The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  One month after Orbeli spoke Anatoly Kuchumov was put on a train to Konigsberg, with orders to staunch another allegation about wilful destruction by the Red Army. Only this one was far more dangerous, as it involved one of the Soviet Union's own treasures. Professor Brusov had already given an interview to TASS revealing that the Amber Room had been destroyed or looted, implicating Soviet troops in its demise. Moscow had to prevent this potentially explosive news from spreading before it could be manipulated by the Allies. Kuchumov would quickly turn the Amber Room story on its head, delivering a different (and more useful) conclusion that enabled the authorities in Moscow to point to a 'still-missing' Amber Room as evidence of how the Motherland had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

  Stalin's inquiry into the actions of the trophy brigades dragged on in secret but claimed some high-profile scalps. Marshal Zhukov, who had led the fight-back against the Nazi invasion and the battle for Berlin, was exiled to Odessa, accused of filling his Moscow dacha with German art works. General Ivan Serov, head of the NKVD in Germany, was accused of looting by MGB director Viktor Abakumov. In the furore, Serov turned the tables on his rival, and in 1951 it was the MGB chief who was arrested, and three years later tried for treason and executed. Stories of Abakumov's fate spread panic throughout the Red Army and security services. Any Soviet citizen who had stolen art works would never talk about them again. The chances of finding the Amber Room, if pieces from it had been looted or rescued from the fire in the Knights' Hall, were remote.21

  Then history was edited again.

  On 31 March 1955 the Council of Ministers of the USSR announced that 'in the course of the Great Patriotic War, during battles on German territory, the Soviet Army saved and removed to the Soviet Union masterpieces of classical painting from the collection of the Dresden Gallery'.22 This was a revelation. The treasures from Dresden had not been seen since April 1945, when the Nazis concealed them in a salt mine, twelve miles east of the city. As well as confirming that the art works had been 'rescued' from this mine by the Red Army, the Council of Ministers also announced in Pravda that they were to be returned to the GDR 'for the purpose of further strengthening and developing friendly relations between Soviet and German people'. The news provided a fraternal backdrop to critical negotiations in the Eastern bloc, the revelation coming just six weeks before Moscow signed the Warsaw Pact.

  In the Soviet capital a million citizens queued outside the Pushkin Museum for a glimpse of the 'rescued' German collection that went on display before it was given back. Exhibition catalogues and posters of Raphael's Sistine Madonna sold out. Soviet magazines published interviews with members of the trophy brigades, who were presented as Red Army heroes who had rescued German art from the firing line.

  Then in January 1957 another exchange was proposed. Soviet tanks had rolled into Budapest the previous November to crush a nationalist uprising. Poland too was in a state of unrest. On 8 January, Pravda reported that the USSR's First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Otto Grotewohl, the GDR premier, had signed a protocol reaffirming fraternal ties. At the bottom of the statement was a pledge: 'Both sides affirmed their readiness to discuss questions connected with the return on a mutual basis of cultural valuables'.23

  Two lists would be drawn up, one of art works 'that are in the Soviet Union for temporary storage' and another of Soviet art that was in East Germany. When the Soviet list was approved on 30 July 1958, it consisted of an incredible 1,990,000 art works that had been 'rescued' from Germany. Here was the altar of Zeus from Pergamum and many other items that had vanished at the end of the war and been secreted in Soviet stores. The Soviet trophy brigades had been far more industrious than even the Allies had suspected.

  The East German list was delayed until 19 October 1958 and when it arrived the Soviet authorities realized why. 'No cultural valuables from the USSR [had been found] in the GDR.' Nothing. Not a stick of furniture could be returned to Moscow, as the Americans had already given back to the Soviet Union half a million valuables at the end of the war.

  Moscow had a serious problem. The forthcoming exchanges had been publicized around the world. But now the Soviets would have to hand back nearly 2 million German art works and get nothing back. They would appear to be voracious thieves while the Germans, convicted at Nuremberg for the decimation of Soviet culture, would be portrayed as victims.

