The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  It was a coup for the joint British-German intelligence operation code-named Old Lace, which had been tasked with chasing down missing Nazis. Erich Koch, who had been among the first to join the National Socialist movement in 1922 and bore party ticket number 90, was one of the most wanted, along with Bormann, Eichmann and Mengele. However, with no central prosecuting authority now in place, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg having closed, the British guarded Koch at their base in Bielefeld, while they decided what to do with him.

  Stalin demanded to be allowed to prosecute Koch, since more than four million Soviet citizens had died and two million more been sent to Nazi work camps during his tenure as Reich's Commissar for the Ukraine (a position he held before becoming Gauleiter of East Prussia). While the British requested that the Soviets send a detailed legal case for extradition, Koch launched his own action, submitting a plea: I know that as a former member of the Nazi Party... I have incurred heavy political guilt but I would ask you to believe that in all my political and human mistakes I . . . was servicing a good cause and the welfare of my people.'3 He wrote that he had no illusions as to 'what awaits me behind the Iron Curtain'. It was not death he feared 'but the base and inhuman treatment that this [Soviet] system applies to its opponents. It is the cold-blooded way in which a human being is made use of and then atrociously killed.' (This from the man who had ordered the corpses of Soviet prisoners in Rovno to be incinerated and the ash sold as fertilizer to German farmers.)

  The British were unmoved by Koch's appeal but the former Gauleiter would not be tried in the Soviet Union. Instead of witness statements, affidavits and photographs, the Soviets submitted a terse letter claiming that Nuremberg had already established Koch's 'grievous war crimes'.4 Then another application for Koch arrived in West Berlin and this one was a detailed legal document accompanied by eyewitness accounts married to specific charges. It had been compiled by the Polish government. The British dispatched the former Gauleiter of East Prussia to Warsaw.

  But having got him, the Poles declined to try Koch. For nine years he was held on remand at Warsaw prison, a delay that was never adequately explained, although the Poles claimed weakly that he was too sick to face trial. We contrast the Polish inactivity with Nuremberg, in which a significant proportion of the leadership of the Third Reich was tried, prosecuted, jailed or hanged in just eighteen months.

  News footage of the trial of Erich Koch in Warsaw, 1959

  It was only in November 1958 that the Poles began the case against Koch. Televised footage shows a tearful former Gauleiter lolling in the dock with a handkerchief tied around his head like a casualty of the Great War. On 19 March 1959, after ten years in custody, and a court case of four months and seventeen days, during which L,500 pages of evidence had been heard, the Poles finally passed the death sentence. Koch immediately launched an appeal on grounds of ill-health, further delaying his fate, an opportunity that would be pounced upon by the Soviets.

  We have asked Our Friend the Professor in St Petersburg to scour the Kuchumov papers for any references to the former Gauleiter of East Prussia and with only four days left on our readers' tickets a couriered package arrives at our Berlin hotel. It contains an extraordinary series of classified Soviet documents. The first is a letter from the Catherine Palace, dated 28 March 1959, nine days after the death sentence on Koch was passed, then suspended pending an appeal. Comrade A.V Bobidanosov wrote to the office of the General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union: 'One can add another crime to all the terrible crimes committed by Nazi troops on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union: the robbery of the Amber Room from the Catherine Palace.'

  Comrade Bobidanosov reported that research to date 'clearly shows that the Amber Room has not perished in the war and could not have been taken out of Kaliningrad... One can see that high-ranking German officials were interested in the fate of the most valuable international art trophy in the world. Therefore it is possible that Erich Koch could have known about [the Amber Room's] fate.'

  Comrade Bobidanosov continued:

  As far as we know in the recent trial in Warsaw the Amber Room was never mentioned and therefore it is possible that this war criminal may take his mystery to the grave. Therefore the state commission for search of art treasures is urging you to address the general Polish prosecutor with the following requests:

  1. Erich Koch should be interrogated about the Amber Room. 2. One should check in the trial materials to see if any witness reports shed light on transportation of the Amber Room.

