The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  We are torn. The material that Our Friend the Professor has obtained from the literature archive in St Petersburg is sensational and we are desperate to see what else they have. However, an official from the Stasi archives has also contacted us to say our application has been approved. We will stay in Berlin for another two weeks while Our Friend the Professor works in the literature archive in Russia on our behalf.

  7

  The Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR is a mouthful that most people shorten to the Ministry of Truth.

  We enter its headquarters through plate-glass doors at 10.30 a.m. Female guards glower behind Perspex screens: applications for passes are to be filled out in triplicate, no cameras, no tape recorders, no ball pens. At 10.50 a.m. we are escorted to the office of the senior functionary who has been assigned to our inquiry.

  From the ninth-floor windows, you can see the view clearly: right across the congested five-lane highway of Otto-Braun-Strasse and into pigeon-grey Alexanderplatz, the former hub of East Berlin. Here, on 4 November 1989 half a million demonstrators gathered to whistle at spy-chief Markus Wolf, who had been called to placate the daily public protests at the intrusions of the Stasi.1

  The box-like office into which we are ushered has bare walls and is empty save for a large white plastic desk and four white plastic garden chairs. Sitting in one is a woman resplendent in pearls like a Japanese empress, one globe in each ear, a generous string at her throat and a delicate strand around her blue-veined wrist. As she speaks, spitting words like a slingshot, she drums the desk with a silver pen. 'So you have got your passes?' A tick in the book. 'So you have your accreditation?' A tick in the book. 'You have references?' A tick in the book. And so on and so on until she has gone through every single page in the large file of paperwork we have accrued in order to gain entry. The Ministry of Truth has a reputation for being fearsomely bureaucratic, fenced in by labyrinthine legislation. We hope our introductory interview will not be protracted.

  The functionary looks at her watch, her pen hovering. 'Unfortunately, you are still not ready to see any files. I must explain the protocol.' It is now EL.15 a.m. Speaking as if to unruly children, she continues: 'Your task is difficult. I am responsible for all files relating to art theft and its investigation, from the Nazi and Stasi periods, a study that requires the examination of more than 1.1 million Nazi-era documents and tens of millions more generated by the Stasi. And there is only me and nine coworkers. Complicated research applications arrive every week from all over the world. As well as yours.'

  The Stasi had begun as a smaller mirror-image of Victor Abakumov's MGB, its sponsoring organization which gifted to it Soviet interrogation records from the end of the war, a starter kit on which to build its own domestic intelligence service. But under the guiding hand of Erich Mielke, who became Minister for State Security in 1957, it underwent a kind of Marxist mitosis, its founding departments of counter-espionage, sabotage, and subversion subdividing into daughter offices responsible for coercion, intrusion and betrayal: fifteen Directorates, twelve Departments, four secretariats, the Dynamo Sports Club, the Feliks Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment (named after the chief of the Soviet Union's Cheka), a publishing wing, a law school, a medical agency, as well as four work groups, including the fabulously titled Central Workgroup for Secrecy. At its height, the Stasi employed 91,016 staff and deployed a network of 180,000 informants (one for every sixty-two civilians).2

  The MGB file on Strauss that we had been sent from St Petersburg contained references to three interrogations of the doctor carried out in Berlin between 1945 and 1949. Copies of these statements should be here, in the Ministry of Truth. 'Then there is the four-eyes principle.' The functionary is still talking. We can see from a typed pro forma that she is nowhere near the end of her presentation. It is now 11.30 a.m. 'The principle is designed to absolutely prevent intrusion into personal data.' There is no point mentioning that intrusion into the personal enabled the creation of these files in the first place. 'So a minimum of two members of staff are in the room with a file at any time. But these files are not actually here, so to speak, only copies. The originals are where they have always been, in another building, now controlled by the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR.' She protectively strokes a binder.

