The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [115]
On 5 February 1967 TASS reported that the Soviet authorities were now certain that the Amber Room was in East Prussia after Koch finally admitted that it was he who gave the order to Alfred Rohde and Dr Helmut Will 'to take out this treasure' and conceal it in a bunker under a city church near Steindamm. Surely this was the same bunker identified by Kuchumov on a map he drew eight years earlier, having interrogated GDR letter-writer 'Rudi Ringel'. At the end of February 1967 TASS revealed that Soviet investigators were indeed heading for Konigsberg - with heavy drilling equipment. There is no record here of what this dig achieved.13
When the articles in Kaliningradskaya Pravda and Freie Welt came out in 1958 and E959, the public focus was drawn towards unnamed Nazis who were accused of evacuating the Amber Room from Konigsberg Castle, although no location for it was revealed (or perhaps known). New information from 'Rudi Ringel', writing in response to these articles, suggested that the unnamed Nazi was Erich Koch. In E967 Koch finally admitted that he had been involved in the Amber Room evacuation (although he insisted that it was to another site in Kaliningrad). At the same time the Stasi and the KGB seemed to be using the Koch-Ringel evidence to pull in different directions. Geissler assured us that the Stasi interpreted the story in such a way that it led them to search for the Amber Room in Germany where they believed Erich Koch had had it sent. The KGB was sticking with Kaliningrad.
Maybe we are missing the point. We are acutely aware of the fact that time is running out. Do we stay here in Berlin or return to St Petersburg? We take the lift to the ninth floor of the Ministry of Truth in Berlin and after half a morning searching through hundreds of censored interrogation documents we come across this draft report from 1976: 'Plan of measures for the carefully concentrated pursuit of the search for the tracks of the Amber Room on the territory of the GDR'. Here at last is a report, written in the Stasi's clumsy language, about its German operation. We hope it will explain or rebut Geissler's statement. Thankfully, because there are not many names contained in it, the censors have spared the document.14
Oberstleutnant Paul Enke advised his section head Oberst Hans Seufert: 'We are aware that in the Soviet Union the search is run by a government commission but based on the clues this search has been concentrated exclusively on Kaliningrad and only relatively little trouble has been taken for an intensive exposure of clues and hints pointing to hiding places in Saxony and Thuringia.' This statement suggested that by 1976, nine years after TASS reported that digging had begun in Kaliningrad, based on Erich Koch's evidence, the Soviets still had not found anything.
Enke recommended: 'Intensive, on-the-spot investigations into the large numbers of facts and clues. The veiled hint of Koch to where his private collection is located may refer to Thuringian storage depots as well as concealment locations in western Saxony.'
The report continued:
Further recommendations: it seems necessary to question Erich Koch extensively on the subject of his private collection. Such an investigation was carried out once already in i960 [sic] by Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss, Berlin, without any result and had anyhow been restricted exclusively to Kaliningrad. Koch could nowadays be given some clues that could be of assistance to help his memory and start him thinking. (Suggested questions attached.)
This is exactly what Geissler told us. The KGB was thought to have misinterpreted the evidence provided by Koch and 'Rudi