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If Feyerabend was right, then so was Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, and it is more than likely that the Ministry of Defence archives in Podolsk contain documents that would corroborate the story that units of the Red Army or trophy brigades inadvertantly destroyed the Amber Room and stole any pieces that survived the fire.

Tucked at the back of Kuchumov's report, 'Destiny of the Amber Room', are a few loose documents written on graph paper that take the story back to the beginning. The summer of 194 5.

We have before us 'Extracts from report notes of Professor A. Brusov to Special Committee of Cultural and Educational Institutions. Note: It concerns the fate of the Amber Room, which was gifted to Peter I and located in the Tsarskoye Selo and moved by the Germans from there.'15

We have previously seen only an extract from Professor Alexander Brusov's diary of his mission in 1945, sent to us from the Leninka, the Lenin Library in Moscow.

This document might hold the key. In this report, Brusov wrote:

I was lucky to learn the following. Packed into cases, the Amber Room was placed in the Knights' Hall of Konigsberg Castle beside another collection, the furniture of the Countess Keyserlingk. In the spring of 1945 ltwas decided to evacuate the Amber Room to Saxony (document attached) and for this reason Rohde visited Saxony...

Brusov described how, after returning from Saxony, Alfred Rohde prepared the room for evacuation but then fell ill: 'For some weeks he did not appear in the museum, according to witness Paul Feyerabend, who ran the Blutgericht...' By the time Rohde had recovered, there were no train carriages available to take the room to Saxony, a story that Brusov verified with local people, who told him that the last chance to evacuate anything to central Germany by train had been at the end of January.

Brusov reported: 'The same Paul Feyerabend was in the castle up until the capture and says the Amber Room was in cases at the moment of surrender and burned there later during a fire that destroyed the north wing of the edifice.' When Brusov inspected this area he found 'traces of fire, ash heaps and ash covering the entire floor' and also 'small pieces of burned wooden strips and parts of cases and some parts of mouldings and copper hinges from the doors, which were taken by Germans from the Tsarskoye Selo and moved to Konigsberg along with the Amber Room'.

He drew a clear conclusion: 'Summarizing all the facts, we can say that the Amber Room was destroyed between 9 and 11 April 1945 since some officers of the Red Army who inspected the castle on 21 April could find no cases in the Knights' Hall.'

Kuchumov had kept this crucial report that repeated Feyerabend's evidence and yet when Feyerabend told Kuchumov exactly the same story one year later, the curator chose to dismiss it.

Kuchumov also transcribed, on this graph-paper addendum, extracts from Brusov's diary that extend beyond the entries we have read in the photocopies from the Lenin Library.

On 25 June 1945 Brusov wrote: I can't get anything out of Alfred Rohde. He barely talks. I would like [the NKVD] to interrogate Rohde.

I would like them to talk to him seriously rather than treating him with kid gloves. I believe that Rohde will not say anything when you are nice to him as he is a committed fascist.'16 So when Kuchumov told Moscow in 1946 that 'the mistake of Professor Brusov was that he believed easily the words of Rohde... forgetting that he was dealing with a Nazi fanatic', he had already read this entry in Brusov's diary and knew his accusation to be false.

In another extract, dated 2 July 1945, Brusov wrote:

We asked General Pronin, commander of Konigsberg, for a car to collect the archive of Castle Wildenhoff. He refused, saying there was not enough petrol. But around us everyone is using cars. For want of twenty-five litres of petrol the archive is going to die. rst Moscow Division is using [Wildenhoff] Castle as barracks. Storerooms are never locked. What can I do? I must try and persuade the military