  All original Stasi and Nazi-era documents remain at the defunct ministry's headquarters three miles east, in Berlin-Lichtenberg, locked inside steel cabinets specially designed to bear the weight of a nation's secrets. The Stasi inherited this site, a block-and-a-half compound on Normannenstrasse, in 1950. Our functionary in pearls shoots out statistics: 'Side by side the paper files would stretch 122,000 metres... Microfiche: 46,500 metres. 360,000 photos. Negatives: 600,000. Slides: 24,000. Videos: 3,850. Movies: 730. And 1OO,OOO sound recordings.'

  No one would really know the scale of the Stasi's enterprise until 15 January 1990, when pro-democracy campaigners of the recently formed GDR Citizen's Committee occupied the block-and-a-half and broke into the central archive. Here they found huge motorized card indexes of GDR citizens. Above were seven reinforced floors that held the files themselves and below a vast empty room lined with copper to prevent electronic interference, inside which the Stasi had been planning to install a supercomputer to accelerate the crunching of surveillance intelligence.3

  The functionary smiles. 'We are the reading supervisors. We cannot talk to those working in the central archive at the former ministry. We are prohibited from visiting the Stasi central archive - as are you. All decisions on what is released by them are final,' she declares. Those files that are approved for public consumption are sent down Karl-Marx-Allee to Otto-Braun-Strasse under guarded transport, where reading supervisors like the one before us will censor them yet again.

  'Can I be frank with you?' She has so far. 'You will see only a skeleton of information as we only have a fraction of what the Stasi actually produced. What is preserved in our archive are the deactivated papers. Cold cases put back in the store. Files on live objects or those out in the field have all vanished.'

  Strauss died in 1984, six years before the Stasi ceased to exist. Is this enough time for him to become a cold case? And what of Kuchumov (dead in 1993)? And Schlossoberinspektor Henkensiefken (who, the author of the cryptic doodle insisted, was a vital source for Kuchumov)? We have no idea if he is alive or dead. It is now n.40 a.m.

  Intelligence files of the Stasi, the East German secret police, bundled up ready for shredding, January 1990

  'Even that which had been filed was got at by agents in January and February 1990.' Photographs in the lobby of the Ministry of Truth show the interiors of Stasi offices and depots as they were found: documents bulging in mailbags, heading for thousands of shredders employed by agents to turn them into bails of paper straw. As the first thing that any prospective applicant to the Federal Authority sees, it marks every trip of discovery with a disconcerting air. One is further reassured as one rides to the ninth floor in the lift by a poster that tells how, in a small village outside Nuremberg, a Federal Authority team, known as the Puzzle People, is employed to stick back together more than 15,000 sacks of those files recovered in a partially shredded state, an exercise that will take more than 375 years to complete.

  'Laws too,' she explains. It is now LL.50 a.m. 'Reading of files is regulated by the Stasi Records Act, 199 L. According to Section 32, I must decide whether the people you are investigating are "contemporary historical personages". These files are available for study only if "no overriding protection-worthy interests of such persons are adversely affected".' Her finger traces the wording of the law. 'Therefore, I will black out all information unnecessary for your research. I will black out anything that relates to third parties. You will not receive any original documents, only photocopies. Photographs? They may be obtained only if they are already in the public domain.' We nod even though all of it is barely comprehensible. Although the Federal Aut
hority was set up so that victims of the Stasi could read their files, it seems that the process of extracting one's own can take a lifetime.

  'Unfortunately for you - ' we thought she had reached the end - 'there are also new considerations.' We sigh. 'The law has recently been amended and any files we have already censored will have to be censored again.' Former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl fought to introduce the legislation to open up the Stasi files in 1991. But now Kohl has brought about their closure. Having been found guilty of receiving 900,000 dollars in illegal funding for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for which he accepted a fine so that the charges would be dropped, Kohl then took an action out against the Federal Authority when it appeared that Stasi files (including transcripts of Stasi phone taps at CDU headquarters) might throw a brighter light on his activities. A court ruled in March 2002 that Kohl's privacy would be invaded if these Stasi files were accessed and as a result millions who were afforded no privacy at all in GDR times will find it far harder to find out how, who, what and why.4 Every time a request is made for a personal file the subject of it, even if they are former Stasi agents, must give permission before it is released. 'But you are lucky. As the re-censorship process for these files has not yet begun you have a small window of opportunity.'

