The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [147]
With George Stein dead (and a strong suspicion he had been murdered for spreading Amber Room secrets), Bernsteinzimmer Report became a bestseller. Vlad Lapsky, Berlin correspondent for Izvestiya, wrote: 'A short time ago the book's second edition appeared in a relatively high run only six months after 20,000 copies of the first edition had been sold. It practically never reached the tables of the bookshops.'6
Public imagination, pricked in 1958 by Kaliningradskaya Pravda and in 19 59 by Freie Welt, now fed off the chilling drama surrounding Stein's death and the authoritative details contained in Bernsteinzimmer Report: interviews with real eyewitnesses, original Nazi documents saved from the fire, explosive allegations linking the West German, British and American governments to a vast conspiracy to steal the world's most valuable treasure.
The climax of Bernsteinzimmer Report was set in the spring of 194 5: a Red Cross van driven by Albert Popp and probably SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel', loaded down with the art collection of the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, and the Amber Room. Skirting Allied bombers, Popp and 'Ringel' raced through Nazi Weimar to a disused mine in the western Erzgebirge in Saxony. Page 227 concluded: '[Gauleiter of Saxony] Mutschmann, Albert Popp and SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel' have taken the secret with them to the grave of where some of the most valuable goods of world culture were hidden for the filthy fascist plans of the future.'
For once the Stasi was delighted with the out-of-favour Enke and, in assessing the impact of Bernsteinzimmer Report, Oberst Seufert revealed that its sole aim was 'to reawaken awareness of the FRG's public' in the hope they would write in, leading 'to new hints'. Seufert reassured the Secretariat that Enke's book 'is not a diary of the search' and there were no secrets in it 'as the documents and facts used are... practically accessible to everyone'.7
One of the key facts, the Erich Koch connection with the Amber Room, would be revealed as a bogus story just months after the book came out. In an interview conducted with the elderly ex-Gauleiter in his Polish prison shortly before his death on 15 November 1986 (thirty-seven years after he was diagnosed as suffering from a terminal illness), Koch told journalist Mieczyslaw Pozhinsky that he had never known what had happened to the Amber Room. 'Do you think that in the spring of 194 5, with the Red Army attacking in all directions, I had time to worry about those boxes?' he asked.8
However, the readers of Bernsteinzimmer Report were not listening. Thousands wrote in to GDR publishers Die Wirtschaft with new angles on old scenarios. 'After careful perusal of your book about the disappeared Amber Room, I suddenly recalled everything,' wrote Herbert from ZeLilenroda, a town twenty miles north-east of the Erzgebirge.9 In 1953 Herbert had trained as a fireman at a castle near Weimar, where he had discovered 'in the half-open drawer of a cupboard and also on the floor in a shallow dish were lying small honey-yellow stones of amber'.
Other correspondents were more imaginative. Gerhard from Uder, a village twelve miles south-east of Gottingen in West Germany, wrote: 'My life has been tragically involved with these events. I have lived to see some quite incredible things.' Most incredible was Gerhard's claim that, on 22 January 1945, he had seen a Special Gauleiter Train packed with the Amber Room panels, commanded by SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel'. Gerhard claimed even to have heard 'Ringel' talking on the telephone to Erich Koch and then Hermann Goring.10 Since the Stasi inquiry was still underway, Enke was called on to weed out the fantasists.
Then, on