The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Strauss had told Anatoly Kuchumov during their interrogation sessions in December 1949 that Rohde was never a Nazi and that his politics (if he had any) were centre-left. But here in Pantheon Rohde was describing the Amber Room as a 'Prussian cultural monument' that had been 'rescued' from the 'furthest forward fighting' around Leningrad after 'a nearly unimaginable storm of victories' by the German army. (Although, of course, Rohde may have had no choice but to frame history in this patriotic language.)

  Dismissing the wreckage and plunder of the Leningrad palaces as 'unavoidable war damage', Rohde revealed that 'Captain Solms Laubach supervised several army authorities, comprising one NCO and six men of a pioneer company, [who] making a supreme effort and through sharing their common interests, succeeded within thirty-six hours in this urgent dismantling job.'

  Thirty-six hours. We are shocked to learn that it took the Nazis only a day-and-a-half to unlock the complex amber puzzle that Anatoly Kuchumov had claimed was impossible to dismantle. We recall that Kuchumov had had eight days to pack up the palaces and we wonder how this article would have reflected on him when Moscow read it. Rohde concluded on a rousing note: 'In its deepest meaning of the words, the Frederick I Amber Room had thereby returned to its native land.'

  Enke's most interesting cutting was from the Konigsberg Allgemeine Zeitung, which reported how, on 8 July 1944, Bernard Rust, Reich Minister for Science, Education and Public Instruction, visited Konigsberg to preside over the four hundredth anniversary of Albertus-University. During a celebratory dinner thrown at the Blutgericht restaurant (in Konigsberg Castle's old torture chamber), Rust told guests that the time had come to start moving the Third Reich's treasures into the heart of the Fatherland. Enke believed that he had found the origin of the plan to evacuate the Amber Room - and it had been conceived as early as 8 July 1944.

  Days later, Amtmann Mertz, one of Rust's officers from Berlin, arrived in Konigsberg with orders for Alfred Rohde. He was to dismantle the Amber Room immediately and send it with other art works to a storage facility at Kassel, the medieval city on the River Fulda where the Brothers Grimm had written their fairy tales. But the Gauleiter of East Prussia intervened. According to Enke, Erich Koch argued that moving the city's treasures and in particular the Amber Room would undermine morale. Mertz returned to Berlin to seek advice.27

  By November 1944 Erich Koch had been persuaded to let the evacuations go ahead. Here in the file we see that Enke read Gerhard Strauss's report to his minister, Paul Wandel, written in 1950. And, like Strauss, Enke highlighted the correspondence between Erich Koch and Martin Mutschmann, from November 1944. Like Strauss, Enke stated that both Gauleiters approved a plan to set aside a castle in Saxony for the Amber Room (if it could be transported out of Konigsberg).

  Then we reach the critical part of the file. Was Enke able to prove that the Amber Room had been moved out of Konigsberg? With his access to Nazi wartime archives, he was able to reconstruct the last days and months of the battle for East Prussia in much more detail than Anatoly Kuchumov, who had attempted the same exercise in 1946.

  Kuchumov had concluded that the last train out of Konigsberg had been on 22 January 1945. However, Enke learned that there were two trains that day: a so-called Special Gauleiter Train, which supposedly took Erich Koch to safety, and also a D-Zug, a civilian express train. This meant there had been a second opportunity to move the Amber Room.

  Reviewing orders issued by the Nazi High Command, Enke also found a record of a ship leaving Konigsberg on 22 January 1945. According to an order from Hitler to Admiral Donitz, the German navy's commander-in-chief, the Emden, a small cruiser that had been laid up in the Konigsberg shipyard, set sail on a secret mission. Nazi footage discovered long after Enke conducted his research, shot by Goebbels's cameramen, shows how on the Emden's deck two coffins lay draped with old flags from German regiments that had fought the battle of Tannenberg, east of Konigsberg, where the Russian army had been crushed in one of the most decisive campaigns of August 19E4. Surrounded by an honour guard, the coffins contained the bodies of former Reich President General von Hindenburg and his wife, who had been disinterred from a memorial constructed at Tannenberg. On the Fiihrer's orders, icebreakers towed the Emden to Pillau, where the coffins were transferred to a passenger steamer, Pretoria, that set out for Stettin the same night. If bodies could be moved on 22 January 1945, Enke asked, what else might have been on board?

