The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [129]
In the Ministry of Truth files, the Stasi's alarm was palpable. Enke's boss Generaloberst Biichner and Stasi deputy minister Generaloberst Beater immediately demanded further intelligence about the activities of George Stein. Beater and Biichner were advised by Enke:
West German hobby-Hist or iker George Stein is talking to the English and American press, saying that the GDR and USSR are hindering attempts to find art works like the Amber Room, that the GDR and USSR have information about the hiding places of art treasures that they do not want to publish. We cannot allow this threatened press campaign by Stein to interfere with the cultural agreements being negotiated between the GDR and FRG.32
West German citizen George Stein had blundered into Ostpolitik. West Germany had held out its hand to Moscow, making peaceful overtures, and for its part Moscow and East Berlin were being made to look recalcitrant. George Stein would have to be headed off.
The files show that it was Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss who was brought in to handle the delicate negotiations. Strauss called George Stein to say that the GDR and USSR were keen to share information about the search for the Amber Room. He invited Stein to Heinrich-Mann-Platz for dinner (which must have been when Stephan Strauss, Gerhard's son, met him) and in the course of the evening explained that the GDR was not being obstructive but was a stickler for protocol. All future inquiries should be directed via him to a Dr Paul Kohler, senior researcher at the Documentation Centre of the State Archives Administration. Dr Kohler would provide relevant documents in exchange for sight of Stein's own research in Western archives and he would even pay for the material.
Stein must have been flattered to be courted by such a prestigious East German cultural scholar as Strauss and to be offered money for what he had so far had to fund from his own pocket. He readily agreed, but could not have known that Paul Kohler at the archives was Paul Enke of the Stasi.
The watchers in the East would now manipulate George Stein. A Stasi report noted: 'Based on Stein's inquiry at the State Archives in Potsdam we have the possibility of establishing specialized contacts via Comrade Enke which have been useful in giving Stein hints about objects and persons in [West Germany] which he could follow up much better than we could.'33 The portal operated in both directions. Stein would be fed information that the East wanted publicized and fetch from the West that which the East couldn't reach.
Within two years, evidence of the success of this strategy would appear. On 23 April 1977 the West German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel carried an exclusive story: 'One of the most famous collections of amber in the world that belonged to Konigsberg University, considered to be lost in the last days of war, has been found in Gottingen University.' During a spring-clean at the geological department, staff at the West German university were said to have broken open two wooden boxes to find 1,1oo exceptionally fine pieces of amber. They bore handwritten labels in Gothic script: 'Institute of Palaeontology and Geology, Albertus-University, Konigsberg, East Prussia'. We recall that part of this collection had been found in Konigsberg by Soviet investigator Professor Alexander Brusov in 1945. At the time Brusov had advised Moscow that the best pieces of this collection had already been evacuated by Nazis from the city. Now they had turned up in West Germany, where it appeared that Gottingen University had been sitting on them for thirty-two years.34
George Stein confronted the university with a series of incriminating documents. One of them, dated 1 November 1944, was from a curator at Konigsberg's Albertus-University, Herr Hoffman. Writing to Hauptmann Peters, Munitions Department, Volpriehausen, Lower