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By Root 1759 0

cruiser that had been laid up in the Konigsberg shipyard, set sail on a secret mission. Nazi footage discovered long after Enke conducted his research, shot by Goebbels's cameramen, shows how on the Emden's deck two coffins lay draped with old flags from German regiments that had fought the battle of Tannenberg, east of Konigsberg, where the Russian army had been crushed in one of the most decisive campaigns of August 19E4. Surrounded by an honour guard, the coffins contained the bodies of former Reich President General von Hindenburg and his wife, who had been disinterred from a memorial constructed at Tannenberg. On the Fiihrer's orders, icebreakers towed the Emden to Pillau, where the coffins were transferred to a passenger steamer, Pretoria, that set out for Stettin the same night. If bodies could be moved on 22 January 1945, Enke asked, what else might have been on board?

Pulling together orders, intercepts and old footage, Enke discovered that even after the Red Army had reached Elbing, south-west of Konigsberg, cutting off all direct routes to Germany, it would still have been possible until 31 January 1945 for the Nazis to transport crates and people out of the region by heading north-west up through the Samland Peninsula before boarding a boat at Palmnicken (now Yantarny).

Enke found orders issued by Gauleiter Erich Koch for ammunition to be supplied to Konigsberg using this sea route that showed it must have remained open until March 1945. Enke also deduced that between 19 February and 6 or 7 April 1945, German forces temporarily rallied, reopening roads between Konigsberg and Pillau, leaving the possibility that the Amber Room could have been evacuated right up until two days before the fall of the city.28

Enke concluded: 'I am convinced that the Amber Room and further precious art treasures robbed in the Soviet Union by the fascists were transported to the West. If one were able to search the archives of the Wehrmacht one would find the Amber Room's destination.' There was but one small hitch for Enke, working in the GDR. The main Wehrmacht military archive was at Freiburg im Breisgau, in West Germany.29

'The file please.' An outstretched hand. The working day has ended. Exactly at 4 p.m.

Paul Enke must have been stuck for many months in the air-tight archives, without access to those quickening modern aids of fax and Internet. Even the telephone was a problem. He could not just pick it up and call Moscow or Leningrad when he needed to check a fact. And those responsible for generating most of the material he was reading had been hanged, hounded, jailed or had flitted to the West or South America.

But in this melee Enke fought to prove that the Amber Room had been evacuated to Germany, disproving the conclusions of Anatoly Kuchumov and Gerhard Strauss, who believed that it had survived the war but remained concealed somewhere in Konigsberg.

Enke worked in a blizzard of foreign-sounding names, obscure locations, train timetables and shipping news. Cyrillic text was transliterated into German and back again, details eroding with every version. The Soviet curator began life as 'Kuchumov' before becoming 'Kugumow' and then 'Kutschumow'. A Leningrad suburb was once called Tsarskoye Selo and then Detskoye Selo before becoming Pushkin. An East Prussian village now sat in Poland with a new name and resettled population who knew nothing about the past. And yet Enke stayed the course, although we do not know what he had discovered that made him so certain the Amber Room had reached Germany.

We are relieved to see that the next binder that arrives on the white plastic table is filled with far more contemporary Stasi material on the Amber Room. Most of it dates to the 1970S and we hope that it may at last give us a glimpse of the intelligence that prompted the Minister for State Security to mount a full-blown inquiry into the fate of the missing treasure.

What we notice straight away is how Enke was ordered to deploy the ministry's training manual to interrogate eyewitnesses to the Amber Room story. We flick