The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [130]
Irreplaceable items - the same words used by Alfred Rohde when writing in December 1944 of his intention to evacuate the Amber Room. Across the bottom of the Hoffman letter was a postscript: 'It makes sense to address the boxes during transport with "ammo dept" so as not to bring them to the attention of others, since they are filled with priceless goods.' On the back of the letter were two handwritten notes, one of which was dated 7 November 1944, and recorded a call from Hauptmann Peters saying that 'everything went smoothly'. The other, dated 4 January 1945, advised: 'The placement of the Konigsberg salvage items has been completed.' Stein had found proof that East Prussian treasures were moving west.36 Could Stein possibly have found genuine tracks of the Amber Room too?
Reporters from Der Tagesspiegel learned from residents of Volpriehausen (the pit village named in the Hoffman letter) that heavily loaded trucks had been seen arriving at the mine in November 1944 and January 1945 - dates that corresponded with the transports from Konigsberg. In September 1945 the entrance of the pit had been blasted shut by the Allies as they withdrew. The following year a Gottingen University professor had gathered a group of students to mount an amateur salvage operation and they had descended L,625 feet down the main shaft on ropes, managing to recover 360,000 partially burnt books. Only the collapse of the roof at the end of the main tunnel had prevented them from continuing. When the Der Tagesspiegel reporters were shown some of the books in 1977, they noticed the stamp of Konigsberg University library. Stein announced that the Amber Room was in the pit and he would lead a team of specialists into the tunnels to salvage it.
But George Stein had no money and in 1978 began to noisily lobby the West German Bundestag to fund the excavation. The Stasi carefully monitored each stage of this 'Volpriehausen episode'. In one report Enke wrote: 'Professor Dietrich of the SPD [Social Democrat Party] initiated several questions in the Bundestag on behalf of George Stein, including specific queries about fascist depots in Volpriehausen.'37 Enke reported that in the village of Stelle, Stein and his wife, Elisabeth, were besieged by newspaper reporters and that right-wing newspapers were asking why West Germans should be concerned with restocking Russian museums when their own were still bare.38
The Bonn government was unimpressed with Stein's campaign. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused permission to excavate. There was insufficient evidence to warrant the expenditure. And what was in it for the FRG, apart from expiation of guilt?
On 1 December 1978 Die Zeit published more evidence from George Stein that he claimed connected the Amber Room to the Volpriehausen pit. It included a letter from 6 March 1944, written by the Nazi Kreisleitung (district administration) that identified the Volpriehausen pit as a vital storage depot with 7,000 square feet of available space. Another document, dated 29 December 1944, reported how twenty-four railway wagons filled with books and valuables had safely arrived at the pit. Die Zeit informed readers that the source of much of Stein's classified and pristine material was 'Dr Paul Kohler in the GDR', whom Stein described as 'my good friend'. Stein claimed that the most compelling document was a copy of a wartime telex concerning 'enterprise Amber Room' that showed how the treasure had been evacuated from Konigsberg in the spring of 1945. Stein told Die Zeit that the telex reported how the room was eventually concealed 'in a place codenamed BSCHW, a cipher