The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [166]
Kuchumov began this draft (as he began his final report to Moscow) with his most important discovery of 1946: the remains of three stone mosaics in the Knights' Hall of Konigsberg Castle. '22 March 1946. Near the entrance to the Knights' Hall, beneath a staircase we found three totally burned and discoloured mosaic pictures from the Amber Room...only when touching them did they disintegrate into tiny pieces.' These stone mosaics had once hung from hooks on the large amber panels of the Amber Room and had been commissioned by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.
In his final report to Moscow, Kuchumov would argue: 'This [discovery of the stone mosaics] cannot serve as evidence that the Amber Room was lost in a fire.' He pointed out that only three out of four stone mosaics were to be found in the Knights' Hall. This suggested that the Amber Room had been broken up and, wherever the fourth mosaic had been hidden, the amber panels would be there too.
Kuchumov told Moscow that he was convinced of this theory because he had found no other charred pieces of the Amber Room in the Knights' Hall (amber and wooden backing boards). He advised Moscow that the space where the stone mosaics had been discovered, under the stairs beside the door, was far too small to have also accommodated the constituent parts of the Amber Room - a dozen large panels twelve feet high made of amber, ten amber panels just over three feet high and twenty-four sections of amber skirting board. 'This forces us to reject the loss of the amber panels in this room,' he concluded to Moscow.
We had found this argument slightly difficult to follow the first time we had read it in papers from the literature archive. We could not understand why Kuchumov's discovery in the Knights' Hall of the charred stone mosaics in 1946 did not simply reinforce the evidence found by Professor Brusov in the Knights' Hall in 1945. The logical conclusion should have been that, as everyone was finding burned pieces of the Amber Room in the Knights' Hall, it had been incinerated there. But Kuchumov concluded the opposite and Moscow accepted his findings. Until now we had given Kuchumov the benefit of the doubt, presuming that he must have gathered additional evidence, complex technical details that he had decided not to burden the senior bureaucrats with. But where were they? Not in this report.
This report is bereft of any new evidence. It reveals how Kuchumov failed to explore the most obvious possibilities. Although he was at pains to describe the cavity where he found the stone mosaics as too small to house the amber panels, he did not even consider that the crates containing other sections of the Amber Room could have been stored elsewhere in the Knights' Hall (which was vast and still half empty by April 1945).
Kuchumov made much of the fact that he could not find a single charred remnant of amber in the Knights' Hall, but in his analysis he ignored a fact he must, as an amber expert, have known: the melting point for amber (between 2oo°C and 38o°C) was far lower than that needed to incinerate the kind of stone used by Florentine carvers like Dzokki. If three stone and glass mosaics were reduced to a fine powder, including pieces of malachite that burns at L,O84°C and pieces of glass that burns at L,4OO°C, then there would have been nothing left of the amber panels themselves.
Kuchumov highlighted his failure to find in the Knights' Hall other elements of the Amber Room (bronze candelabras, glass mirrors, glass and crystal pilasters). But he failed to consider that Soviet troops