  Pulling together orders, intercepts and old footage, Enke discovered that even after the Red Army had reached Elbing, south-west of Konigsberg, cutting off all direct routes to Germany, it would still have been possible until 31 January 1945 for the Nazis to transport crates and people out of the region by heading north-west up through the Samland Peninsula before boarding a boat at Palmnicken (now Yantarny).

  Enke found orders issued by Gauleiter Erich Koch for ammunition to be supplied to Konigsberg using this sea route that showed it must have remained open until March 1945. Enke also deduced that between 19 February and 6 or 7 April 1945, German forces temporarily rallied, reopening roads between Konigsberg and Pillau, leaving the possibility that the Amber Room could have been evacuated right up until two days before the fall of the city.28

  Enke concluded: 'I am convinced that the Amber Room and further precious art treasures robbed in the Soviet Union by the fascists were transported to the West. If one were able to search the archives of the Wehrmacht one would find the Amber Room's destination.' There was but one small hitch for Enke, working in the GDR. The main Wehrmacht military archive was at Freiburg im Breisgau, in West Germany.29

  'The file please.' An outstretched hand. The working day has ended. Exactly at 4 p.m.

  Paul Enke must have been stuck for many months in the air-tight archives, without access to those quickening modern aids of fax and Internet. Even the telephone was a problem. He could not just pick it up and call Moscow or Leningrad when he needed to check a fact. And those responsible for generating most of the material he was reading had been hanged, hounded, jailed or had flitted to the West or South America.

  But in this melee Enke fought to prove that the Amber Room had been evacuated to Germany, disproving the conclusions of Anatoly Kuchumov and Gerhard Strauss, who believed that it had survived the war but remained concealed somewhere in Konigsberg.

  Enke worked in a blizzard of foreign-sounding names, obscure locations, train timetables and shipping news. Cyrillic text was transliterated into German and back again, details eroding with every version. The Soviet curator began life as 'Kuchumov' before becoming 'Kugumow' and then 'Kutschumow'. A Leningrad suburb was once called Tsarskoye Selo and then Detskoye Selo before becoming Pushkin. An East Prussian village now sat in Poland with a new name and resettled population who knew nothing about the past. And yet Enke stayed the course, although we do not know what he had discovered that made him so certain the Amber Room had reached Germany.

  We are relieved to see that the next binder that arrives on the white plastic table is filled with far more contemporary Stasi material on the Amber Room. Most of it dates to the 1970S and we hope that it may at last give us a glimpse of the intelligence that prompted the Minister for State Security to mount a full-blown inquiry into the fate of the missing treasure.

  What we notice straight away is how Enke was ordered to deploy the ministry's training manual to interrogate eyewitnesses to the Amber Room story. We flick greedily through pages of surveillance reports of 'operationally interesting persons', written up from notes probably made on the backs of envelopes, scribbled on sheets torn out of school exercise books and on U-bahn or cinema tickets.

  This binder bulges with cross-references to Operative Personenkontrolle files (OPK), a dossier opened on any individual selected by the Stasi for further investigation. Each OPK began with a formulaic description: gender, age, height, hair colour, eye colour, distinguishing features. Then came an opening report, followed by a plan of action, requests for clandestine checks, with responses ranging from 'p
rovisional arrest' to 'arrest' and from 'search' to 'interrogation'.

  There were school and university records, curriculum vitae and statements taken from neighbours, co-workers, friends and family. There were maps of housing estates and written comments: 'Is it possible to get the keys to his apartment without telling him?' Or: 'Does this "object" have a mistress we could approach?' And: 'We are not aware of the address of Countess Schwerin in the Federal Republic of Germany. The source of the information is one of her relatives and has been passed to us by a reliable and trustworthy informant.'

  From this ball of information some individuals became Operativ Vorgangs or OVs, targets for a full-blown investigation. Agents used a range of technological devices that made the task of peeling back the layers of privacy easier. Again more choices: 'A' measures (telephone tapping) or 'B' measures (bugging).30 Odour samples were requested, collected from crotches and armpits of 'hostile-negative elements'. The Stasi transferred the swatches to their 'smell conserve', to be brought out along with packs of hounds called the schnuffeltieren if a surveillance 'object' went AWOL.

