The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Why Enke felt it necessary to reanalyse the statements made by Erich Koch and 'Rudi Ringel' becomes clearer when we read a report of a research trip to Thuringia and Saxony conducted by Enke in June 1976.

  He was accompanied by Gerda, his wife (a couple on holiday was a 'legend' that the Stasi used time and again). They headed first for Weimar, the birthplace of the Weimar Republic. Leaving Gerda to pace the cobbled streets down which Hitler's armour-plated Mercedes once clattered, Enke set up office in the local Stasi headquarters, a villa on Cranach-Strasse, where he spent hours poring over Nazi-era archive material.

  Enke reported to Seufert: 'Everything which the Nazis had brought to Thuringia in order to continue the good life... had to be left behind. Palaces, even the dance halls of many inns, had been filled up to their ceilings with luxury goods.'15 In the Weimar archives, Enke immediately encountered 'interesting traces' of Koch, including 'extensive stocks of files from the estate of his bloody governance of the Ukraine that had been evacuated to [nearby] Bad Sulza at the beginning of 1945'.

  Many East Prussian artefacts had been evacuated to Thuringia in the spring of 1945, Enke reported, including medieval sculptures from Marienburg Castle (today Malbork in Poland) and an iron chest of the St George Brotherhood from Elbing. A few days later, Enke found an inventory from 1945 of 'museum goods delivered for storage to the State Museum of Weimar', written by its wartime director, Dr Walter Scheidig. It included valuable Gobelin tapestries, paintings and a large collection of wall-mounted silver candelabras. But what initially caught Enke's eye were paintings of insignificant monetary value: A View of Elberfeld, Roaring Monarch of the Glen and a series of third-rate family portraits.

  Enke reported that Elberfeld, in the Rhineland, was the birthplace of Erich Koch and, according to papers Enke had read in Potsdam, Roaring Monarch of the Glen was one of many gifts received by the Gauleiter while he was in Konigsberg. Enke contacted East Berlin: 'We have found the relocation site of [Koch's] robbed collection, even without Koch's assistance!' Enke added that he had once read in a GDR newspaper that Erich Koch had bragged: 'If you find my art collection then you will find the Amber Room too.' Enke believed he was closing in on something significant.

  Enke went in search of Dr Scheidig, who had compiled the inventory of Koch's evacuated art works. At the remains of the State Museum of Weimar (heavily bombed in the war and still a ruin in 1976), Enke found an elderly retired art dealer who told him that Scheidig was dead. But Enke should not worry, as the dealer (name blacked out) also knew how the Weimar museum came to receive Erich Koch's collection.

  The old art dealer recalled that a Nazi officer had arrived in a van on 9 February 1945, saying that he was an 'administrator for Gauleiter Koch' and was 'bringing museum treasures from Konigsberg'. The officer wore the uniform of the Nationalionalsozialitsches Fliegerkorps (NSFK) and appeared uneasy. He was 'neither an art historian nor a museum curator' and seemed anxious to leave as soon as he had unloaded the contents of his van. The old man noted that the cargo was an assortment of 'crates, racks, suitcases and chests' that museum staff stacked unopened on the ground floor. 'Everything about the evacuation of these crates seemed to have been conducted without thought or pre-planning, leaving much to chance,' Enke wrote.16

  After several weeks of bombing raids over Weimar, on 9 April 1945 (the day that Konigsberg surrendered) Gauleiter Koch's administrator returned to remove the 'museum goods from Konigsberg', cramming crates and suitcases into a small van with Swiss number plates, operating under the flag of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He came back again the next day to take another batch and said he would return on 21 April for the last. But he never returned, since the next force to arrive in Weimar was the US Third Army (on 11 April 1945) and American art experts who accompanied the troops found the unclaimed crates in the lobby of the Weimar museum. Museum director Scheidig was ordered to open them and make an inventory, noting that alongside family portraits, German etchings and prints were silver candelabras and museum exhibits that bore labels written in Russian. It was this list that Enke had discovered.

  So where was this cache now, Enke asked the old art dealer? He said that he was surprised Enke didn't know. A female curator from Russia had visited Weimar in 1948, debriefed Scheidig and taken most of the contents of the crates back to the USSR. The old man thought her name was Xenia Agarfornova.

