by Adrian Levy
George Stein confronted the university with a series of incriminating documents. One of them, dated 1 November 1944, was from a curator at Konigsberg's Albertus-University, Herr Hoffman. Writing to Hauptmann Peters, Munitions Department, Volpriehausen, Lower Saxony (a pit village twelve miles north-west of Gottingen University), Hoffman said: 'The transporter of this letter has two wooden trunks with the most valuable pieces of amber from the collection of the Prussian state. Please keep them in a place which is specially guarded.' One wagon of valuables had already been sent, Hoffman added, and another 'containing irreplaceable art items of the university will come next week, addressed to the Burgermeister'.35
Irreplaceable items - the same words used by Alfred Rohde when writing in December 1944 of his intention to evacuate the Amber Room. Across the bottom of the Hoffman letter was a postscript: 'It makes sense to address the boxes during transport with "ammo dept" so as not to bring them to the attention of others, since they are filled with priceless goods.' On the back of the letter were two handwritten notes, one of which was dated 7 November 1944, and recorded a call from Hauptmann Peters saying that 'everything went smoothly'. The other, dated 4 January 1945, advised: 'The placement of the Konigsberg salvage items has been completed.' Stein had found proof that East Prussian treasures were moving west.36 Could Stein possibly have found genuine tracks of the Amber Room too?
Reporters from Der Tagesspiegel learned from residents of Volpriehausen (the pit village named in the Hoffman letter) that heavily loaded trucks had been seen arriving at the mine in November 1944 and January 1945 - dates that corresponded with the transports from Konigsberg. In September 1945 the entrance of the pit had been blasted shut by the Allies as they withdrew. The following year a Gottingen University professor had gathered a group of students to mount an amateur salvage operation and they had descended L,625 feet down the main shaft on ropes, managing to recover 360,000 partially burnt books. Only the collapse of the roof at the end of the main tunnel had prevented them from continuing. When the Der Tagesspiegel reporters were shown some of the books in 1977, they noticed the stamp of Konigsberg University library. Stein announced that the Amber Room was in the pit and he would lead a team of specialists into the tunnels to salvage it.
But George Stein had no money and in 1978 began to noisily lobby the West German Bundestag to fund the excavation. The Stasi carefully monitored each stage of this 'Volpriehausen episode'. In one report Enke wrote: 'Professor Dietrich of the SPD [Social Democrat Party] initiated several questions in the Bundestag on behalf of George Stein, including specific queries about fascist depots in Volpriehausen.'37 Enke reported that in the village of Stelle, Stein and his wife, Elisabeth, were besieged by newspaper reporters and that right-wing newspapers were asking why West Germans should be concerned with restocking Russian museums when their own were still bare.38
The Bonn government was unimpressed with Stein's campaign. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused permission to excavate. There was insufficient evidence to warrant the expenditure. And what was in it for the FRG, apart from expiation of guilt?
On 1 December 1978 Die Zeit published more evidence from George Stein that he claimed connected the Amber Room to the Volpriehausen pit. It included a letter from 6 March 1944, written by the Nazi Kreisleitung (district administration) that identified the Volpriehausen pit as a vital storage depot with 7,000 square feet of available space. Another document, dated 29 December 1944, reported how twenty-four railway wagons filled with books and valuables had safely arrived at the pit. Die Zeit informed readers that the source of much of Stein's classified and pristine material was 'Dr Paul Kohler in the GDR', whom Stein described as 'my good friend'. Stein claimed that the most compelling document was a copy of a wartime telex concerning 'enterprise Amber Room' that showed how the treasure had been evacuated from Konigsberg in the spring of 1945. Stein told Die Zeit that the telex reported how the room was eventually concealed 'in a place codenamed BSCHW, a cipher that could be unpicked to mean 'B-Tunnel [Volpriehausen]'. The head of the secret operation SS Sturmbannfiihrer Ringel apparently signed the telex.39
Suddenly we realize that the Volpriehausen episode was a highly successful diversionary ploy. While the Stasi had secretly suspended all of its own operations connected to the source 'Rudi Ringel', it had recycled his dubious evidence for a new purpose - through George Stein. BSCH, the secret hiding place of the Amber Room, was becoming nomadic: first in Kaliningrad, then in East Germany and now in West Germany, alongside 'Rudi Ringel's' father, the lame post office security guard who appeared to have signed a telex in 1945 using a pseudonym given by the Stasi in E959. It was all getting rather far-fetched.
