The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [110]
He smiles, sucks in a deep lungful of smoke and then leans forward until his head is barely an inch from ours. We can see every oily pore and his chipped incisors. 'Wouldn't that be interesting? Worth something a little extra.' We have not yet discussed money. Geissler settles back into his chair. 'I'll give you a taster. For free. The letter-writer only found out his dad's secret when he discovered wartime documents hidden in a leather pouch in the family's cellar in 1949, a couple of years after his father died. He had never spoken about these documents until he read the article in Freie Welt.'
What did these documents state, we ask? We must keep Geissler talking.
'There was a receipt confirming the handing over of forty-two crates and packages to the letter-writer's father and an order to take the Amber Room to a secret storage facility codenamed BSCH. Another document was a transcript of a radio message reporting the implementation of that order and it read: "Action Amber Room concluded. Storage in BSCH. Accesses blown up. Casualties through enemy action." There was also a map. But there was confusion over what location these documents identified. And there was a much more serious problem. The letter-writer was just a kid when he found them and he was so frightened by what they said - there were regular round-ups of old Nazis going on 1949 - that he burned them.'
It is a lot to believe. How did you corroborate the letter-writer's story, we ask?
'He was vetted. By the author of the Freie Welt articles, Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss.'
That name again.
'Dr Strauss reported back that he thought the letter-writer was telling the truth. He had little to gain by exposing his father's Nazi past. We agreed to disguise the letter-writer's identity and he became source 'Rudi Ringel'.
Where was BSCH?
Geissler brushes our question aside: 'After Strauss had finished with "Rudi Ringel" he was whisked off to Kaliningrad so the Soviets could check him out too. Comrade K. Lebedev, the chairman of the district committee on arts affairs, was in charge. All intelligence connected to "Rudi Ringel" was sent to Comrade Veniamin Krolevsky at the Kaliningrad Party Secretariat.'
You said the evidence pointed to Germany, so why take 'Rudi Ringel' to Kaliningrad and channel all of your information to the KGB, we ask?
I told you there was some confusion over the location of BSCH because the documents were burned. The "fraternal authorities" agreed that "Rudi Ringel" was probably telling the truth but deduced that BSCH was a location in Kaliningrad. Of course we were not in a position to contradict them and while they did their work we did ours, checking out all the remaining Freie Welt letter-writers. Finally, "Rudi Ringel" came home to the GDR.'
What happened next, we ask?
Silence. The windows of the cabin are dripping with condensation, the rain is thundering on the corrugated roof and Geissler's wife appears at the front door, soaking wet, bearing a box of cherry pies.
'Liebling. Let's have a break from talking. Let's eat and drink together.' The pot is brewed. The coffee is poured and it is not until Geissler is sated that he continues. 'Enke grilled "Rudi Ringel". I did the sister and the mother. We were all over like them like a virus.' Thankfully, Geissler is unstoppable. 'We found many references in Nazi records that supported the "Ringel" family's stories.' He lights another cigarette. 'And these references revealed what we suspected all along, that the documents "Rudi Ringel" had found in the family's cellar had been misinterpreted by the KGB. BSCH could not be found in Kaliningrad because BSCH was here in Germany.'
How did the Stasi locate BSCH? What were these clues, we ask?
'That would be telling and telling equals money, but what I will tell you for free is that Enke proved that "Rudi Ringel's" father had evacuated the Amber Room out of East Prussia.