The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [111]
'Paul Enke went to Oberst Seufert but the boss was cautious. Didn't want to clash with the "fraternal authorities" who were digging in Kaliningrad. Seufert said that if we found more evidence then he would back an application for funding a dig in Germany. But - ' Geissler takes a mouthful of pie - 'there was a problem. Enke identified in the GDR 700 possible locations for BSCH: salt mines, coal-mines, quarries, caves and underground bunkers. The Stasi Secretariat ordered us to whittle the list down. We went back to "Rudi Ringel" but he said he knew only what he had seen in the documents. His father had died two years after the war without ever talking about the location of BSCH. The only living person who could confirm the location of the Amber Room was the man who issued the orders, the Nazi war criminal Gauleiter Erich Koch.'
Geissler looks at his watch. 'Time's up. Nothing more for free. I'm back in the city on Monday. Call me and we'll talk cash,' he chirps. 'You'll have to. I'm the only one connected to the Amber Room study group still alive.'
Liebling struggles to hold the door and slams it shut behind us. 'Goat's Throat Village' sinks beneath the deluge.
On 28 May 1949 the Daily Telegraph reported the arrest of a farm labourer called Rolf Berger in the village of Haasemoor, north of Hamburg, after a tip-off from suspicious neighbours. 'In his trouser pocket was found a glass phial of cyanide of potassium, the kind issued to leading Nazis. A similar phial was used by Himmler after his arrest in 1945,' the Daily Telegraph revealed. Under interrogation, the labourer admitted that he was Erich Koch, the former Gauleiter of East Prussia, and that he had been living incognito for four years in the same sparsely populated northern-most German state where Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue and Reich Minister for Occupied Eastern Territories, had been run to ground in May 1945.
It was a coup for the joint British-German intelligence operation code-named Old Lace, which had been tasked with chasing down missing Nazis. Erich Koch, who had been among the first to join the National Socialist movement in 1922 and bore party ticket number 90, was one of the most wanted, along with Bormann, Eichmann and Mengele. However, with no central prosecuting authority now in place, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg having closed, the British guarded Koch at their base in Bielefeld, while they decided what to do with him.
Stalin demanded to be allowed to prosecute Koch, since more than four million Soviet citizens had died and two million more been sent to Nazi work camps during his tenure as Reich's Commissar for the Ukraine (a position he held before becoming Gauleiter of East Prussia). While the British requested that the Soviets send a detailed legal case for extradition, Koch launched his own action, submitting a plea: I know that as a former member of the Nazi Party... I have incurred heavy political guilt but I would ask you to believe that in all my political and human mistakes I . . . was servicing a good cause and the welfare of my people.'3 He wrote that he had no illusions as to 'what awaits me behind the Iron Curtain'. It was not death he feared 'but the base and inhuman treatment that this [Soviet] system applies to its opponents. It is the cold-blooded way in which a human being is made use of and then atrociously killed.' (This from the man who had ordered the corpses of Soviet prisoners in Rovno to be incinerated and the ash sold as fertilizer to German farmers.)
The British were unmoved by Koch's appeal but the former Gauleiter would not be tried in the Soviet Union. Instead of witness statements, affidavits and photographs, the Soviets submitted a terse letter claiming that Nuremberg had already established Koch's 'grievous war crimes'.4 Then another application for Koch arrived in West Berlin and this one was a detailed legal document