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By Root 1855 0

rifle through the file. We find a letter that explains how Kuchumov's Amber Room plan came to the attention of the authorities in Moscow. In October 1963 he wrote to Mrs L. S. Karpekina, vice-director of the Committee of Culture of the Executive Committee of LenGorSoviet: I treat it as my debt to say to you the following. 1. The searching for the Amber Room in which I took part in 1946 and 1949 had mostly the character of observation or scouting, a preparation exercise for a wider-scale search with modern techniques.' Kuchumov confessed there were no special funds and that the investigations he conducted with Tronchinsky in 1946 and then Gerhard Strauss in 1949 were superficial.

This is bizarre. Superficial? A scouting exercise? The 1946 mission was a watershed, the investigation that overturned Brusov's findings. We can only presume that Kuchumov was downplaying his success in 1946 and 1949 to appeal for more resources.

Kuchumov continued: '2. Having analysed the documents and witness statements, one can suppose that the Amber Room was not transferred from Kaliningrad and was hidden in a special bunker.'8

Kuchumov appeared to have compelling new evidence. He claimed to have identified a specific bunker in which the Amber Room might have been concealed, a reason to resume the search.

The file goes back to the winter 1949, revealing where the bunker story came from. We already know that in 1949 Kuchumov had quizzed GDR art historian Gerhard Strauss in the Hotel Moscow in Kaliningrad about the location of a bunker. But we did not realize how critical this bunker would be. In the report before us, Kuchumov revealed that when he failed to get results from Strauss, he summoned Professor Brusov from Moscow - someone we had assumed had dropped out of the picture in 1946.

According to the file, Professor Brusov was sixty-four years old in 1949 and had been retired from his job at the State Historical Museum. He gave a new witness statement to Kuchumov, the one that had been cut out of Jelena Storozhenko's ready-reckoner. But it is here in the file from St Petersburg and it makes for startling reading. In it Brusov completely contradicted his conclusions of 194 5. Originally Brusov had written that the Amber Room had been destroyed. In 1949 he claimed: I think that the Amber Room exists because in the Knights' Hall, the place where Alfred Rohde said he had stored it, we found only the remains of burned doors. We did not find pieces of bronze or any other anti-inflammables [glass, mirrors, stone mosaics].'9

It was an incredible about-face, and Kuchumov must have presented Brusov with incontrovertible new evidence to jog his memory but it has not been detailed here. What has been noted in this file was that once the professor had reviewed his main conclusion, he revisited all of his 1945 findings. On 29 December 1949 Brusov stated:

When I was [in Kaliningrad] in 1945, Rohde suggested to me that I search a cellar on Steindamm Strasse. Rohde, who had a key to this cellar, went three floors underground and I found several museum items there. I was not looking for the Amber Room since I thought it had been burned. I only searched the rooms that Rohde showed me and did not pay attention to several others in this large bunker.

Here was the root of Kuchumov's bunker theory. There were rooms in a bunker that had never been searched. It was the same bunker that Brusov had talked to Kuchumov about in L946. It was not a new story. But in L949, when Kuchumov asked to be taken to the bunker, Brusov was unable to find it again. 'My memory is not good,' he conceded. I could remember the street, Steindamm Strasse, but I could not exactly point out the building [beneath which the bunker lay].'

Our file from St Petersburg shows that after Brusov was sent back to Moscow in 1949, Kuchumov sat as a special adviser to a Kaliningrad-based team that searched for this bunker from that year until 1960 and it was shortly after this date, having failed to find it, that Kuchumov contacted Mrs L. S. Karpekina in Leningrad, appealing for more backing.