  There was also the van painted with the cheery slogan 'Fresh Fish from Rostock!' In GDR times everyone knew that inside were men and women stacked like trays of silvery mackerel, up to seven prisoners in one small vehicle that drove repeatedly around the suburban streets so everyone would know. Round up in daylight. Interrogate at night. The proliferating paranoia drove citizens to extraordinary lengths to protect themselves, secreting miniature pencils in body cavities when they feared the agents of the state were approaching, so that later they might have something with which to scribble a plea for help. The Stasi responded to by introducing the 'penis search'.31

  Judging from the number of surveillance forms and OV files that are contained in this one binder, Enke was evidently in pursuit of a rich new seam of intelligence about the Amber Room.

  Here we at last come across a small reference to the 1959 articles in Freie Welt (written by Gerhard Strauss, identifying for the first time that the Amber Room had survived the war). Enke wrote that much of the intelligence that he was acting upon came from readers of Freie Welt. 'Stolz', the former Stasi agent we had met in the Berlin Swissotel, had been right. By disguising the source of the Freie Welt story (the Stasi and KGB), readers had responded in their hundreds.

  However, frustratingly, almost every detail that identified these readers and what they had volunteered, has been blacked out. All our potential leads and therefore any insight into the Stasi's thinking on the Amber Room have been obliterated by the Ministry of Truth's censors.

  In some files only the 'Reg-Nr', the case number for a particular 'object', remains and the Ministry of Truth will not give us access to the corresponding name index. What has not been obscured was written deploying the terminology of Erich Mielke's Dictionary of Political-Operative Work, a 500-page lexicon of terms and definitions that was into its third edition when the Berlin Wall fell.32

  Take the word 'hate'. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'A feeling of intense dislike, anger, hostility, or animosity'. The minister's favourite word, hass, was defined as 'one of the fundamental features of the passionate and irreconcilable struggle against the enemy', an essential attribute for any good Chekist. And although this lexicon would ultimately control the lives of everyone within the GDR, it was one of the many paradoxes of the time that it was never made available to the general public, who were left deliberately confused and at cross-purposes. As are we, reading the files now.

  What we are left with in this binder is an intriguing hierarchy of code-names that we cannot decipher without help.

  Günter Wermusch, the editor of Paul Enke's Bernsteinzimmer Report, lives in an eastern Berlin suburb where the past has been smothered with a forest of identical towers. As we walk past the sports centre, it echoes to the splash of a lone swimmer.

  Before our fingers have left the buzzer a voice urges: 'You must walk up. Elevator is kaput.' We climb eighteen flights. A door is open. In the shadows stands a man who is younger than we had expected, wearing two days' stubble and a synthetic tracksuit. Giinter Wermusch looks like a bedraggled Soviet sports coach, the kind who shouted gruff instructions to shrimpy gymnasts on television in the 1970S. 'Better come in,' he mutters, limping back through the apartment.

  We smell mildewed books, boredom and emptiness. In the kitchen a solitary supper is laid out on the grey Formica: a bottle of red wine, a tin of mushrooms, a knife and fork. The hallway is stuffed with old cardboard boxes spilling papers on to the floor, files stacked precariously on top of them beside a battered photocopier. Russian paperbacks prop up homemade shelves. We notice that there are no family photographs on the walls. No finger-paintings on the fridge.

  'Zo, you've flown from London, eh? I hope not just to see me. I think

  Günter Wermusch

  I might disappoint.' Wermusch clears his throat and fills a briar pipe from a pouch of vanilla-scented tobacco. An English dictionary sits on the arm of his chair beside several boxes of pills. 'Who gave you my name? Who have you talked to?'

  We do not mention 'Stolz' or the Ministry of Truth files just yet. We stick to the Bernsteinzimmer Report.

  'I'm a Lektor,' Wermusch says defensively, rippling through the pages of his dictionary. 'Yes, an editor, not quite the right word but you know what I mean? I am a historian and with Bernsteinzimmer Report I did what my publishing house, Die Wirtschaft, asked of me.' He limps over to the picture window that fills the far wall with a distant view of the giant TV tower on Alexanderplatz.

