The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [125]
The Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, had signed off all art transports into his state and yet Enke had found no documents connecting Mutschmann with the Amber Room. Although it was an open secret that the Red Army had probably found Mutschmann in the Erzgebirge in May 1945 and taken him back to Moscow, Enke had made no formal request to the KGB for intelligence. There was no evidence (aside from that given by an aged Weimar art dealer) that Albert Popp, the man who had evacuated Hitler's half-sister, had also been the driver of the Red Cross van bearing Koch's art collection to the Erzgebirge. There were no witnesses or corroborative facts that supported the claim that the man in the passenger seat was 'Rudi Ringel's' father. Not only had Enke based his investigations on one source alone ('Rudi Ringel'), he had also tailored the source's statement to fit his own theory. While we had read in Kuchumov's original debriefing of 'Rudi Ringel' that BSCH (the supposed codename for the secret Amber Room storage facility) was described as in Konigsberg, Paul Enke placed it in East Germany.
Oberst Stolze wrote to Generalmajor Neiber, warning him of an even more worrying factor. In reviewing Enke's interrogations of old East Prussians, Stolze had discovered that virtually every German citizen questioned by the Stasi in connection with the Amber Room story had already been quizzed by the Soviets at the end of the war. Stolze wrote: 'It has been ascertained that in the post-war years, the Soviet Union... undertook intensive measures in the territory of the GDR to find the Amber Room. Many of the persons and objects of these searches, which had been undertaken at the time, have reappeared in our inquiry.' If the Stasi and KGB had the same motives in searching for the Amber Room, why had the Soviets not shared their findings, Stolze queried, and saved the Stasi time and money?15
On 28 October 1980 the Stasi wrote to the KGB in Moscow to rectify the situation. 'In our efforts to obtain new hints, indications or documents which could lead to the finding of the Amber Room we are asking for any information from your archives, card indexes and other sources in the USSR in connection with the enclosed questionnaire.'16 Attached was a thirteen-page list of what the Stasi needed: intelligence on Nazi organizations, eyewitnesses and suspects. The request was copied to the chairman of the KGB and the KGB liaison in Berlin-Karlshorst.
While it waited for a response, the Stasi recruited more staff to help comb through the old Amber Room files, dispatching a constant stream of briefing papers to deputy minister Neiber, including a twenty-three-page report dated 11 January E982 containing new indexes for locations, transport firms, digging sites, witnesses and names of former Nazis. There were chronological lists of newspaper articles, alphabetical tables of Nazi art depots, maps - scores of them, now sorted and classified - and photographs too. All of Enke's theories on the Amber Room's disappearance were anatomized. Buried towards the end of one of these reports was a significant concession: perhaps the Amber Room had remained concealed in Kaliningrad after all.17
The Secretariat signed off a fifteen-page recommendation on 2E January 1982: 'Political-Operative Plan of Steps for Cooperation between Foreign Security Services for the "Operation Puschkin" investigation'. It was a plea to brother intelligence organizations to share information with the Stasi. The KGB in Moscow was petitioned again to open their files and the Polish security services were asked again for access to Erich Koch, who was still alive.18
By February