We can see how conveniently this bad publicity played out for the Stasi. To the delight of the authorities in the East, Bonn once again appeared to be intransigent and chauvinistic, while the Soviet Union's wartime losses were highlighted through the fate of the Amber Room.
The Soviets contacted the Stasi, asking for more background information and a character assessment of George Stein. In his reply, Paul Enke made certain that he was not eclipsed by his West German mole:
I suggest you don't really expect anything sensational from this source...Stein works with somewhat dubious methods, for instance with forgeries. The motives for these practices are not quite clear to us. Maybe it is only the greed for sensationalism and the need for so-called scoops inherent in Capitalism. Just recently Stein published in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit four reports about the storage of the Amber Room in the pits near Gottingen. According to a statement by Stein... he has a copy of a wartime telex that writes about the conclusion of 'enterprise Amber Room' that is supposed to be graced with the signature 'Ringel'. But as we are all aware, the name Ringel is only a pseudonym given to our 'object' in 1959, therefore it can hardly be the signature on a letter from 1945. This is only one further example of Stein's talent for invention.40
This was a bold statement from a Stasi man who would already have known that he was about to be investigated in connection with his reliance on the dubious evidence presented by 'Rudi Ringel'. But Enke's unflattering portrait of Stein failed to put the Soviets off the scent.
Five months later, flattering articles about George Stein began to appear in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, & highbrow Soviet literary journal, under the byline of its Bonn correspondent, Julian Semyonov. This must be the 'Comrade Julia Semjonow' that Stasi deputy minister Neiber requested to see on his planned mission to the KGB in Moscow in 1982.
In May 1979 Semyonov wrote an article headlined 'A West German Citizen from the Village of Stelle'.41 He described the scene:
I am sitting here in the home of the married couple Stein in the village of Stelle near Hamburg. Wooden beams blackened by the wind from the sea lie across the white walls of this genuine Hanseatic house as I listen to the story. Like every enthusiastic person [George Stein's] language is unclear, rapid and jumps from one subject to another. George Stein knew that the search for the Amber Room had to continue and this is his story...
The thousands of words that follow tell how Stein had inadvertently become 'Europe's most successful Second World War treasure-hunter'.
Semyonov revealed that Stein's interest in Nazi loot was sparked in 1966 when, laid up in a sanatorium at the foot of the Matterhorn, recovering from a car accident, he read a series of articles by Anthony Terry in The Sunday Times about Erich Koch's prison-cell confessions concerning the Amber Room. Semyonov revealed that Stein, a native of East Prussia, vowed to find the Amber Room as a tribute to his family. His father, a Konigsberg industrialist, had been part of the wartime resistance, while Dorothea-Luisa, Stein's sister, had worked at Konigsberg Castle as an assistant to Alfred Rohde. Can this possibly be true? It seems a little neat. Semyonov continued: George Stein had been conscripted to defend the city, which he did until he was captured by the Red Army in May 1944, only learning after his release from camps in Uzbekistan and Leningrad that the SS had executed his entire family on discovering
their links to the resistance and the 'Red Countess' Marion Donhoff. Putting his tragic past behind him, Stein had migrated to Stelle, married Elisabeth, the daughter of a local farmer, and settled down to grow strawberries, until he crashed his car into a traffic policeman and ended up in Switzerland, bored and compulsively scanning the newspapers.
A photograph of Stein shows a large, jovial man with a harelip and thick-rimmed glasses, ostentatiously smoking a cigarette at a dinner table, a wine glass before him - a bon viveur dining out on a flush of stories.
George Stein
Julian Semyonov revealed that, having pressed the West German government to dig at Volpriehausen, Stein's life was now in danger. Hate mail had arrived at his home in Stelle. Semyonov wrote: 'George Stein has found out through innumerable threatening letters and public hostility how close the criminal past is connected with the present in the Federal Republic of Germany.'
