The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [149]
The Stasi barely had time to consider the Baron's proposal, as two weeks later its attention was drawn elsewhere. News arrived that the Soviets had begun digging for the Amber Room again, in Kaliningrad, even though they had told the Stasi two years before that they had given up the search. 'The Scent Leads to Ponarth,' declared Izvestiya.13 Vlad Lapsky, its Berlin correspondent, wrote: 'Another version of a hiding place of the Amber Room emerges. There will be confirmation of this new scenario soon.' Then a report from TASS, dated 2 August 1988, read: 'Amber Room found in Kaliningrad?' And twelve days later Aktiillen Kamera (the GDR state TV news programme) reported: 19.30 hours.
14 August 1988. Kaliningrad. Population 400,000. City on the Soviet Baltic coast. An unusual search started this weekend here at the [Ponarth] brewery, which took us back to the last months of the war. A group of experts, students and workers, led by operation director Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, are hoping to find the world-famous Amber Room.'14 By the second week of August 1988 there was so much publicity surrounding this new Soviet dig that Erich Mielke, the Minster for State Security, felt compelled to write to Viktor Chebrikov, the chairman of the KGB:
Dear Comrade Tschebrikow! The TASS report about the location of the Amber Room has finally brought about my writing of this letter. The alleged facts of the case emanated from a female citizen of the GDR. You are aware that the GDR and especially the [Stasi] have been pursuing the traces of the Amber Room since 1945 in order to return this work of art to its legal owner, the Soviet Union.
These activities reveal our continued interest in the fate of this work of art. I would therefore be grateful to you if you could let me know the results of your search in Kaliningrad. In the event that you have achieved success, we would call off our searches.15
Translation: the trials and tribulations of the Amber Room were as much a part of the GDR as they were of the USSR. But the most feared man in the GDR, someone who had risen to power by forging the closest possible ties with Moscow, suspected that he was so far out of the Soviet loop that even if the Amber Room was found, he might learn of it only from the newspapers.
While he was on the subject, there were other matters of concern. Mielke continued:
I also believe it could serve our joint purpose if we could have sight of the archive accumulated by the FRG citizen and hobby-Historiker George Stein, which has been passed to the Soviet Culture Fund. The same also applies to certain fascist files that are held in Soviet archives. It could prove useful if an exchange of information between the experts in the search after missing works of art could be set up.
I wish to ensure you the GDR and her MfS will not rest or relax in their search for the whereabouts of the Amber Room and other treasures of world culture.
Erich Mielke promised to give the Soviets his all, even though he surely now realized there was only one possibility, that all the German versions of the Amber Room story were spent and the answers if there were any, lay with the Soviets, who were not going to share their findings with anyone.
There are no more files in the Ministry of Truth for us to decrypt and it is as we feared. Mielke must have felt trapped by the Amber Room saga, or at the very least misled by Moscow. Perhaps the Soviets were using their German comrades to distract attention from the one direction in which answers lay.
We too feel that the German version was a snare, serving to bog us down and distract us from the real work in Russia.
12
The cherry-lipped Pulkova Airlines stewardess