  The Soviets launched a damage limitation exercise. In July 1958 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the State Hermitage in Leningrad announced that they were to stage joint gala exhibitions of 'saved treasures'.24

  Newspaper editors were called in and briefed on what stories to run. It was now that Kaliningradskaya Pravda (and then practically every other paper in the Motherland) published their dubious stories about the Amber Room. The articles revealed how 'the most valuable international art trophy in the world' had not been destroyed by fire in April 1945 but concealed by Nazis in a secret location known only to a handful of Germans. The story of the Amber Room helped to divert attention away from the embarrassing questions being asked in the Western media about why Moscow had lied for so long about looting German treasures? What else was concealed in its archives and stores?

  Anatoly Kuchumov had revived the Amber Room story to save his career. Moscow had snapped his report up to ward off American allegations of Soviet impropriety. Now in 1958 revelations about the secret search for the world's most valuable missing art treasure would grab the headlines once again and save Soviet face.

  Six months later East Germans joined the clamour for news about the Amber Room, having read the sensational articles in Freie Welt. It was fate that the Freie Welt articles appeared as would-be Stasi agent Paul Enke graduated from the Walter Ulbricht Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg. This was his cue to begin searching for the Amber Room in the GDR, forming the embryonic Amber Room study group that would play into Soviet hands by generating yet more rumours about the 'still-missing' Amber Room (while ascertaining what the Germans really knew about the truth).

  And once Moscow had launched the story, they had to keep looking for it in the Soviet Union too. As the mystery of its hiding place gathered momentum, ever-higher figures in the Soviet establishment became attached to what was now a patriotic mission. Perhaps, as time went by, the Soviets forgot the real story, believing instead the dogma, until 1984, when Moscow tired of paying out in pursuit of nothing and secretly called it a day, shutting down all Amber Room inquiries after thirty-eight exhausting years.

  But Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, the director of the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, told us that this was not the end of the Amber Room story. When Communism began to teeter in the late 1980S, several high-profile art collections looted during the Second World War emerged in the Soviet Union. All of these long-concealed treasures materialized through the mediation of a quietly spoken academic from Bremen University, a man able to play all sides: trusted by Soviet apparatchiks; tolerated by former Nazi looters; courted by politicians in the Bundestag.

  And after these missing art works floated to the surface in Moscow, pieces of the Amber Room emerged in Germany.

  14

  'So you want me to tell you about the recovered pieces of the Amber Room?' Professor Wolfgang Eichwede says, raising his eyebrows, when we meet in his study at Bremen University in April 2003. He pushes a box of Russian chocolates across the table and we see that the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg is pictured on the lid. 'Take one,' he says, popping a soft centre into his mouth. 'They're really very good.'

  He settles back in his chair. 'A few months before the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989,' he recalls. I received a phone call from a man in Moscow. His name was Viktor Baldin and he was the director of the Shchusev Museum of Architecture. He told me he had a secret.'

  Baldin confessed to Eichwede, director of Bremen University's Research Centre for Eastern Europe, that his institution had, locked away in its stores, 364 pictures and drawings that belonged to the Bremen Kunsth
alle.

  Not parts of the Amber Room, we ask?

  'No, they appeared much later. Viktor Baldin told me that he had known about these pictures since in July 1945, while serving as a captain with the Soviet's 38th Field Engineers Brigade, he and other soldiers had found them in the cellars of Karnzow Castle, forty miles north of Berlin. They all bore markings of the Bremen Kunsthalle. Several comrades, including Baldin, brought art works back to Moscow.'

  Viktor Baldin said that after the war, when Stalin ordered an investigation into looting, he panicked and gave his cache of 364 pictures to the Shchusev Museum of Architecture, where he worked. In 1989, with the Cold War coming to an end, Baldin, who had risen to become the museum's director, wanted to return the Bremen drawings as a sign of friendship. However, the authorities in Moscow had found out and were trying to block him.