Enke clipped everything Semyonov wrote about Stein and the Amber Room, pasting it into his files. Several translations have notes scribbled in the top left-hand corners, showing that the articles were referred up the hierarchy to the deputy minister and to Mielke himself. Key sentences were underlined, all of which were quotes from George Stein about 'my good friend Dr Paul Kohler in the GDR'. Paul Kohler was in danger of being unmasked as Stasi agent.
Paul Enke had to get alongside Semyonov. The flamboyant, hard-drinking Soviet journalist was well known to the Ministry for State Security. A graduate of Moscow University, Semyonov had begun publishing fiction in 19 5 8 and by the time he was posted to Bonn in the early 1970S, he was the author of a bestselling series of spy novels starring Maxim Stirlitz, a cultured Soviet agent who could speak almost every European language 'with the exception of Irish and Albanian'. While readers in the West were thrilled by Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice and Diamonds are Forever, bibliophiles in the East bought Semyonov's Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and He Killed Me Near Luang Prabang. However, unlike James Bond, the Stirlitz novels were meticulously rooted in historical fact and advanced a propagandist agenda, such as the storyline in which the spy exposed an attempt by Britain and the United States to make a peace-pact with Hitler, opening a united front against the Soviet Union (something that the KGB archives reveal that Stalin had actually believed when he forged the non-aggression pact with Germany of 1939). With access to limitless visas and a capacious expense account, Semyonov travelled the world researching his books. By the time he began to write about George Stein he had served as president of the International Association of Crime Writers. Semyonov insisted that it was his success with Stirlitz that bought him his freedom and connections, but few other writers in the Soviet Union at this time were given carte blanche like this.42
The Stasi Secretariat viewed Semyonov's interest in Stein as a possible threat. Stein was a Stasi source, a useful tool that it did not want to lose to the Russians. The German Amber Room operation was run by the Stasi from the East and not George Stein in the West. The Stasi would have to engineer a collaborative relationship with Semyonov. They would do it 'through the mediation of a female comrade by the name of [name blacked out]'.
We do not know what actually happened between Semyonov and this 'female comrade' (name blacked out), but on 31 October E979 Enke received a series of telephone calls at his home, 'several very urgent requests' to meet Semyonov at the Soviet Embassy at 10 p.m. Enke wrote an account of what happened next for his deputy minister Generalmajor Neiber: 'At 22:00, on return from his official trip, I met [Semyonov] at the embassy and I then accompanied him to the railway station, from where he continued his journey to Moscow around midnight.' Always the minutiae before the meat. 'Semyonov informed me as follows. He had concluded his activities in Bonn, Vienna, Geneva and The Hague and intended to get on with some of his literary projects during the following period of time.'
Both men talked about the fact the other was preparing a book on the Amber Room and, according to Enke, agreed to co-author a two-volume edition. Enke wrote: 'The first volume would deal with the history of the room as well as the activities of the imperialist secret services and the counter-espionage engaged in the fight against such machinations.' It sounded like a plotline from Stirlitz. Enke, who, according to his personal file, had as a young man been desperate to become a journalist, was flattered by the attentions of his new and famous acquaintance. There was even an invitation dangled by the celebrated Soviet writer. Enke wrote: 'Julian Semyonov announced a forthcoming visit for me to Moscow for the premiere of a play he has written.'43 It is a shame we cannot see what Semyonov reported to the KGB about Paul Enke.
Believing they had engineered a positive relationship with Julian Semyonov, the Stasi now felt confident enough to reactivate Stein and soon he was used to plant another story. A letter written by Enke on LO September 1981 reported that Alfred Rohde's written assurances of September 1944 that the Amber Room had survived the Allied air raids 'will [soon] be utilized in the article to appear in October in Die Zeit. On this occasion we will remember that 14 October is the fortieth anniversary of the date on which the Amber Room was dragged out from Pushkin on eighteen trucks laden with works of art... We will continue to support [Stein] as much as we can.'44
But the following February, in 1982, George Stein was invited to Moscow without the Stasi's prior knowledge at a time when the Stasi deputy minister's request for a visit to Moscow had been rejected by the KGB. A West German hobby-Historiker was welcomed to the Soviet Union at the head of a commission searching for the Amber Room, while the dutiful Stasi's Amber Room operation remained marooned in East Berlin.