  The General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union replied to Comrade Bobidanosov on 3 June 1959: 'According to our request the authorities in Poland have interrogated the former Gauleiter Erich Koch. But he knows nothing of the fate of the Amber Room and he was not aware of the existence of the room and never was informed about its unique value. Also, in the materials of his trial there is no trace of the Amber Room.'5

  It was a strange response from the Poles. We recall that in 1949 Dr Gerhard Strauss had furnished the Soviets with a dossier of evidence connecting Koch to the Amber Room: letters from him to Gauleiter Mutschmann in Dresden, asking for secure storage facilities; orders from him to Alfred Rohde to inspect castles in Saxony for places to hide 'irreplaceable treasures', including the Amber Room.

  Unsurprisingly, the Soviets refused to accept the Polish response and insisted on sending their own emissary to interrogate Erich Koch. They would need a neutral figure who would not aggravate the Poles or the former Gauleiter. We search for an account of the meeting. There is no reference to it in the literature archive but in the Ministry of Truth we come across a report dated 24 June 1959.6 In it we read that a top-secret grilling took place that month in the GDR embassy in Warsaw and, examining the list of those who attended, see that the man chosen as the Soviet's emissary was none other than Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss of Humboldt University. For us, Strauss had begun as an incidental character, a name in a grease-flecked letter discarded by a Soviet curator, but now he seems to crop up everywhere. By 1959 he must have been very highly regarded by both Moscow and the GDR Politburo to have been chosen to front such delicate negotiations.

  The minute shows that the meeting - attended by Strauss, Erich Koch, his lawyer, the GDR Deputy Ambassador Riesner and the Polish Solicitor General - got off to a terrible start. One of the prison warders had given Koch Strauss's recent articles about the Amber Room, published in Freie Welt. Koch immediately began to attack Strauss, saying that he was unhappy about the articles and the 'accusations raised' that he had some connection to the fate of the Amber Room. A Nazi prisoner on death row faced the emissary of the bloc, accusing him of peddling lies like a tabloid journalist. It must have been an excruciatingly embarrassing moment for Strauss, who struggled to reassure the former Gauleiter that he was in fact a serious East German academic trying to solve the mystery of the Amber Room on behalf of his government. 'It was possible to make light of it,' Strauss reported. We will never know what Strauss really told Koch about Freie Welt, but the former Gauleiter kept talking.

  Strauss and the prisoner then discussed art concealed in bunkers. Koch's knowledge of East Prussian storage facilities, Strauss noted, tallied with his own and the former Gauleiter conceded that it was possible that the Amber Room had been hidden in a bunker or cellar. However, Koch insisted he had never given orders concerning the Amber Room, a reply that Strauss cautioned should be seen in a wider context. 'In total Koch took great care to give only such information that minimized his own responsibility and spoke in his favour.' Although the former Gauleiter claimed to have no personal knowledge of the fate of the Amber Room, he said he thought it impossible for it to have been evacuated to Germany.

  Koch proposed his own radical theory. Strauss wrote: 'Koch thinks it is likely that the Amber Room was transported by the Soviet Army but when I said, "Well, in that case it would have been reinstalled in Pushkin," Koch accepted that my argument was more convincing than his.' As the ninety-minute meeting drew to a clo
se, Koch demanded Strauss's 'word of honour' that their discussion would remain confidential. 'Nobody should find out that he was helping to find the Amber Room,' Strauss reported. 'At the moment we cannot expect more from Koch, but because he is trying to influence his appeal process, it is not impossible that shortly we shall get further statements from him.'

  We had left our meeting with Uwe Geissler still unsure of how the Stasi had tied Erich Koch to the Amber Room and a hiding place in Germany. In this Stasi report Koch divulged no evidence connecting himself to the Amber Room or an evacuation plan ending in Germany. But just as we begin to think that Geissler may have been lying, the next document sent to us from St Petersburg bolsters Geissler's story. He told us that in the summer of 1959 a GDR citizen codenamed 'Rudi Ringel' had been flown to Kaliningrad and cross-examined by party functionaries. Here we read confirmation that 'Rudi Ringel' did exist and that this source was flown to Kaliningrad in the summer of 1959. The Soviet official who interrogated him there was Leningrad curator Anatoly Kuchumov.

