The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [131]
Suddenly we realize that the Volpriehausen episode was a highly successful diversionary ploy. While the Stasi had secretly suspended all of its own operations connected to the source 'Rudi Ringel', it had recycled his dubious evidence for a new purpose - through George Stein. BSCH, the secret hiding place of the Amber Room, was becoming nomadic: first in Kaliningrad, then in East Germany and now in West Germany, alongside 'Rudi Ringel's' father, the lame post office security guard who appeared to have signed a telex in 1945 using a pseudonym given by the Stasi in E959. It was all getting rather far-fetched.
We can see how conveniently this bad publicity played out for the Stasi. To the delight of the authorities in the East, Bonn once again appeared to be intransigent and chauvinistic, while the Soviet Union's wartime losses were highlighted through the fate of the Amber Room.
The Soviets contacted the Stasi, asking for more background information and a character assessment of George Stein. In his reply, Paul Enke made certain that he was not eclipsed by his West German mole:
I suggest you don't really expect anything sensational from this source...Stein works with somewhat dubious methods, for instance with forgeries. The motives for these practices are not quite clear to us. Maybe it is only the greed for sensationalism and the need for so-called scoops inherent in Capitalism. Just recently Stein published in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit four reports about the storage of the Amber Room in the pits near Gottingen. According to a statement by Stein... he has a copy of a wartime telex that writes about the conclusion of 'enterprise Amber Room' that is supposed to be graced with the signature 'Ringel'. But as we are all aware, the name Ringel is only a pseudonym given to our 'object' in 1959, therefore it can hardly be the signature on a letter from 1945. This is only one further example of Stein's talent for invention.40
This was a bold statement from a Stasi man who would already have known that he was about to be investigated in connection with his reliance on the dubious evidence presented by 'Rudi Ringel'. But Enke's unflattering portrait of Stein failed to put the Soviets off the scent.
Five months later, flattering articles about George Stein began to appear in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, & highbrow Soviet literary journal, under the byline of its Bonn correspondent, Julian Semyonov. This must be the 'Comrade Julia Semjonow' that Stasi deputy minister Neiber requested to see on his planned mission to the KGB in Moscow in 1982.
In May 1979 Semyonov wrote an article headlined 'A West German Citizen from the Village of Stelle'.41 He described the scene:
I am sitting here in the home of the married couple Stein in the village of Stelle near Hamburg. Wooden beams blackened by the wind from the sea lie across the white walls of this genuine Hanseatic house as I listen to the story. Like every enthusiastic person [George Stein's] language is unclear, rapid and jumps from one subject to another. George Stein knew that the search for the Amber Room had to continue and this is his story...
The thousands of words that follow tell how Stein had inadvertently become 'Europe's most successful Second World War treasure-hunter'.
Semyonov revealed that Stein's interest in Nazi loot was sparked in 1966 when, laid up in a sanatorium at the foot of the Matterhorn, recovering from a car accident, he read a series of articles by Anthony Terry in The Sunday Times about Erich Koch's prison-cell confessions concerning the Amber Room. Semyonov revealed that Stein, a native of East Prussia, vowed to find the Amber Room as a tribute to his family. His father, a Konigsberg industrialist, had been part of the wartime resistance, while Dorothea-Luisa, Stein's sister, had worked at Konigsberg Castle as an assistant to Alfred Rohde. Can this possibly be true? It seems a little neat.