The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [112]
But having got him, the Poles declined to try Koch. For nine years he was held on remand at Warsaw prison, a delay that was never adequately explained, although the Poles claimed weakly that he was too sick to face trial. We contrast the Polish inactivity with Nuremberg, in which a significant proportion of the leadership of the Third Reich was tried, prosecuted, jailed or hanged in just eighteen months.
News footage of the trial of Erich Koch in Warsaw, 1959
It was only in November 1958 that the Poles began the case against Koch. Televised footage shows a tearful former Gauleiter lolling in the dock with a handkerchief tied around his head like a casualty of the Great War. On 19 March 1959, after ten years in custody, and a court case of four months and seventeen days, during which L,500 pages of evidence had been heard, the Poles finally passed the death sentence. Koch immediately launched an appeal on grounds of ill-health, further delaying his fate, an opportunity that would be pounced upon by the Soviets.
We have asked Our Friend the Professor in St Petersburg to scour the Kuchumov papers for any references to the former Gauleiter of East Prussia and with only four days left on our readers' tickets a couriered package arrives at our Berlin hotel. It contains an extraordinary series of classified Soviet documents. The first is a letter from the Catherine Palace, dated 28 March 1959, nine days after the death sentence on Koch was passed, then suspended pending an appeal. Comrade A.V Bobidanosov wrote to the office of the General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union: 'One can add another crime to all the terrible crimes committed by Nazi troops on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union: the robbery of the Amber Room from the Catherine Palace.'
Comrade Bobidanosov reported that research to date 'clearly shows that the Amber Room has not perished in the war and could not have been taken out of Kaliningrad... One can see that high-ranking German officials were interested in the fate of the most valuable international art trophy in the world. Therefore it is possible that Erich Koch could have known about [the Amber Room's] fate.'
Comrade Bobidanosov continued:
As far as we know in the recent trial in Warsaw the Amber Room was never mentioned and therefore it is possible that this war criminal may take his mystery to the grave. Therefore the state commission for search of art treasures is urging you to address the general Polish prosecutor with the following requests:
1. Erich Koch should be interrogated about the Amber Room. 2. One should check in the trial materials to see if any witness reports shed light on transportation of the Amber Room.
The General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union replied to Comrade Bobidanosov on 3 June 1959: 'According to our request the authorities in Poland have interrogated the former Gauleiter Erich Koch. But he knows nothing of the fate of the Amber Room and he was not aware of the existence of the room and never was informed about its unique value. Also, in the materials of his trial there is no trace of the Amber Room.'5
It was a strange response from the Poles. We recall that in 1949 Dr Gerhard Strauss had furnished the Soviets with a dossier of evidence connecting Koch to the Amber Room: letters from him to Gauleiter Mutschmann in Dresden, asking for secure storage facilities; orders from him to Alfred Rohde to inspect castles in Saxony for places to hide 'irreplaceable treasures', including the Amber Room.
Unsurprisingly, the Soviets refused to accept the Polish response and insisted on sending their own emissary to interrogate Erich Koch. They would need a neutral figure who would not aggravate the Poles or the former Gauleiter. We search for an account of the meeting. There is no reference to it in the literature archive but in the Ministry of Truth we come across a report dated 24