The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [167]
Kuchumov would write in his 1948 propaganda articles that some soldiers had come forward with amber trophies, such as Misha Kulot, who admitted to carrying a nugget that he believed had come from the Amber Room all the way to Sakhalin Island and back again. And yet Kuchumov never mentioned the possibility that Soviet soldiers had looted as he drafted this report, one that is for us beginning to resemble a 'cheat sheet' in which the curator assembled the argument that the Amber Room had survived.
Kuchumov assured Moscow that he had conducted a 'very scrupulous search'. But we now know that there was no more evidence. No great discoveries. Nothing. There were no additional technical data. The truth was that Kuchumov's investigation had been superficial and prejudiced.
We can see nothing in this report that would have convinced Professor Brusov he was wrong. He must have been coerced into abandoning his findings by other means.
We turn to the next page and find a collection of interrogation reports. Across the top Kuchumov wrote: 'Statements of citizens of Kaliningrad, collected by myself. 1946. Original papers in German'.
The first interrogation was of Paul Feyerabend, the director of the Blutgericht restaurant, which occupied the cellars beneath the Knights' Hall. We already know that Kuchumov questioned Feyerabend on 2 April 1946, but here is a statement made by Feyerabend that we have never read before. The restaurant director told Kuchumov:
At the beginning of April 1945 the packed Amber Room stood in the Knights' Hall. Several days later the city's resistance began. I was located in the cloakroom and the Knights' Hall and during the [Soviet] attack [of 7 April onwards] Alfred Rohde was nowhere to be seen. On the afternoon of 9 April... I was in the wine cellar with several servants. Later, with their agreement, I hung from the north wing of the castle a white flag as a sign of surrender.
At 11.30 p.m. that night [9 April] a Russian colonel came. When I told him everything and gave statements, he ordered the evacuation of the castle. At 12.30 a.m. [LO April], when I left, my restaurant was occupied by artillery regiments of the Red Army. The cellar and Knights' Hall were not damaged at all. After I came back from Elbing, where I had been hospitalized, I heard from Alfred Rohde that the Knights' Hall and the restaurant [beneath it] had been burned down.
This is extraordinary. According to Paul Feyerabend, the fire that incinerated the Knights' Hall had begun after the Red Army occupied Konigsberg Castle. The Amber Room was, according to Feyerabend, packed into crates in the hall when he surrendered to a Russian colonel. This can only mean one of two things: the Amber Room was removed by Soviet troops from the Knights' Hall after the German surrender or it was destroyed in a fire started by the Red Army.
Kuchumov dismissed Paul Feyerabend as an unreliable witness who 'mixed up facts and dates'. He chose not to attach any importance to the restaurant director's statement. In fact he ignored it all together, making no mention of it in the reports to Moscow we have seen. The great curator was intent on providing only one view of history. Our view of him is changing.
If Feyerabend was telling the truth, then Kuchumov knew as early as 1946 that the Amber Room had been stolen or burned by the Red Army. Yet he chose to promulgate a line that would lead to a search across the Soviet Union and Germany in pursuit of Nazi thieves and their hiding place.
If Feyerabend had recalled correctly, then George Stein, the West German hobby-Historiker, had been remarkably close to the truth when he threatened to go public in 1975, accusing the Soviet and GDR government archives of sitting on data that would solve