searched already by the Soviets in 1946 and they had found nothing in them.7
Kuchumov challenged him. Was Strauss concealing facts about the Nazi evacuation plan? Strauss defended himself:
I buried treasure. I helped to bury books from Konigsberg Library and the state archive on the lower underground floor of Lochstadt Castle. Sixty-five feet down. We wrote a message on a big piece of cotton with the help of a captured Russian soldier, 'Russian cultural treasures, open only in the presence of a curator.' Treasures were hidden at Schlobitten Castle too. Nowadays it's in Poland. There we placed furniture and paintings. People from Konigsberg Museum moved them. Possibly they took some things from the museum too.
Strauss began to trail off, perhaps realizing that he was in danger of incriminating himself again. I wasn't there. I got this information from Helmut Hels from Hamburg... no, maybe Mrs Clomp from the Monuments Commission.' More names. More contradictions.
Strauss asked for a break, but Kuchumov returned to the Hofbunker.
Strauss threw back yet more suggestions, names and locations: 'Schlobitten Castle, the home of Prince Alex zu Dohna-Schlobitten. Talk to him. He knows. Professor Voringer from Halle, he told me that things from the university and the most treasured items from Konigsberg Library were moved to Langheim Palace, near Warstenburg. You should talk to him.' More names for Kuchumov's witness list. 'There was talk too of moving icons from Konigsberg churches to Tilsit [Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Province] and of moving other items to Tsiten [Kaliningrad Province] and also an estate on an island at the Samland Peninsula, the name of which I don't remember.'
Think now. Don't stop. You can rest soon. You must know the name. Strauss dried up: 'No,' he said finally. I don't know any more. Not about art from the USSR. I can't remember anything else.'
Here was a man confident enough to contact the MGB, an organization feared by most Germans, and volunteer his services in the search for the Amber Room. He promised precision and details, even a solution, and yet, having been issued a special permit to travel and having been escorted to the closed military province of Kaliningrad, Strauss delivered nothing of substance. While placing himself at the centre of key events, claiming that the Amber Room had survived the air raids of 1944 only after he insisted on its being dismantled, Strauss failed to reveal anything concrete about Rohde's plans for the Amber Room and he claimed to know nothing about its final resting place.
What Kuchumov had to decide was whether Strauss really did not know or was playing a dangerous game. In an appendix to the official typed interrogation transcript that was compiled some time later, Kuchumov wrote:
In 1949, according to the decisions of the local party and the Soviet administration, a big and authoritative commission was organized A hundred soldiers and firemen, mobile generators and other equipment was provided. Giving evidence, Dr Strauss affirmed only those facts that were already known from the evidence of others and Rohde's correspondence. He didn't describe the exact location of the Amber Room in spite of our belief and hope that he must have known more about it.
There was more. Once the Soviets had decided to dig in Kaliningrad, Strauss had hindered the operation. The great curator concluded: 'Strauss tried, as Rohde also did by different means, to deflect the attention of our commission from heaps of bricks at the southern side of the castle, making recommendations to search in the north wing, discouraging the digging until the time that plans for the castle could be found.'8
Strauss stood accused of grave charges: wasting the time and resources of the Soviet government.
There is one last document in our packet from St Petersburg and it serves only to increase our uncertainty about Strauss's motives. We have before us a folded sheet of paper that carries obscure doodles, as well as maps, dates and names.
On one side, there is a message: 'To my best comrade from Leningrad. It's better to search in Henkanziskan! 7-19. XII.49'.9
The Cyrillic is poor. It's somebody's second language. But the dates are intriguing: 7-19 December 1949, the period during which Kuchumov interrogated Strauss in Kaliningrad. Only General Zorin, Soldier Kazakhov and the MGB were supposed to know about this classified mission.
The sheet is dominated by a large drawing of a man with little round glasses, wearing a pork-pie hat, a miniature shovel sticking out of the hatband like a feather. His nose has been coloured in blue, and beside this freezing figure is a thermometer measuring minus EO°C. Unlike the hand that painted Kuchumov's birthday cards, this artist is no professional, but there is no doubt about who is being caricatured.
The cartoon Kuchumov is carrying a magnifying glass inside which the word HENKANZISKAN appears again, in large wobbly letters. Although incorrectly spelt, this can only be a reference to Friedrich Henkensiefken, Schlossoberinspektor of Konigsberg Castle, one of the people near the top of Kuchumov's list of missing German officials. We wonder who is taunting the curator about this man and why.
Doodle of Anatoly Kuchumov searching for the Amber Room with a magnifying glass, 1949
Beside the cartoon Kuchumov's feet is a small sketch of the Knights' Hall in the north wing of Konigsberg Castle. And to the right is a globe, featuring a magnified detail of the Samland Peninsula and again the name 'Henkanziskan'. On the far right of the page is a strange kind of hieroglyphic: a cartoon depicting a bearded man floating in the clouds with a telephone to his ear. At the other end of the line (presumably down on earth) a Red Army soldier listens, standing amidst drawings of the Brandenburg Gate, a Christmas tree, a bottle labelled pivo (beer), a gun and a chicken, above which is written the name STRAUSS.
The reverse of the paper sheet is given over to a hand-drawn map of the Baltic coast, a railway line stretching between Leningrad and northern Germany, along which a steaming train chugs out of 'Detskoye Selo' (Pushkin) towards Kaliningrad and then on to a Berlin that is divided into sectors, each one highlighted by the occupier's national flag.
Doodle sent to Anatoly Kuchumov, depicting clues as to the post-war location of the Amber Room, 1949
The chicken called Strauss is depicted again, standing in the American sector. 'Cluck, cluck' is written over his open beak. Across the top of the page, again in faulty Russian, is written a word that could say 'place' or, if the letters are better formed, could also read 'revenge'. If this is the theme, then the caption makes some sense: 'It is better for my best comrade of Leningrad to go around Berlin through the American sector.' This is where the answer to the mystery lies, according to the cartoonist.
Someone was warning Kuchumov to beware the chicken called Strauss, who was willing to barter the life of others in order to keep hold of a priceless secret.
Someone else believed that Strauss was lying, despite having volunteered to assist the Soviets. And to understand why Strauss would embark on such a high-risk venture, we need another source, an objective one who will not attempt to filter our understanding, one who might also lead us to Friedrich Henkensiefken, Schlossoberinspektor of Konigsberg Castle. It cannot be Stephan Strauss, the doctor's protective son.