  Eichwede says: 'His phone call began a chain reaction. Just days after he rang me, Russian Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko and the KGB raided the Shchusev Museum in Moscow, confiscating the 364 Bremen Kunsthalle works, sending them to the closed stores of the State Hermitage in Leningrad.' He glances up at an exhibition poster on the wall from the State Hermitage. I began ringing Gubenko's deputy. I made no demands. Said I simply wanted to see the Bremen items.'

  A graduate of the radical student movements of 1968, Eichwede was familiar with the Soviet mindset and already had connections in Moscow. In the early 1970S he had helped initiate the first post-war public discussions about Soviet-West German relations. In 1992 the professor finally won an invitation to see the Bremen drawings.

  'When I arrived at the State Hermitage, director Mikhail Piotrovsky had laid them out on the table in his office beside the Neva. We looked at them together as the snow fell outside. I was the first German to see the Bremen drawings in forty-seven years. I would not leave with them on that day but strong friendships were struck.'

  On 1 March 1993, after negotiations stage-managed by Eichwede, Russia agreed to give back the Bremen works in exchange for a collection of German-owned drawings and funding from the German Bundestag to restore churches in Novgorod that had been damaged by the Nazis.

  Eichwede says: 'Having agreed to the deal, my government got cold feet and blew the arrangement out of the water, saying that Germany could not be seen to reward looting. A ridiculous point of view given that we had betrayed and ransacked the Soviet Union. But our politicians said: "What else do the Russians have? We want everything back and not just the Bremen pictures." I had to go to Moscow and tell them the deal was off.'

  Weeks later, more of the missing Bremen Kunsthalle collection surfaced in Moscow, when another Red Army veteran came forward after reading about Viktor Baldin in the Russian papers. The veteran had 101 drawings that he said a friend had found in Karnzow Castle in 1945. He took them in a suitcase to the German Embassy. When the Soviets found out they issued an immediate export ban. Now two parts of the missing Bremen Kunsthalle collection were stranded: one in St Petersburg, the other in Moscow.1

  What was the connection between the Bremen drawings and the Amber Room, we ask?

  'Be patient,' Eichwede says, 'The negotiations were labyrinthine. Then another missing German treasure emerged in Russia. Gregory Koslov, a curator from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, a man who had helped to negotiate the handing over of the 101 Bremen drawings to the German Embassy, found a pile of documents in his museum that were about to be shredded. In these documents were references to German art works taken to Russia at the end of the war. There were pages of lists naming priceless exhibits we Germans all thought had been destroyed, including the so-called "Trojan Gold". What a discovery!'

  The 'Trojan Gold', a hoard of ancient diadems, necklaces and earrings, a highlight of Berlin's pre-war art collections, had been among the things the Allies had accused the Soviets of stealing in 194 5. The Soviets had categorically denied any responsibility, but the documents that Koslov found proved that the gold had arrived in Moscow, had been secretly taken to the Pushkin Museum and was inventoried there on 28 June 1945.

  Koslov went public with the story. The German government was furious. So was Irina Antonova, Koslov's boss and the director of the Pushkin Museum. She had begun her career by helping to compile the inventory for the gold, a secret she had kept for almost fifty years.

  Antonova called Koslov to her office. He later recalled: I told her I wanted to tell the truth. She retorted, "There are different truths... there are foolish truths and wise truth and your truth is foolish. There is also justice... You are young and inexperienced. You didn't see Peterhof burn down, but I did..."'2 The Soviet deception over the 'Trojan Gold' was entirely excusable, nothing compared to the scale of the Nazi destruction in Leningrad, she argued.

  Eichwede rolls his eyes. 'In October 1994 a German delegation arrived in Moscow to see the "Trojan Gold".3 When they left, Irina Antonova said that although the Russians would not give it back they would display it soon. But one year later, she wrote an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, headlined: "We Don't Owe Anybody Anything."'4 Now there were three German treasures revealed as stranded in Russia: 364 Bremen drawings in St Petersburg; 101 more in the German Embassy in Moscow; and the 'Trojan Gold' locked in the Pushkin Museum stores.