  In a typed report marked 'Ringel: Top Secret', Kuchumov summarized the witness's story. It was remarkably similar to the one Geissler told us. Kuchumov wrote:

  In July 1949, two years after the death of his father, when the family was preparing to move house, ['Rudi Ringel'] was sent to clear the cellar by his mother. Under some rough moist coal he found a leather map pouch, like the ones used by soldiers during the war. It was covered in mildew. Its contents were wet through and stuck together. What could be deciphered were typewritten sheets of orders, reports, parts of a Konigsberg town plan and various SS documents with passport photos of his father [SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel'], one of which bore Himmler's signature. 'Rudi Ringel' was only thirteen but old enough to understand the significance.7

  So the map that 'Rudi Ringel' recalled seeing was of Konigsberg, not Germany. Geissler's story was still at odds with this one.

  Kuchumov asked 'Rudi Ringel' to reproduce from memory the contents of the map pouch and noted that the witness reconstructed seven documents, each of which he signed as 'true copies'. Kuchumov initialled them. Comrade Wagnerman translated them. Comrade Shaposhikovna of the KGB 'certified' them.

  The first reconstructed document was a letter addressed to 'Rudi Ringel's' father, dated December 1944:

  To SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel'. It is supposed that soon in Konigsberg Operation Grime will begin. It will then be necessary for you, as agreed, to assume your responsibility for the evacuation of the Amber Room. Borders B-Sch-Kniproderstrasse, Steindamm, Reihe/BU3UP, visible from streets Jakobstrasse, Gezekusplatz. After burying it, blow up the building. Then you and your officers go to place [name missing], moving there as agreed. When you have successfully completed this mission please confirm by courier. Heil Hitler.

  Although the street names are garbled, what was almost certainly being described here was a location in Konigsberg, somewhere adjacent to Steindamm Strasse.

  'Rudi Ringel' recalled that the next document he read was marked 'Top Secret' and addressed to 'the Main Office of the Reich's Security Minister V.V.S. (military air forces department)': 'Order is executed. Action Amber Room is finished. Entrance according to orders has been blown up. Many victims due to enemy action. I am coming to agreed place [name missing].' 'Rudi Ringel' recalled his father, the SS Sturmbannfiihrer, had signed the message although it was not dated.

  Kuchumov sketched a map of the centre of Konigsberg. At the junction of Steindamm Strasse and Lange Reihe the great curator marked Steindamm Church, a pond and a First World War monument. An area running between the church and the pond was shaded and labelled 'bunker'. If 'Rudi Ringel' could be relied on, then the evacuation of the Amber Room, codenamed Operation Griine (Green), had gone ahead and the Soviet treasure had been taken from Konigsberg Castle and concealed somewhere near Steindamm Church. We wonder how the Stasi could have reached the conclusion that the Amber Room was evacuated to Germany.8

  Frustratingly, the five remaining documents transcribed by 'Rudi Ringel' are missing from our file. We call St Petersburg and ask the Professor to recheck the index. She soon gets back to us: 'Nothing.' We revisit the Ministry of Truth to see if the Stasi was sent a record of Kuchumov's debriefing of 'Rudi Ringel'. Again nothing.

  All we have before us from the literature archive are yet more of Kuchumov's newspaper clippings and they concern Erich Koch.

  As Strauss predicted in 1959, Erich Koch soon began to talk again about the Amber Room, leaking information to his guards at Mokatovska Prison. In September 1961 he also spoke to Polish journalist Vladimir Orlovsky and then in October to Izvestiya: 'Erich Koch knows of two bunkers where art works were hidden by Rohde and Dr Helmut Will.9 There, among other items, are some things from his own collection. He cannot be LOO per cent sure that the Amber Room is there but he thinks it almost certainly is.'10 Although Koch still denied any responsibility for the Amber Room, he was almost certain that it had been moved to a bunker beneath Konigsberg, a story that seemed to tally with the evidence of letter-writer 'Rudi Ringel'.

