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In 1966 George Stein, a strawberry farmer from Stelle, a village south-west of Hamburg, had begun to scour West German archives in his free weekends, looking for information about the Amber Room. It was an exciting hobby for a man who had been raised in the former East Prussia.

He began his research with the war. In state archives in Bonn he read how, despite the division of Germany into Allied zones at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, a race had ensued to reach the Nazi hoards. In April 1945 the US Army had beaten the Red Army to Thuringia (in the Soviet Zone) and removed the Reichsbank reserves, 'LOO tons of gold and silver bullion'.24 From the Soviet Zone US troops also took priceless German art collections, as well as Soviet treasures looted by the Nazis that had been stored beside them. Stein considered the possibility that the Amber Room had been found by US troops and taken back to America.

Art works stolen by the Nazis, hidden in German mines and found by American troops in April 1945

He read how the USA had tried to placate Stalin in 1945 by assuring him that all Soviet art would be returned, and between 1946 and 1948 the USA sent to the USSR tens of thousands of crates. There was, however, no apology for taking the gold and German art collections from the Soviet Zone. By March 1949, with Berlin blockaded, the wrangle over reparations and the bitterness felt by the Soviets at losing out contributed to the freezing of relations between East and West.

Stein read in the Bonn archive how Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Occupation Forces, accused his American counterpart, General Lucius Clay, of 'deliberate spoilage or theft'.25 The US dismissed the claim as Stalinist propaganda, stating that the only Soviet items it continued to hold on to were politically sensitive documents, such as the Smolensk Communist Party Archive, which 'served their purpose as a training ground for American Sovietology'.26 If we have hoarded Soviet art, the Americans challenged Moscow, show us the proof.

In 1972, Stein found it. In the Ministry of Truth files, we come across a report on Stein's researches, written by Paul Enke, that stated Stein had discovered in the Bonn archive (a place barred to the Soviets and East Germans) a letter dated 27 April 1955 from Dr Clemens Weiler, director of West Germany's Wiesbaden City Museum. In the letter, Weiler explained how he had been made responsible for numerous art works left behind by the Americans after they had closed their central art collection point, which was based in Wiesbaden, in E951. Four years later Dr Weiler was offering some of these art works, specifically a collection of Russian icons, to another West German museum, the Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen.27

Stein probed and found more correspondence about the Russian icons, this time letters from Clemens Weiler to Ardelia Hall, head of the US Restitution Program at the Department of State in Washington. Weiler reported to Hall his intentions to pass on the icons and Hall advised him to dispose of them as he saw fit, requesting only that they be made 'as accessible to the public as possible'. There was no discussion about returning the icons to the Soviet Union.28

In 1972 Stein drove to Recklinghausen and discovered that the deal had gone ahead. In fact the Russian icons were still there, locked up in a third-floor store. He contacted a family friend who had been part of the wartime resistance in Konigsberg, Marion Donhoff, the famous 'Red Countess of East Prussia', who after the war had become the publisher of Die Zeit newspaper. The story Marion Donhoff printed forced the Recklinghausen museum to defend itself. Its spokesman claimed that the wooden icons had been locked away only 'to avoid infestation with moths' - hardly a convincing argument - and failed to answer the question of what icons belonging to the Soviet Union were doing in a West German museum in the first place. The West German