The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [128]
But the story would not go away. What Stein had found was one of the Soviet Union's most precious missing devotional treasures, the Byzantine icons from the Mirozhsky Monastery in Pskov. They had been stolen by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941, packed into crates along with ruby-studded crucifixes, bishops' crowns encrusted with precious stones, and gold and silver chalices, and shipped to Castle Colmberg in Bavaria in 1944. There they had been discovered by American forces, who had taken them to Wiesbaden in April 1945.
As soon as the story went public, the Soviets lodged an appeal for the return of the treasures and the West German Foreign Office was forced to back down. On 14 May 1973, amid a barrage of negative publicity in West Germany, where curators called for Moscow to hand back items allegedly looted by the Red Army in 1945 (including a Gutenberg Bible, stained glass from St Mary's in Frankfurt an der Oder, the 'Trojan Gold', drawings by Diirer and the entire collection of the Bremen Kunsthalle), the Pskov icons were repatriated to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the West German Consul-General presented them to Patriarch Pimen, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who then awarded George Stein the Star of the Order of St Vladimir Second Class, a cross worn around the fruit farmer's neck on which was embossed the motto 'Usefulness, Honour and Glory'.30
Lionized in Russia, George Stein returned to West Germany in June 1973 to be belittled as a meddling hobby-Hist or iker by bristling and chauvinistic elements in the West German press. But according to the Ministry of Truth files, what the Stasi had identified as a 'favourable political-operative situation' (the Soviets and East Germans portrayed as preyed upon by the greedy West, which was forced by one of its own citizens to return stolen art) rapidly deteriorated into a 'politically hostile situation' (the Soviets and East Germans demonized by that same citizen - George Stein).
Stein learned from irate West German museum curators that extensive files concerning secret Nazi art storage facilities and the fate of the Amber Room had been amassed by the USSR and GDR. He began demanding access to them and in particular he repeatedly wrote and called the State Archives Administration in East Berlin (the place where the Stasi's own Amber Room expert, Oberstleutnant Paul Enke, worked undercover as researcher Dr P. Kohler).
In the Ministry of Truth we found this report, written by Paul Enke:
[day and month blacked out], 1975. in connection with problems of exchange of works of art, my department has unofficially learned that George Stein is...trying to force the USSR and the GDR to make available and accessible information that is closed about the hiding place of art treasures and especially the Amber Room of Pushkin. In 1974 and on 3 July 1975 George Stein has asked our Documentation Centre of the State Archives Administration for assistance in his search for the Amber Room. On 18 August 1975 he received a reply that in spite of detailed researches there is no information about the Amber Room in the archives of the GDR.31
But the Stasi had underestimated how tenacious George Stein could be. When he received the letter from the State Archives Administration on E 8 August 1975, brushing him aside, he turned to press contacts he had made after recovering the Pskov icons. He called up 'Red Countess' Marion Donhoff of Die Zeit, Anthony Terry at The Sunday Times in London and reporters on the Washington Post. He accused the East German and Soviet governments of withholding sensitive information about the Amber Room, hobbling those who were making