  We know this name. According to Kuchumov's diary from his Berlin mission in 1947, when he worked for General Zorin, sorting stolen Soviet treasures in the Derutra warehouse, Xenia Agarfornova was part of the staff. She had come from the Leningrad Hermitage and was given a roving role to retrieve art works concealed in the German countryside. She had also interrogated Gerhard Strauss. The USSR had claimed part of Koch's collection and not thought to tell the Stasi. Why?

  Enke would have to check with the Soviet authorities and sent off a letter to Leningrad. While he waited for a response he worked on mapping Koch's consignments that had left Weimar in the Red Cross van on 9 and LO April 1945.

  Sitting at his desk in Cranach-Strasse, with his favourite thinking food of black beer and pickled pork, Enke plotted the 1945 Allied advance on his route map of Thuringia. 'Under the conditions described, the average van speed may hardly have exceeded 30 kmh,' he wrote in his report. 'Considering the journey to the depot [Weimar museum], unloading, the return journey, controls en-route and resting periods, this would have allowed a maximum distance to be travelled of 150-180 kilometres from Weimar.' But in which direction had Koch's treasures been driven?

  North was into the arms of the Red Army. If the van had driven west it would have run into the American troops that reached a Thuringian village called Merkers on 4 April 1945. The Americans were also advancing from the south and were at Coburg in Bavaria by 11 April, threatening the Berlin-Nuremberg A9 autobahn. Enke concluded that the only sensible route on 9 and LO April 1945 would have been east, along the A4 autobahn to Gera and on towards Dresden. 'To simplify and shorten our description, we will call this mooted area western Saxony,' Enke wrote.

  Where in western Saxony? Enke reported: 'By April 1945 all [Nazi] hope had evaporated and turned into the certainty of total defeat. At this moment the Nazis no longer searched for palaces, castles or monasteries... but for hiding places where [art] might be stored and remain undiscovered for a certain length of time.' Mines not castles. Caves not monasteries. Bunkers not safes. Enke reminded Seufert about the American discovery in May 1945 of the vast Fuhrermuseum collection found in a salt mine beneath the Alt-Aussee mountains of Austria.

  Enke sought out archives to help locate subterranean bolt-holes in western Saxony. He visited Dresden and among the papers he recovered there was a letter from Professor Fichtner, who wrote to the Reich Chancellery in December 1943: 'The best and most ideal safeguarding and rescue depots are at this moment in time decentralized accommodations in well-camouflaged areas of central Germany.' Fichtner named a limestone quarry at Lengefeld, on the northern edge of western Saxony's Erzgebirge nature park, much of which was 'laterally inside the mountain and may be considered to be absolutely safe against air raids'. At the time, the Reich Chancellery declined the offer and, as far as Enke could establish, the hiding places had remained free.17

  Enke applied himself to the Erzgebirge region, a dense and uneven strip of pine forest hugging the mountainous border between Saxony and Czechoslovakia. Erzgebirge means 'Mountain of Ore' and the region had been heavily excavated for zinc, silver and lead since the twelfth century. Enke visited a 'mountain archive' at Freiberg, a small town on the northeastern tip of the Erzgebirge, a document centre mapping the region's disused mines. He reported to Seufert: 'It is imperative that the search must be precisely targeted because the stock of files extends to several thousands of metres of shelving, as well as around 76,000 individual mine and shaft sketch plans.'

  Enke learned from local residents that on 11 May 1945 the bodies of Hitler's brother-in-law, as well as four members on the s
taff of the Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, had been found in the Erzgebirge. He recalled the correspondence from 1944 in which Koch debated with Mutschmann about the best places to conceal the Amber Room. Mutschmann himself had been arrested in this area in May 1945, found by the Red Army in the hamlet of Tellerhauser and allegedly taken back to the Soviet Union. Enke speculated that Mutschmann had fled to what he thought was the safest part of his state. This would be the area where the Stasi would dig for the Amber Room. All that Enke needed was the Secretariat's approval.