  Eichwede says: I had to break the impasse. To bring the sides together. I organized a conference in 1994, "The Spoils of War", to get the Germans and the Soviets to talk. I suggested they make a unique kind of exchange that didn't involve giving anything back.'

  We look perplexed. He signals us to be patient and says: 'Why not help re-create the Amber Room, I asked the Germans? Prussian King Frederick William I gave the original Amber Room to the Russian Tsar Peter the Great as a diplomatic gift. Why couldn't the Chancellor of the new Germany build for the President of the new Russia another Amber Room and soothe old wounds?'5

  Initially no one took up Eichwede's idea and criticism of Russia intensified when, in January 1996, it was admitted to the Council of Europe.6 The action should have resolved arguments over looted art works as Russia was now bound by international restitution law that forced it to cooperate with Germany over returns. All looted archives and art works belonging to member states were to be given back.

  But Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko, who had thwarted Baldin's attempts at returning the 364 drawings to Bremen in 1989, was still determined that nothing from Russia would go to a nation that had wrought destruction on the Soviet Union. He convinced the Duma to set in passage a bill to nationalize all cultural properties seized by the Red Army during the war so that German treasures would be redefined as 'reparations for damages incurred'.

  Eichwede pops a Russian chocolate into his mouth. 'What a nightmare. Then, in the summer of 1997, I got another phone call. In the middle of the night. Half an hour later I was sitting in a dubious restaurant in a Bremen backstreet with a man who, quite frankly, was mentally destroyed. Now I come to your topic. This man told me that his father, a Wehrmacht veteran, had fought outside Leningrad in 1941 and had stolen part of the Amber Room and that he still had it.'

  We look aghast.

  Eichwede stifles our attempt to ask another question. 'It sounds ridiculous but it was true. This man, Hans Achterman, had a Florentine stone mosaic depicting the senses "Touch and Smell" in his bedroom.'

  A stone mosaic from the Amber Room. Anatoly Kuchumov had found only three of the Amber Room's four Florentine stone mosaics in Konigsberg in 1946. One had been missing and Kuchumov had reasoned, wherever that was, so were the panels of the Amber Room.

  Eichwede continues: 'Achterman told me that while watching a television documentary about the Amber Room in 1978 featuring hobby-Historiker George Stein, he recognized a picture of the missing mosaic when it flashed up on the screen. It was identical to the one that lay in his parents' attic. At the time he did nothing. He was frightened. However, eight years later, with his father dead and local newspapers carrying stories about priceless German artefacts stuck in Russia, Achterman thought he could make some mone
y. By 4 a.m. we were talking cash for the mosaic.

  'Achterman dithered. Eventually as the sun rose, the restaurant manager came over and said, "Hans, you're discussing with a professor who understands these issues. This is your one chance. For God's sake, tell him how much you want for the stone mosaic." We started at 400,000 DMs and got down to 250,000. I wrote the agreement on the back of a beer mat and then, with the pen in his hand, Hans Achterman changed his mind and left me there. With the cigarette butts.'

  Although Achterman went to ground, news of the reappearance of the missing stone mosaic from the Amber Room travelled fast when the German police announced they would arrest him for theft. The Daily Telegraph reported: 'One of the greatest art mysteries of the century, the whereabouts of the sumptuous Amber Room, took a new twist yesterday after the discovery in Germany of a mosaic, believed to have been part of the priceless palace treasure.'7

  US News reported: 'Missing: Priceless Room Last Seen in World War. Bits of Tsarist Treasure Mysteriously Resurface.'

  Having endured eight years of vilification over the Bremen pictures and the 'Trojan Gold', Russia leapt on the PR opportunity. Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called for the mosaic's return. It was evidence that the Germans were still clinging on to his country's most precious treasure. There was hysterical speculation in the Russian press that the Amber Room was about to be found - in Germany. All of the hoary old stories about its disappearance - an elite unit of Nazis evacuating the room from Konigsberg to a secret location codenamed BSCH - were regurgitated. But of course the Amber Room failed to materialize.