The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [102]
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