The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [173]
But Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, the director of the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, told us that this was not the end of the Amber Room story. When Communism began to teeter in the late 1980S, several high-profile art collections looted during the Second World War emerged in the Soviet Union. All of these long-concealed treasures materialized through the mediation of a quietly spoken academic from Bremen University, a man able to play all sides: trusted by Soviet apparatchiks; tolerated by former Nazi looters; courted by politicians in the Bundestag.
And after these missing art works floated to the surface in Moscow, pieces of the Amber Room emerged in Germany.
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'So you want me to tell you about the recovered pieces of the Amber Room?' Professor Wolfgang Eichwede says, raising his eyebrows, when we meet in his study at Bremen University in April 2003. He pushes a box of Russian chocolates across the table and we see that the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg is pictured on the lid. 'Take one,' he says, popping a soft centre into his mouth. 'They're really very good.'
He settles back in his chair. 'A few months before the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989,' he recalls. I received a phone call from a man in Moscow. His name was Viktor Baldin and he was the director of the Shchusev Museum of Architecture. He told me he had a secret.'
Baldin confessed to Eichwede, director of Bremen University's Research Centre for Eastern Europe, that his institution had, locked away in its stores, 364 pictures and drawings that belonged to the Bremen Kunsthalle.
Not parts of the Amber Room, we ask?
'No, they appeared much later. Viktor Baldin told me that he had known about these pictures since in July 1945, while serving as a captain with the Soviet's 38th Field Engineers Brigade, he and other soldiers had found them in the cellars of Karnzow Castle, forty miles north of Berlin. They all bore markings of the Bremen Kunsthalle. Several comrades, including Baldin, brought art works back to Moscow.'
Viktor Baldin said that after the war, when Stalin ordered an investigation into looting, he panicked and gave his cache of 364 pictures to the Shchusev Museum of Architecture, where he worked. In 1989, with the Cold War coming to an end, Baldin, who had risen to become the museum's director, wanted to return the Bremen drawings as a sign of friendship. However, the authorities in Moscow had found out and were trying to block him.
Eichwede says: 'His phone call began a chain reaction. Just days after he rang me, Russian Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko and the KGB raided the Shchusev Museum in Moscow, confiscating the 364 Bremen Kunsthalle works, sending them to the closed stores of the State Hermitage in Leningrad.' He glances up at an exhibition poster on the wall from the State Hermitage. I began ringing Gubenko's deputy. I made no demands. Said I simply wanted to see the Bremen items.'
A graduate of the radical student movements of 1968, Eichwede was familiar with the Soviet mindset and already had connections in Moscow. In the early 1970S he had helped initiate the first post-war public discussions about Soviet-West German relations. In 1992 the professor finally won an invitation to see the Bremen drawings.
'When I arrived at the State Hermitage, director Mikhail Piotrovsky had laid them out on the table in his office beside the Neva. We looked at them together as the snow fell outside. I was the first German to see the Bremen drawings in forty-seven years. I would not leave with them on that day but strong friendships were struck.'
On 1 March 1993, after negotiations