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By Root 1894 0

Amber Room investigation was also terminated. A handwritten note by Hauptmann Rudolph recorded: 'Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss should be deleted from any further utilization in the procedure "Operation Puschkin".' An attached note (that also confirmed what we have suspected all along, that Strauss was a Stasi collaborator) stated: 'Professor Strauss has been removed from the whole process of the Amber Room after the intervention of the Comrade Minister.'9 (After reunification Strauss's place of work, Humboldt University, would be exposed in the German press as a Stasi hothouse, with one in six professors and one in ten employees having had links to Mielke's ministry).

For Enke, there was to be some recompense. Seufert suggested that the Secretariat award him the Battle Decoration in gold (Kampforden) and a one-off bonus of L,500 Ostmarks - one month's salary.10 But surely nothing could console Enke, having been forced out of that which he created.

Once Enke had turned over his paperwork, he was ordered to complete his long-overdue book, an exercise that the Ministry of Truth files stated was 'critical to the success of the new "Operation Puschkin"'. The Secretariat had ditched Enke's dogmatic title in favour of something more pithy: Bernsteinzimmer Report. Enke was given just months in which to polish his manuscript and, to hurry him along, two Stasi-approved Lektors (editors) were hired: Wolfgang Ney, Humboldt University professor of criminology and Dr Manfred Kirmse, director of the Documentation Centre at the State Archives Administration.11 No mention yet of Giinter Wermusch or Die Wirtschaft, the eventual publishers.

According to Ministry of Truth files, the latter chapters of Bernsteinzimmer Report would provide a 'description of the finding of the new tracks of the Amber Room in Thuringia', proving that 'arriving from Konigsberg, the unique art collection of Erich Koch, including the Amber Room, had been stored in the State Museum of Weimar and that on 9 or 10 April [1945] these collections had been taken to a place of safety away from the approaching US Army. The man in charge of the double relocation of the collections was Albert Popp.' The book would 'succeed in proving that a man living in the GDR and serving as an informant to the Soviet government (a.k.a. 'Rudi Ringel') told how his father was supposed to have concealed the Amber Room and that as a result of the author's research... new tracks [of 'Rudi Ringel's' story] point to western Saxony, a version supported by information emanating from the Soviet Union which was passed under conditions of confidentiality to the author'.12

Given the internal investigation into 'Rudi Ringel's' evidence, the failed digs in Saxony and the pensioning off of Paul Enke, Bernsteinzimmer Report, still today the most famous book on the Amber Room mystery, was shaping up to be a classic exercise in disinformation. In a report to Generalmajor Neiber, Oberst Seufert confirmed this, writing: 'The book is to be published to lend new impulses to the search.'13

While Enke sweated over his manuscript, Seufert picked through his subordinate's files and began to discover significant gaps. Enke had never seen Professor Brusov's assessment of Konigsberg Castle Museum director Alfred Rohde, written in 1945, or Anatoly Kuchumov's dismantling of it in 1946. Enke had never been shown any of Kuchumov's 1946 interrogations. Or a transcript of Kuchumov's interview with of Dr Gerhard Strauss in the Hotel Moscow in Kaliningrad in 1949. In fact, Enke had mislaid the Stasi's entire file on Gerhard Strauss, an incident that now led to a high-level inquiry, with one Stasi directorate head writing to another: 'This file could be of great importance to our investigations but for operative reasons it cannot be located. We have already been looking for it in the State Archives Administration and the Central State Archive in Potsdam with no result. Do you have it?'14

Although Enke's main investigations to date hinged on the theory that the former Gauleiter Erich Koch had ordered the evacuation of the