The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [109]
'I'd say, "If you have looted stuff, that's acceptable. Everybody nicked stuff in the war. But if you've killed people, well, that is a different matter. Not so easy to forgive."' Geissler grins. 'It was a great trick. Worked every time. So they would all eventually admit to looting, but then we would have them. Stupid pricks didn't realize we were looking for looters all along, particularly anyone connected with the Amber Room.' He bunches his hands into fists and Wermusch slips outside with a cigarette. 'There was this one guy who admitted to having stolen something quite valuable. When he realized that I was going to report him, he pleaded with me. Said he'd never told his wife and now she would find out from the Stasi. I had to call the ambulance.' Geissler is laughing and tears well in his eyes. 'The guy had a fucking heart attack.'
Geissler's liebling grabs her purse and marches out of the chalet, sending a beaded curtain flying. We are beginning to understand why GDR citizens would never have responded to Freie Welt if they even suspected that the Stasi was its source.
Is it true, we ask, that you spent time in Bautzen (a high-security Stasi prison nicknamed 'Yellow Misery' by those cast into its urine-coloured buildings)?1 We have heard enough bravado.
Geissler reaches for a cigarette. 'It was all a misunderstanding. That's what my boss, Oberst Hans Seufert, said when he got me out in 1977. Served three years. All of it in solitary. Listen to my cough. My parents died and they would not even let me out to bury them. They accused me of selling Stasi secrets.' Did you? 'Never. A Stasi officer was giving my wife one. Wanted me out the way. I was framed. Seufert told me, "You've done your time, now shut up. If you argue you'll go back inside." It worked out all right in the end. I found a new wife, a younger one. And I was brought back into the Amber Room team.'
Geissler goes on the offensive, jabbing a finger towards us. I know many important things,' he shouts, motioning to an imaginary store at the back of the cabin. 'Government people came looking for me in 1993, the Ministry of the Interior and the head of the Berlin CDU. They were so impressed by what I knew about the Amber Room that they offered me money to write it all down.' His face reddens. 'Money too for my Stasi documents about the Amber Room investigation. I told them all to piss off.'
What documents, we ask? 'My papers are my pension. Took them in January 1990, when it all went to hell.' Oberst Seufert once told Giinter Wermusch that his Amber Room study group generated 180,000 pages of intelligence and yet we know from the functionary at the Ministry of Truth that the files she has recently acquired run to only E2,ooo.2 Someone is still sitting on the rest.
But what story do these documents tell, we ask? Geissler cannot keep it to himself: 'The Stasi had intelligence that the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, had successfully evacuated the Amber Room from Konigsberg Castle to Germany. When Freie Welt came out, the intelligence was substantiated by one of the letter-writers. A man wrote that his father, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer, had overseen the evacuation of the Amber Room on Koch's orders.'
Could this possibly be true? The existence of a plan to evacuate the Amber Room had been glimpsed by Kuchumov, confirmed by Strauss and plotted by Enke, but this is the first positive confirmation we have had that someone ordered it and that the task was accomplished. We are not yet ready to believe it. Geissler's revelation opens up a staggering range of new possibilities.