There was now even more need for the Stasi to find the Amber Room and return it to Russia.
'All these comrades are our models and teachers for our work,' Erich Mielke once wrote of the leaders of Soviet Russia.45 He and his ministry would, at least in public, maintain unquestioning loyalty to Moscow Central until the very end.
The KGB made certain. Moscow attached a KGB colonel to every Stasi directorate and all Stasi intelligence was fed back to Moscow and into a super-computer called SOUD (System of Unified Registration of Data on the Enemy) that could place an enemy operative into any one of fifteen categories. Regardless of how it was treated by the KGB, George Stein or no George Stein, the Stasi always gritted its teeth.46
In September 1982, four months after Stein's mission to Moscow, Mielke also flew to Russia for talks with his KGB counterpart, Chairman Vitaly Fedorchuk. East German workers already footed the bill for apartments, kindergartens, cars, furnishings and everything else needed by the 2,500-strong KGB team at Berlin-Karlshorst. And on LO September 1982 Mielke signed a thirty-eight-page protocol pledging absolute loyalty and a further extension of his ministry's financial support. An indication of the enormity of the sums involved comes from a Soviet estimate equivalent to 19,ooo dollars to refurbish just one KGB apartment in East Berlin, at a time when the average East German earned the equivalent of 33 dollars a month.47
So tight-knit were the connections between the KGB and the Stasi that in November 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down, dozens of KGB teams flew into Berlin to destroy documents stored at Stasi headquarters, preventing the exposure of live operations and the links between Moscow and the Stasi leadership.
However, the KGB sweepers were not entirely thorough. Amid the thousands of pages of Amber Room files at the Ministry of Truth we found an extremely rare letter written by Erich Mielke (famous for his reluctance to commit anything to paper). It concerned the Amber Room and was addressed to Comrade Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov, who became chairman of the KGB in December 1982.
The letter revealed how Mielke had used his scheduled September 1982 trip to Moscow to resuscitate 'Operation Puschkin'. Although the Stasi must still have been smarting from seeing George Stein reach Moscow before them, Mielke put the episode behind him and sought out Chebrikov, who was then KGB deputy chairman.
'Dear Comrade Tschebrikow!' Mielke wrote. 'During my visit in the autu
mn of 1982 I passed to you a progress report on the state of the search [for the Amber Room] in the GDR. As it made clear the search on the territory of the GDR has been and still is justified. I wish to assure you that the GDR and her MfS will not rest or relax in their search for the whereabouts of the Amber Room and other treasures of world culture.'
Viktor Chebrikov, KGB chairman, with Erich Mielke (right), East Germany's Stasi chief, at Stasi headquarters, East Berlin, 1987
The minister wrote that he was certain that documents, witnesses and maps could still be found in East Germany to help unravel the mystery. But he was also at pains to assure the KGB that he did now recognize 'the possibility' that the Amber Room could have remained in the former Konigsberg 'or its nearer or further vicinity'.48 Mielke was distancing himself from the German theory, banked on by the Stasi for so many years, most likely in recognition of the damage caused by the 'Rudi Ringel' episode.
In February 1983 the Stasi received a response to Mielke's Amber Room progress report, but it did not come from the KGB. Oberst Seufert reported that Professor Vladimir Andreievich Bojarsky, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had made contact and 'stated that he was running a commission for research into the natural resources of the earth and... that his academy had recently been commissioned to carry out a further search after the Amber Room'. Seufert concluded: 'Bojarsky stated his conviction that it would be helpful to arrange a working consultation to be held in Moscow with Paul Enke.'49
That was it. No round of toasts at the Lubyanka, KGB headquarters. No dinner at the Kremlin. There was no way to disguise the poverty of relations. But the Stasi needed to grab any line it could get into the Soviet Amber Room inquiry and ordered Enke to reply.