The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [158]
He looks down the pages of our Storozhenko statement and taps on the line where she complained that she was hindered by the rebuilding of the city. 'She was being euphemistic. It was worse than that. In 1947 the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation passed an order handing over all areas of the oblast that were in any way connected to the amber industry to the Ministry of Defence.10 Amber was a lucrative asset, after all. Beaches, villages, forests, marshes and factories all went under the control of the military. Anywhere Jelena wished to dig, she had to seek permission from them. And they seldom gave her that permission. Why would they do that when they were also supposed to have been part of the effort to find the Amber Room?'
We have no idea. Maybe the Ministry of Defence was simply trying to protect its assets, we suggest. The Baltic coast was a strategic area.
The colonel sips from a glass of water. 'You misunderstand the Soviet Union. Obstacles were placed in Jelena's way. Let me give you another example. In your document Jelena writes of the twenty archives she visited, but she does not mention the others that were out-of-bounds. Brezhnev once declared: "We should make access to special military archives more restrictive to make sure that filthy people will not use them for their own dirty purposes." And they did.'11 He drains his glass.
But for what reason, we ask? What was there to hide?
'Jelena was pursuing her own theory. Something that Professor Brusov had subtly alluded to in 1945. Our Red Army was heroic and long-suffering. But this was not the only truth. There was also theft and terrible destruction of treasures by our side.'
Is the colonel suggesting that the Red Army stole or destroyed the Amber Room, we ask, our hearts in our mouths?
He ignores the question and carries on: 'Jelena had stumbled over a few Ministry of Defence papers that had been misfiled. One from 15 June 1945 referred to a [Soviet] trophy brigade opening and emptying a safe in the Konigsberg Volksbank. I have the document.' He reads aloud from it: '"What we recovered: eighty kilos of cultural treasures, including a huge amount of platinum, gold and silver, among them one kilo of gold chains, rings, medallions and watches, silver coins, medals and 353 silver soup spoons, 244 forks, 107 knives. Report of Major Germani of the 5th Trophy Department [sic], assisted by Major Makarov, head of the travelling department of the State Bank 168, and Lt Suzlova, representative of Konigsberg Military HQ."'12 The colonel looks up: 'Later this Volksbank haul disappeared. And this was just one example. When Jelena attempted to trace what had happened to these treasures and the people who found them, Moscow informed her that there was no surviving archive material. Why would they do that? Why cover up the disappearances and the work of these so-called trophy brigades? Unless they wanted to preserve intact the image of the heroic Red Army fighting the Great Patriotic War.'
The colonel launches into a crisp lesson in Soviet military history.
In 1942 reports about the Nazi pillaging of the Leningrad palaces in 1941 and 1942 prompted officials in Moscow to propose that the Soviet Union was entitled to compensation, he says. An Extraordinary Soviet State Commission to investigate German war crimes was established in November that year and sanctioned the idea of taking 'Replacement Treasures', art works gathered from German territory to replace those that had been lost in the USSR.
On 25 February 1945, two weeks after Stalin returned from the Yalta conference (where compensation for Soviet losses had been set by the Allies at LO billion dollars), a new body was established in Moscow to realize the sum. The Special Committee on Germany was staffed by Nikolai Bulganin, the deputy head of defence, Georgy Malenkov,