  We have only twelve days left in Berlin before we are scheduled to return to St Petersburg. The functionary's watch reads now 12.10 p.m. 'You might find a few helpful references in here,' she says, passing an A4 ring binder over the desk.

  Before us are fourth-generation photocopies that have been scored through with so much thick black marker that they are barely legible. Someone zealously wielding a hole-puncher has cut words out of pages and whoever made these most recent copies has aligned them so badly that the reader has to guess the first word of every line. Then there is the prolific stamp of the Federal Authority itself. It recurs with such frequency that more words are obliterated beneath it. The indelible marker is lazily applied. On one page a name is blacked out but then mentioned in full seven lines beneath. Two small passport photographs of individuals wear sad Zorro-like masks of black marker. The only obvious fact that we can initially derive from these papers is that all of them have been prepared or filed by a Stasi agent with the initials P. E.

  However, what we have before us is something completely unexpected. Although the date has been obscured on the first document, it is not difficult to work out the year from the text. It is not an MGB interrogation of Gerhard Strauss but an official report written by him for Dr Paul Wandel, concerning Strauss's trip to Kaliningrad in December 1949. So now we get to see the Hotel Moscow interrogation from the other side of the desk.

  This version is strikingly different from Kuchumov's. In it Strauss accused Kuchumov of holding him under virtual house arrest after being interrogated. He said that he was detained in Kaliningrad for several weeks while his Soviet counterpart decided on an inadvisable excavation.

  Strauss wrote that 'the ground is hard as rock due to the sub-zero temperatures. Several days were taken up with clearing a passageway through the [castle's] former Albrecht Gate for the required Soviet excavator to pass through. It was far too big.' Strauss claimed that Kuchumov was so desperate to find the Amber Room, he excavated at random:

  I told him it was pointless without a proper set of plans for the castle, which I could find in Berlin. He shouted at me, accused me of knowing less than him about the layout of somewhere I had worked for years. It was most exasperating. Several days were wasted digging out the rubble that covered the remnants of the south-wing cellars. I tried to tell him that he would find only collapsed chambers there, but he did not believe it until he saw them for himself.5

  There is no mention here of the gossip, the second-hand intelligence, the desperate lists of names, the scene of Strauss stammering under the weight of Kuchumov's questions. But then Kuchumov failed to mention the shortsightedness of embarking on a major dig in the midst of a Kaliningrad winter. We have no idea who is telling the truth.

  It is only when we look up a biography of Paul Wandel, the recipient of Strauss's report, that we truly appreciate its significance. An early supporter of the German Communist Party (KPD), Paul Wandel had fled to Russia in August 1931. In Moscow, he had been selected for the Lenin School (for spies), entrance to which was limited to only the most promising cadre. Wandel graduated to the Marx-Engels Institute, where he was introduced to a senior German comrade, Wilhelm Pieck. During the war, Wandel acted as Pieck's personal secretary and in his spare time broadcast anti-fascist propaganda directed at weakening the morale of the Wehrmacht. After the return of the KPD leadership to Berlin in July 1945, the German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht appointed Wandel and Pieck to his inner circle, Wandel becoming Minister for Education and Pieck the GDR's first President.6

  By writing to Paul Wandel, Strauss was effectively reporting his thoughts on the Amber Room to President Pieck and, by extension, to Ulbricht, General Secretary of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Although it was barely a year old, the SED Politburo must have been as concerned with the fate of Amber Room as SovNarKom. We are beginning to appreciate the political muscle pushing the ongoing search for the Amber Room. We cannot yet comprehend why.

  'May I have?' The functionary is back and has her hand out. 12.30 p.m. 'We are closed for the day.'

  The next morning. In one of the anodyne white rooms at the Ministry of Truth, a file awaits us. Inside are more chewed-up pages, stamped, blotted, scribbled over, but we can see that all of them are authored by Dr Gerhard Strauss. In Kaliningrad, Strauss performed so poorly that he seemed to us to have nothing to contribute to the search for the Amber Room. An incidental witness who would fade away. And yet before us, in classified documents submitted to his superiors in the GDR, Strauss appears unstoppable, generating piles of intelligence about the Amber Room. Vain, naive, treacherous, arrogant, whoever the real Gerhard Strauss was, he was far more central to the search for the Amber Room than we had previously thought.

