• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1865 0

June 1959.6 In it we read that a top-secret grilling took place that month in the GDR embassy in Warsaw and, examining the list of those who attended, see that the man chosen as the Soviet's emissary was none other than Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss of Humboldt University. For us, Strauss had begun as an incidental character, a name in a grease-flecked letter discarded by a Soviet curator, but now he seems to crop up everywhere. By 1959 he must have been very highly regarded by both Moscow and the GDR Politburo to have been chosen to front such delicate negotiations.

The minute shows that the meeting - attended by Strauss, Erich Koch, his lawyer, the GDR Deputy Ambassador Riesner and the Polish Solicitor General - got off to a terrible start. One of the prison warders had given Koch Strauss's recent articles about the Amber Room, published in Freie Welt. Koch immediately began to attack Strauss, saying that he was unhappy about the articles and the 'accusations raised' that he had some connection to the fate of the Amber Room. A Nazi prisoner on death row faced the emissary of the bloc, accusing him of peddling lies like a tabloid journalist. It must have been an excruciatingly embarrassing moment for Strauss, who struggled to reassure the former Gauleiter that he was in fact a serious East German academic trying to solve the mystery of the Amber Room on behalf of his government. 'It was possible to make light of it,' Strauss reported. We will never know what Strauss really told Koch about Freie Welt, but the former Gauleiter kept talking.

Strauss and the prisoner then discussed art concealed in bunkers. Koch's knowledge of East Prussian storage facilities, Strauss noted, tallied with his own and the former Gauleiter conceded that it was possible that the Amber Room had been hidden in a bunker or cellar. However, Koch insisted he had never given orders concerning the Amber Room, a reply that Strauss cautioned should be seen in a wider context. 'In total Koch took great care to give only such information that minimized his own responsibility and spoke in his favour.' Although the former Gauleiter claimed to have no personal knowledge of the fate of the Amber Room, he said he thought it impossible for it to have been evacuated to Germany.

Koch proposed his own radical theory. Strauss wrote: 'Koch thinks it is likely that the Amber Room was transported by the Soviet Army but when I said, "Well, in that case it would have been reinstalled in Pushkin," Koch accepted that my argument was more convincing than his.' As the ninety-minute meeting drew to a close, Koch demanded Strauss's 'word of honour' that their discussion would remain confidential. 'Nobody should find out that he was helping to find the Amber Room,' Strauss reported. 'At the moment we cannot expect more from Koch, but because he is trying to influence his appeal process, it is not impossible that shortly we shall get further statements from him.'

We had left our meeting with Uwe Geissler still unsure of how the Stasi had tied Erich Koch to the Amber Room and a hiding place in Germany. In this Stasi report Koch divulged no evidence connecting himself to the Amber Room or an evacuation plan ending in Germany. But just as we begin to think that Geissler may have been lying, the next document sent to us from St Petersburg bolsters Geissler's story. He told us that in the summer of 1959 a GDR citizen codenamed 'Rudi Ringel' had been flown to Kaliningrad and cross-examined by party functionaries. Here we read confirmation that 'Rudi Ringel' did exist and that this source was flown to Kaliningrad in the summer of 1959. The Soviet official who interrogated him there was Leningrad curator Anatoly Kuchumov.

In a typed report marked 'Ringel: Top Secret', Kuchumov summarized the witness's story. It was remarkably similar to the one Geissler told us. Kuchumov wrote:

In July 1949, two years after the death of his father, when the family was preparing to move house, ['Rudi Ringel'] was sent to clear the cellar by his mother. Under some rough moist coal he found a leather