  Three years later the Polish authorities commuted Erich Koch's death sentence to life, publicly stating that the prisoner had been reprieved because he was suffering from a terminal illness. Shortly after, Koch was transferred to a specially built compound in the Polish countryside, from where he continued to cooperate.11 In 1967 stories leaked out that the former Gauleiter (remarkably, still alive) had incriminated Reichsleiter Bormann, who, he said, was keen to acquire the Amber Room, which in Koch's estimation 'was worth in excess of 50 million dollars'.12

  On 5 February 1967 TASS reported that the Soviet authorities were now certain that the Amber Room was in East Prussia after Koch finally admitted that it was he who gave the order to Alfred Rohde and Dr Helmut Will 'to take out this treasure' and conceal it in a bunker under a city church near Steindamm. Surely this was the same bunker identified by Kuchumov on a map he drew eight years earlier, having interrogated GDR letter-writer 'Rudi Ringel'. At the end of February 1967 TASS revealed that Soviet investigators were indeed heading for Konigsberg - with heavy drilling equipment. There is no record here of what this dig achieved.13

  When the articles in Kaliningradskaya Pravda and Freie Welt came out in 1958 and E959, the public focus was drawn towards unnamed Nazis who were accused of evacuating the Amber Room from Konigsberg Castle, although no location for it was revealed (or perhaps known). New information from 'Rudi Ringel', writing in response to these articles, suggested that the unnamed Nazi was Erich Koch. In E967 Koch finally admitted that he had been involved in the Amber Room evacuation (although he insisted that it was to another site in Kaliningrad). At the same time the Stasi and the KGB seemed to be using the Koch-Ringel evidence to pull in different directions. Geissler assured us that the Stasi interpreted the story in such a way that it led them to search for the Amber Room in Germany where they believed Erich Koch had had it sent. The KGB was sticking with Kaliningrad.

  Maybe we are missing the point. We are acutely aware of the fact that time is running out. Do we stay here in Berlin or return to St Petersburg? We take the lift to the ninth floor of the Ministry of Truth in Berlin and after half a morning searching through hundreds of censored interrogation documents we come across this draft report from 1976: 'Plan of measures for the carefully concentrated pursuit of the search for the tracks of the Amber Room on the territory of the GDR'. Here at last is a report, written in the Stasi's clumsy language, about its German operation. We hope it will explain or rebut Geissler's statement. Thankfully, because there are not many names contained in it, the censors have spared the document.14

  Oberstleutnant Paul Enke advised his section head Oberst Hans Seufert: 'We are aware that in the Soviet Union the search is run by a government commission but based on the clues this search has been concentrated exclusively on Kaliningrad and only relatively little trouble has been taken for an intensive exposure of clues and hints pointing to hiding places in Saxony and Thuringia.' This statement suggested that
by 1976, nine years after TASS reported that digging had begun in Kaliningrad, based on Erich Koch's evidence, the Soviets still had not found anything.

  Enke recommended: 'Intensive, on-the-spot investigations into the large numbers of facts and clues. The veiled hint of Koch to where his private collection is located may refer to Thuringian storage depots as well as concealment locations in western Saxony.'

  The report continued:

  Further recommendations: it seems necessary to question Erich Koch extensively on the subject of his private collection. Such an investigation was carried out once already in i960 [sic] by Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss, Berlin, without any result and had anyhow been restricted exclusively to Kaliningrad. Koch could nowadays be given some clues that could be of assistance to help his memory and start him thinking. (Suggested questions attached.)

  This is exactly what Geissler told us. The KGB was thought to have misinterpreted the evidence provided by Koch and 'Rudi Ringel'.

  Enke called for an 'investigation of the true role of SS Sturmbannfiihrer "Ringel" in the concealment of the Amber Room'. He advised: 'The statements made by "Rudi Ringel" during questioning by a Soviet Government Commission [Anatoly Kuchumov] rest only on his childhood memories (he was thirteen in 1949). I recommend re-questioning now.'