The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [116]
Enke called for an 'investigation of the true role of SS Sturmbannfiihrer "Ringel" in the concealment of the Amber Room'. He advised: 'The statements made by "Rudi Ringel" during questioning by a Soviet Government Commission [Anatoly Kuchumov] rest only on his childhood memories (he was thirteen in 1949). I recommend re-questioning now.'
Why Enke felt it necessary to reanalyse the statements made by Erich Koch and 'Rudi Ringel' becomes clearer when we read a report of a research trip to Thuringia and Saxony conducted by Enke in June 1976.
He was accompanied by Gerda, his wife (a couple on holiday was a 'legend' that the Stasi used time and again). They headed first for Weimar, the birthplace of the Weimar Republic. Leaving Gerda to pace the cobbled streets down which Hitler's armour-plated Mercedes once clattered, Enke set up office in the local Stasi headquarters, a villa on Cranach-Strasse, where he spent hours poring over Nazi-era archive material.
Enke reported to Seufert: 'Everything which the Nazis had brought to Thuringia in order to continue the good life... had to be left behind. Palaces, even the dance halls of many inns, had been filled up to their ceilings with luxury goods.'15 In the Weimar archives, Enke immediately encountered 'interesting traces' of Koch, including 'extensive stocks of files from the estate of his bloody governance of the Ukraine that had been evacuated to [nearby] Bad Sulza at the beginning of 1945'.
Many East Prussian artefacts had been evacuated to Thuringia in the spring of 1945, Enke reported, including medieval sculptures from Marienburg Castle (today Malbork in Poland) and an iron chest of the St George Brotherhood from Elbing. A few days later, Enke found an inventory from 1945 of 'museum goods delivered for storage to the State Museum of Weimar', written by its wartime director, Dr Walter Scheidig. It included valuable Gobelin tapestries, paintings and a large collection of wall-mounted silver candelabras. But what initially caught Enke's eye were paintings of insignificant monetary value: A View of Elberfeld, Roaring Monarch of the Glen and a series of third-rate family portraits.
Enke reported that Elberfeld, in the Rhineland, was the birthplace of Erich Koch and, according to papers Enke had read in Potsdam, Roaring Monarch of the Glen was one of many gifts received by the Gauleiter while he was in Konigsberg. Enke contacted East Berlin: 'We have found the relocation site of [Koch's] robbed collection, even without Koch's assistance!' Enke added that he had once read in a GDR newspaper that Erich Koch had bragged: 'If you find my art collection then you will find the Amber Room too.' Enke believed he was closing in on something significant.
Enke went in search of Dr Scheidig, who had compiled the inventory of Koch's evacuated art works. At the remains of the State Museum of Weimar (heavily bombed in the war and still a ruin in 1976), Enke found an elderly retired art dealer who told him that Scheidig was dead. But Enke should not worry, as the dealer (name blacked out) also knew how the Weimar museum came to receive Erich Koch's collection.
The old art dealer recalled that a Nazi officer had arrived in a van on 9 February 1945, saying that he was an 'administrator for Gauleiter Koch' and was 'bringing museum treasures from Konigsberg'. The officer wore the uniform of the Nationalionalsozialitsches Fliegerkorps (NSFK) and appeared uneasy. He was 'neither an art historian nor a museum curator' and seemed anxious to leave as soon as he had unloaded the contents of his van. The old man noted that the cargo was an assortment of 'crates, racks, suitcases and chests' that museum staff stacked unopened on the ground floor. 'Everything about the evacuation of these crates seemed to have been conducted without thought or pre-planning, leaving much to chance,' Enke wrote.16
After several weeks of bombing raids over Weimar, on 9 April 1945 (the day that Konigsberg surrendered) Gauleiter Koch's administrator returned to remove the 'museum goods from Konigsberg', cramming