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By Root 1907 0

crates and suitcases into a small van with Swiss number plates, operating under the flag of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He came back again the next day to take another batch and said he would return on 21 April for the last. But he never returned, since the next force to arrive in Weimar was the US Third Army (on 11 April 1945) and American art experts who accompanied the troops found the unclaimed crates in the lobby of the Weimar museum. Museum director Scheidig was ordered to open them and make an inventory, noting that alongside family portraits, German etchings and prints were silver candelabras and museum exhibits that bore labels written in Russian. It was this list that Enke had discovered.

So where was this cache now, Enke asked the old art dealer? He said that he was surprised Enke didn't know. A female curator from Russia had visited Weimar in 1948, debriefed Scheidig and taken most of the contents of the crates back to the USSR. The old man thought her name was Xenia Agarfornova.

We know this name. According to Kuchumov's diary from his Berlin mission in 1947, when he worked for General Zorin, sorting stolen Soviet treasures in the Derutra warehouse, Xenia Agarfornova was part of the staff. She had come from the Leningrad Hermitage and was given a roving role to retrieve art works concealed in the German countryside. She had also interrogated Gerhard Strauss. The USSR had claimed part of Koch's collection and not thought to tell the Stasi. Why?

Enke would have to check with the Soviet authorities and sent off a letter to Leningrad. While he waited for a response he worked on mapping Koch's consignments that had left Weimar in the Red Cross van on 9 and LO April 1945.

Sitting at his desk in Cranach-Strasse, with his favourite thinking food of black beer and pickled pork, Enke plotted the 1945 Allied advance on his route map of Thuringia. 'Under the conditions described, the average van speed may hardly have exceeded 30 kmh,' he wrote in his report. 'Considering the journey to the depot [Weimar museum], unloading, the return journey, controls en-route and resting periods, this would have allowed a maximum distance to be travelled of 150-180 kilometres from Weimar.' But in which direction had Koch's treasures been driven?

North was into the arms of the Red Army. If the van had driven west it would have run into the American troops that reached a Thuringian village called Merkers on 4 April 1945. The Americans were also advancing from the south and were at Coburg in Bavaria by 11 April, threatening the Berlin-Nuremberg A9 autobahn. Enke concluded that the only sensible route on 9 and LO April 1945 would have been east, along the A4 autobahn to Gera and on towards Dresden. 'To simplify and shorten our description, we will call this mooted area western Saxony,' Enke wrote.

Where in western Saxony? Enke reported: 'By April 1945 all [Nazi] hope had evaporated and turned into the certainty of total defeat. At this moment the Nazis no longer searched for palaces, castles or monasteries... but for hiding places where [art] might be stored and remain undiscovered for a certain length of time.' Mines not castles. Caves not monasteries. Bunkers not safes. Enke reminded Seufert about the American discovery in May 1945 of the vast Fuhrermuseum collection found in a salt mine beneath the Alt-Aussee mountains of Austria.

Enke sought out archives to help locate subterranean bolt-holes in western Saxony. He visited Dresden and among the papers he recovered there was a letter from Professor Fichtner, who wrote to the Reich Chancellery in December 1943: 'The best and most ideal safeguarding and rescue depots are at this moment in time decentralized accommodations in well-camouflaged areas of central Germany.' Fichtner named a limestone quarry at Lengefeld, on the northern edge of western Saxony's Erzgebirge nature park, much of which was 'laterally inside the mountain and may be considered to be absolutely safe against air raids'. At the time, the Reich Chancellery declined the offer and, as far as Enke could