The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [171]
In 1946 Dr Hermann Voss, director of the Dresden State Art Collections, had told American interrogators, preparing evidence for Nuremberg: 'Immediately the Russians occupied Dresden, a commission called the Trophy Organization [sic] appeared to make a choice of the best works of art belonging to the Saxon state... Almost all... were selected by the Russians and disappeared.'
The Soviets denied any responsibility but, to assure the Allies, Stalin ordered an investigation into the behaviour of his trophy brigades, appointing Alexander Porivayev, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as inquiry chairman.20
In February 1946 the USSR opened its case at Nuremberg, calling to the stand Joseph Orbeli, then director of the State Hermitage museum in Leningrad, who drew the world's attention to German looting and the destruction of Leningrad's cultural trophies as acts that encompassed all Soviet suffering. Orbeli talked of 'intentional wrecking', the burning down of great halls, the stealing of parquet floors, priceless treasures ripped from the walls. These palaces were not military installations, Orbeli said. They were ambassadors of Russian culture that spoke on behalf of the Motherland. They should have been accorded the privileges due to them under international law.
One month after Orbeli spoke Anatoly Kuchumov was put on a train to Konigsberg, with orders to staunch another allegation about wilful destruction by the Red Army. Only this one was far more dangerous, as it involved one of the Soviet Union's own treasures. Professor Brusov had already given an interview to TASS revealing that the Amber Room had been destroyed or looted, implicating Soviet troops in its demise. Moscow had to prevent this potentially explosive news from spreading before it could be manipulated by the Allies. Kuchumov would quickly turn the Amber Room story on its head, delivering a different (and more useful) conclusion that enabled the authorities in Moscow to point to a 'still-missing' Amber Room as evidence of how the Motherland had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Stalin's inquiry into the actions of the trophy brigades dragged on in secret but claimed some high-profile scalps. Marshal Zhukov, who had led the fight-back against the Nazi invasion and the battle for Berlin, was exiled to Odessa, accused of filling his Moscow dacha with German art works. General Ivan Serov, head of the NKVD in Germany, was accused of looting by MGB director Viktor Abakumov. In the furore, Serov turned the tables on his rival, and in 1951 it was the MGB chief who was arrested, and three years later tried for treason and executed. Stories of Abakumov's fate spread panic throughout the Red Army and security services. Any Soviet citizen who had stolen art works would never talk about them again. The chances of finding the Amber Room, if pieces from it had been looted or rescued from the fire in the Knights' Hall, were remote.21
Then history was edited again.
On 31 March 1955 the Council of Ministers of the USSR announced that 'in the course of the Great Patriotic War, during battles on German territory, the Soviet Army saved and removed to the Soviet Union masterpieces of classical painting from the collection of the Dresden Gallery'.22 This was a revelation. The treasures from Dresden had not been seen since April 1945, when the Nazis concealed them in a salt mine, twelve miles east of the city. As well as confirming that the art works had been 'rescued' from this mine by the Red Army, the Council of Ministers also announced in Pravda that they were to be returned to the GDR 'for the purpose of further strengthening and developing friendly relations between Soviet and German people'. The news provided a fraternal backdrop to critical negotiations in