  The first document in this file is another report written by Strauss in 19 50 for Dr Paul Wandel. Strauss provided a detailed breakdown of all that he could recall about the events of 1945. And there was a lot. He wrote that on 15 January 1945 he returned to Konigsberg from a tour of castles in East Prussia, having learned of plans to evacuate art works from the city's castle. He found Dr Alfred Rohde and ten workmen surrounded by half-packed crates, duvets and pillows in the castle yard.

  Strauss even recalled the names of the blacksmith and joiner employed to make the crates: Herr Weiss and Herr Mann. Rohde complained that the task to evacuate treasures was being slowed down due to his additional responsibilities as a Leutnant with the Volkssturm (the Nazi home guard). Instead of spiriting priceless art works from the doomed city he was digging defences. Strauss wrote that he advised Rohde to take urgent action, particularly regarding the Amber Room. But Rohde informed him that it was of such value to the Nazi hierarchy that he could not move it without authorization from Dr Helmut Will, the city's Oberburgermeister. Getting permission from Dr Will was proving difficult. Strauss then left the city on other duties as an air-raid warden and returned only at the beginning of March 1945, by which time there was no sign of Rohde. The last thing Strauss heard about the Amber Room was from a junior civil servant at the Konigsberg office of the Ministry of Culture, who told him that it had been evacuated to 'somewhere east of Gorlitz'. So this was the source of his Gorlitz story, the hook in Strauss's letter of 1949 sent to Major Kunyn in Berlin, offering his assistance to the Soviet's Amber Room search. Strauss had then written: 'in March 1945 I did overhear that the evacuation of the Amber Room was assigned to one place, east of Gorlitz'.

  Nothing about his coming forward in 1949 had been down to chance. Prior to travelling to Kaliningrad in that year, he had spent four years researching the fate of the Amber Room using documents from the Soviet archive of Nazi files at Potsdam, a heavily militarized area south-west of blockaded Berlin. The S
oviet Military Administration had discovered caches of Nazi files all over Germany that they locked into this high- security archive. To gain access to them Strauss must have offered his services as a translator and convinced the Soviets of his Communist credentials. We cannot yet understand why a man who must have been trusted by the Soviet authorities in Berlin treated his comrade Kuchumov in Kaliningrad with contempt.

  Strauss studied the Nazi plan to evacuate art from Konigsberg thoroughly and, even though he would not meet Anatoly Kuchumov until December 1949, this research shows that both men were working independently on the same theory as to the fate of the Amber Room - that it was not destroyed in the Knights' Hall.

  In the dossier prepared for Wandel in E950, Strauss cited a letter dated November 1944 from Gauleiter Erich Koch to Martin Mutschmann, the Gauleiter of Saxony, in which Koch advised his counterpart that, due to the worsening military situation in East Prussia, he was sending a museum official to Dresden, in Saxony, to search for potential storage facilities.

  In November 1944 Saxony was still a safe haven, with an array of disused mines, caves and medieval fortresses in which things of value could be concealed. It was also a gateway to Bavaria and Austria, where the Nazi High Command had built its eyries and Hitler had his southern headquarters, the Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden.

  The next wartime document in Strauss's dossier for Wandel was a report from the man chosen by Koch as his emissary, Helmut Friesen, head of the Provincial Memorials Office in Konigsberg. Friesen arrived in Dresden on 22 November 1944 and met Arthur Grafe, chief of Saxony's Department of State Collections of Art, Science, Castles, Gardens and Libraries. An account of this meeting written by Arthur Grafe revealed that the two men discussed 'the storage of irreplaceable art treasures of high monumental value' and identified one of them as 'the famous Amber Room, a present from Frederick the Great toTsar Peter III [sic] that had been rescued after the terror air raid on Konigsberg'.7