  In an attempt to focus his inquiries, Enke began to work on identifying the Nazi officer who had transported Koch's treasures in through Weimar. Enke reported to Seufert that, using a combination of archival resources and eyewitnesses, he arrived at the name Albert Popp, an NFSK Brigadefuhrer in Gruppe-7 (Saxony) and, more importantly, Gauleiter Mutschmann's nephew.

  Enke reported that Popp had acted for the Nazi High Command already, evacuating Angela, Hitler's half-sister, from Dresden to Berchtesgaden in March 1945. To demonstrate further the proximity of Popp to the Nazi High Command, Enke advised Seufert that, while Popp fled to the West after the war, his wife remained in the GDR and adopted the children of missing Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann.18

  Enke tested the name Albert Popp on the old art dealer, the only surviving eyewitness to the arrival of Koch's crates at Weimar museum in February 1945. Enke reported: 'The dealer said, that if he could hear or read the name, he would probably remember it. So, we wrote down two dozen names, some of them fairly similar, with the name of Albert Popp in thirteenth place. The old man read through the names... and then he said: "Yes, the driver was called Popp."'19

  Enke also tried out his theory on a Soviet source. Our Friend the Professor has found two letters from him to Anatoly Kuchumov in the St Petersburg archive, written while Enke was conducting his Saxony research. We never knew that the two men had ever corresponded. The first letter, dated 24 July 1976, began with 'heartfelt greetings to my battle comrade'. Enke wrote:

  And now to a... problem... You told me about the last statement of Erich Koch regarding possible connections between the Amber Room and his private collection. Do you think it likely that maybe Erich Koch thought to hide them together? This idea corresponds exactly with a version of the story that I have been researching... as I told you in April in Pushkin and Pavlovsk.20

  So Enke and Kuchumov had met, in Leningrad in April 1976, and discussed the possibility that Erich Koch had evacuated the Amber Room along with his own art collection from East Prussia. Until now we had thought that the Stasi and Soviet investigations had gone their separate ways and that Enke had never left the GDR.

  Enke continued:

  I have found a list of Koch's vast stolen collection and on that list is a great amount of silver candelabras. I recalled the description of the Amber Room in Pushkin and above all remembered the light emitted by the large number of candles that were reflected by the huge mirrors. According to my calculations, from photographs, there should be 132 candelabras. It is interesting to me that on this list of silver belonging to Koch is the same number of [Russian] candelabras. Maybe these are the decorations of the Amber Room.

  Enke's theory (and Geissler's account of it) was beginning to make sense. He had a final question for Kuchumov:

  Did you see during your searches the name of Koch's aide? Was it Popp or Poppa? I have evidence that this man was trusted and helped hide some of the treasures on Koch's list. My heartfelt thanks to you and your colleagues in Pavlovsk and Pushkin. Be sure that we from our side direct all our energy to help you reach our mutual goal, with Communist regards, P. Enke.

  Enke's second letter was written on 22 October 1976: 'My respectable Anatoly Mikhailovich, first of all my wife and I personally thank you for your battle-felt regards on the occasion of our national festival of the GDR [7 October].' Enke was still keen to learn all he could about Albert Popp, the driver of the Red Cross van: I have a question about a man who transported the treasures of Koch in 1945 from Konigsberg to central Germany and hid art pieces so successfully that some are still missing. Could you tell me anything more about this Popp, his date of birth, his real name.' Perhaps Kuchumov had not answered Enke's previous inquiry.

  Enke continued, easing his way into more delicate matters:

  During vacations with my wife we travelled through Thuringia and Saxony and visited useful people who gave us information. But I have a question for you. It seems that in 1948 Soviet art historian Xenia Agarfornova found part of Koch's treasure, including the silver candelabras (that I spoke of before) and delivered them back to the USSR. Is she a curator from the State Hermitage and did you establish that these candelabras were from the Amber Room? Heartfelt regards and I am sure together we are going to find the Amber Room. P. Enke.

  This is the first time that we have seen any evidence that part of the Amber Room (albeit only the candelabras) might have been found in Germany by the Soviets after the war. If what Enke confided in Kuchumov in this private letter was true, it explains why the Stasi was so certain that the Amber Room was in Germany. What it doesn't explain is why the Soviets chose not to tell the Stasi about their discovery of the candelabras.