  And Paul Enke, we ask? How did you meet him?

  Wermusch has boxed himself into a corner. 'He came to me in 1984,' he says, trapped between the shelves and a chair. I had edited a scientific book on amber. It contained a chapter on the Bernsteinzimmer. Enke rang up. He said he'd been researching the mystery since the 1950S. He had a manuscript he wanted me to look at.' A kiss-curl of smoke floats over Wermusch's head.

  What did he tell you about his research, we ask?

  'Enke told me he had seen the Amber Room in Konigsberg during the war and later became a research officer of the Volkspolizei. The Amber Room investigation was like his weekend thing. A hobby-Historiker, we call people like him. Why should I be suspicious?' We could think of a number of reasons but say nothing.

  'At the time I presumed Enke had got interested the same way we all had. The Freie Welt articles in E959 got everyone very excited. Went and bought metal detectors.' Freie Welt again. Gerhard Strauss's articles obviously succeeded in generating a lasting clamour.

  Wermusch ponders a stain on his carpet. 'In 1959 we all thought we would find something that everyone else had overlooked. The Amber Room story did that, ja} So when Enke came to Die Wirtschaft in E984, we thought it seemed like a great idea to publish his manuscript. Get people excited again.' The phone rings in the hall. Wermusch looks relieved. He limps out. 'Wer ist da? Nein. Nein. Nicht. Eine minute.' He drops the receiver and shuffles back into the room, distracted. 'All the time, these people call. I don't know who they are.'

  Are they ringing about the Amber Room, we ask? Wermusch does not answer.

  'Before die Wende you didn't ask questions,' Wermusch says, forgetting the caller and hanging up. 'We worked on the manuscript at Paul Enke's house in Berlin-Griinau. There was always a third man present, with black hair, but he never talked. Enke once introduced him as "my friend Hans".'

  You met this man on dozens of occasions and never knew who he was, we ask?

  I only found out after Enke died in December 1987.' Wermusch pauses. He stares at us. Looks at his watch. He fills his pipe and then begins again. 'The funeral. I suppose I was invited because I was Enke's Lektor. We were not great friends or anything. Zo, there were a few people to see him off. But no green policemen. You know, the Volkspolizei. No friends from the force turning up. I thought it was, er, sonderbar.' Wermusch rifles through the dictionary. 'Odd, ja} The only person I recognized was the black-haired silent man
from the meetings in Enke's house. I went up to him after the service. He introduced himself as Hans Seufert.'

  Seufert. The Stasi Oberst or colonel in charge of the Amber Room study group.

  I asked Seufert: "Where are Enke's Volkspolizei colleagues? Seufert laughed at me. "Comrade," he said. "We don't wear uniforms." He was laughing so much he could not get his words out. And I still didn't get it.'

  We sit in silence, pondering Wermusch's claim to have worked out Enke's membership of the Stasi only after the funeral.

  Can we clear up something else, we ask?

  'Anything,' he splutters. 'Whatever you like.'

  Were you in the Stasi too, we ask?

  Wermusch jumps up, a glimpse of his old agility returning, and rustles furiously through one of his boxes. I was only ever paid by my publishing house,' he shouts over his shoulder. 'Look, look at the proof.' He bounds over to pass us some paperwork mutilated with the familiar stamp of the Ministry of Truth. But he sees that we linger over an abbreviation next to his name: 'Gen.'

  'Nein. Nein. Nein.' He pounds the arm of his chair. 'Nicht General but Genosse. We were all comrades. Look here. Look at this word.' He points to Freiwilliger. 'Volunteer, that's what I was. Volunteer, not Stasi, not informer. Take it. I have another copy.'33 We have no idea of what he 'volunteered' for but he has a ready supply of these non-incriminating references from his Stasi file. 'How could I be Stasi after all?' He rings his hands. 'My father was in the SS.' The warped logic of unified Germany is that someone would rather expose their family's Nazi pedigree than be revealed as Stasi. 'Maybe I was singled out to edit the book because I was good at Russian. I don't know. I had worked for Comrade Naumann as translator. I went with him to Moscow several times.' (Konrad Naumann had been the SED's party boss for East Berlin in the early 1980S and held a senior position in the Politburo.)