The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [159]
Soldiers could not do such a specialized job and so conscription orders were sent to industrialists, artists, curators, writers and scientists. They were invested with military ranks and uniforms so that the Red Army would respect them. Armed with lists, targets and Baedeker guides to Germany, they would be known as the 'trophy brigades' and dispatched to the front.
The colonel looks at us over his glasses. I began to investigate the behaviour of these brigades and our regular troops in East Prussia. Among the Soviet forces storming Konigsberg in April 1945 were the LLth Guards Army, the 50th Army and the 43 rd Army. Each of these armies had trophy brigades attached to them and these experts hit the ground running as soon as the city fell on 9 April. When the 50th and 43rd armies were dispatched to the Far East, the i Lth Army under General Galitsky was left behind and its trophy brigades carried on with their work.'
We know that Professor Alexander Brusov, who led the first official search for the Amber Room, only reached Konigsberg sixty-one days after the city fell. According to Colonel Ovsianov's research, this meant that there were sixty-one days during which the city was crawling with regular troops and trophy brigades whose actions were not always coordinated or accountable.
'Even after Brusov arrived, his was not the only team in town,' the colonel says. 'Several units of the trophy brigades were still operating. Colonel D. D. Ivanyenko, the man who found the Castle Gift Book, recording the arrival of the Amber Room in December 1941, was not a real army officer. He was conscripted from Moscow State University to a trophy brigade and remained in the city until August, accompanied by political commissar Major Krolic and translator Lieutenant Malakov.
'In June 1945, the Brigade of the Committee of Arts Affairs, led by N. U. Sergeiyevskaya, Secretary of Moscow's Purchasing Committee of the Commission of Cultural Affairs, arrived with First Lieutenant 1.1. Tsirlin from the Pushkin Museum. The same month, another brigade, headed by Comrade S. D. Skazkin and Comrade Turok of the Academy of Science in Moscow, arrived. And then a fourth search team came from the Voronezh Museum, under the chairmanship of Professor I. A. Petrusov. All of these teams had overlapping responsibilities for recovering loot and all of their findings came under the Ministry of Defence.
'No one was to supposed to know of the existence of these brigades. Certainly not the Allies. Secrecy was understandable at that time. And during the Cold War, when you and I were enemies. But now we are at peace, I cannot understand the behaviour of our officials, who still block access to the trophy brigade archives.'
Is the colonel saying that the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, was right, we ask? He had told Gerhard Strauss at the special interrogation in the GDR's embassy in Warsaw in 1959 that he believed the Red Army had stolen the Amber Room.
I am not saying that,' the colonel replies. I am saying that by keeping the trophy brigade files closed, the Ministry of Defence is obstructing investigators and creating suspicion. It cannot sanction a probe into the Amber Room and then remove from it one of the most vital sources of reference material.'
He bangs his fist on the desk. 'For thirty years I served in the military and even I cannot get certain files out of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence that relate to the trophy brigades. I have come up against very thick walls of Soviet bureaucracy.'
In June 1996 Colonel Ovsianov learned from a colleague in Moscow that files concerning the activities of the trophy brigades attached to the LLth, 50th and 43rd armies of the Third Belorussian front (those active in East Prussia) did exist and were kept