  Kuchumov's replies, if he sent any, are not in the Ministry of Truth. What is here is another report dated E976 from Enke to Oberst Seufert. In it Enke attempted to tie up all the loose ends, and addressed the issue of the evidence given by GDR citizen 'Rudi Ringel'.

  His line of reasioning was as follows: Koch had hinted that his treasures were concealed together with the Amber Room; Enke had traced Koch's treasures to Weimar and then into a Red Cross van; if 'Rudi Ringel's' father, the SS Sturmbannfiihrer, had also been involved in the secret operation to evacuate the Amber Room, that placed him together with Albert Popp in the Red Cross van heading in all probability into western Saxony and not, as the Soviets had concluded, in downtown Konigsberg. It was an unconvincing and staggeringly simplistic piece of logic but the Stasi seemed to have accepted it.

  To prove his theory, Enke began to prise apart 'Rudi Ringel's' family history, testing the stories told by his mother, sister and brother against available wartime records, looking for connections to Albert Popp, a Red Cross van and the western Erzgebirge. We realize, reading this document, that it must have been at this point that Enke called in Uwe Geissler to help him with the cross-examinations. According to the report, 'Frau Ringel' claimed that on 2 November 1944 she and her children had relocated from bombed Konigsberg to Crimmitschau in Saxony, sixty miles west of the Erzgebirge. Her husband, the SS Sturmbannfiihrer, stayed behind, but on 5 February 1945 he arrived in plain clothes on his family's doorstep in Crimmitschau, carrying a duffel bag, a machine gun, a pistol and some food.

  According to local records, scoured by Enke and Geissler, the SS man had registered with the Crimmitschau police on 6 February 1945. His wife claimed he then disappeared for ten days and did the same in March and April 1945. In February 1946, the 'Ringel' family moved again, to Schlema (a suburb on the edge of the Erzgebirge). In nearby Greiz hospital, Enke located the death certificate for the SS Sturmbannfiihrer, 'dated 14 October 1947 (lung disease)'. It was in the cellar of the family's Schlema house that 'Rudi Ringel' claimed to have found the map pouch in July 1949 as his family prepared to move again to Elsterberg, west of the Erzgebirge, a place that Enke discovered had been Albert Popp's hometown. Popp and the 'Ringel' family's proximity to the Erzgebirge was tantalizing for Enke (although it seems to prove little to us).21

  We read on impatiently, as Enke reported to Seufert:

  There had been many voices that claimed 'Rudi Ringel' is a swindler, a fantasist and for these reasons he does not have to be taken seriously. Initially we too had some doubts, but we wanted certainty and therefore we dealt thoroughly with 'Rudi Ringel's' past... We do not consider the radio message ["Action Amber Room concluded. Storage in BSCH. Accesses blown up. Casualties through enemy action."] to have been a mistake or a forgery, but we only query the op
inion mentioned by several investigators that the message had been sent from Konigsberg.22

  Enke was so certain of his breakthrough that a few months after writing to Kuchumov he factored the Koch-Weimar-Popp-Ringel theory into a plan for a book that he gave the provisional title 'Traces of the Amber Room: A Historical Criminological Investigation'. This was the start of what would eventually become Bernsteinzimmer Report. Chapter 6 promised 'New Tracks That Point to Western Saxony'.23

  We flick ahead through the file, looking for a report on the outcome of the 1976 digs in the western Erzgebirge and instead find something baffling. Two years later, Paul Enke had been taken off the Amber Room investigation altogether. Now based at home, he composed this letter to Generaloberst Bruno Beater, Deputy Minister for State Security, Erich Mielke's right-hand man, first among several deputies.

  Enke wrote: '30 January E978, E18 Berlin-Griinau, Dear Comrade Beater! I am in need of your good advice and practical assistance and I am asking for the possibility of a personal consultation. My request is for information about the BZW [Amber Room file]... With the best will in the world I cannot accept the recommendation to give up the search.'24

  One minute he was digging in the Erzgebirge. Now he was begging for access to the Amber Room files that surely he had compiled. We read on, trying to understand what had happened to Paul Enke. What had gone wrong?