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Eichwede says: 'It was the break that Russia needed. All eyes were on the Amber Room and memories were jogged about Soviet loss. Germany was now on the defensive.'

The German Foreign Office appealed for calm, while further inquiries into the provenance of the stone mosaic were carried out. And then a wealthy housewife from West Berlin came forward, saying that she owned a chest of drawers that had come from the Amber Room, too.

The housewife had seen an article about Hans Achterman's stone mosaic that was illustrated with a picture of the original Amber Room. Among the furnishings she had spotted a delicate, intricately inlaid eighteenth-century chest that was now in her living room, filled with tablecloths and napkins.

Then newspapers picked up on a sale at Christie's in London. Two years earlier the auction house had sold for 15,000 dollars a palm-sized centurion's head carved from amber. Eichwede says: 'It was an old piece. Mature. Honeyed. Christie's speculated that it was connected to the Amber Room.'

However, what the Russians made no mention of in the ensuing publicity was that the stone mosaic, the centurion's head and the chest of drawers proved nothing about the fate of the Amber Room itself, since all of these pieces had become separated before the Amber Room reached Konigsberg in December 1941, and therefore could not have been transported to the supposed secret Nazi hiding place in which the Amber Room was allegedly stashed.

We traced the centurion's head to Munich, where an art dealer acting for the collector who bought it (a German with a passion for old amber) revealed that there was an auction label stuck to the back of the head that dated from the 1920S. It probably left Russia after the Revolution.

The chest of drawers. There was no mention of it in the Konigsberg Castle Gift Book, which carefully listed each item that Alfred Rohde received in December 1941. The chest must have been stolen from the Catherine Palace before the Amber Room was transferred to Konigsberg.

And finally the stone mosaic. Hans Achterman maintained up until his death that his father had taken the mosaic as a souvenir when he and five other soldiers had dismantled the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in 1941. If what he claimed was true then he was a member of the squad that packed up in just thirty-six hours that which Anotoly Kuchumov failed to save. The fact that the fourth stone mosaic also never reached Konigsberg is confirmed by studying the photographs taken to illustrate the Pantheon article written by Alfred Rohde in 1942. In one photograph of the room reassembled in Konigsberg Castle, the reflection in a mirror revealed an empty space in the opposite wall where the fourth mosaic would have hung.

Rather than proving that German thieves were still concealing the Amber Room, the discovery of the fourth mosaic undermined the central plank of the Soviet case that the Amber Room had survived the fall of Konigsberg. In Anatoly Kuchumov's private papers he argued that the absence of the fourth mosaic from the pile of ash he found in the Knights' Hall was proof that the fourth mosaic was concealed elsewhere, together with the amber panels. But of course the mosaic did not reappear until after Kuchumov's death and so he would not live to see his theory undermined.

These details did not matter in Russia, where former Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko, now a deputy in the Duma, claimed that his nation's greatest missing treasure was buried in Germany. The Amber Room was being hawked bit by bit by German thieves, Gubenko and Russian newspapers speculated. The fate of the Amber Room was once again manipulated, this time to justify Russia's decision never to return to Berlin anything taken by the Red Army during the war. In April 1998 the Russian constitutional court ordered an unwilling President Yeltsin to authorize the law nationalizing wartime loot.

In Germany some would benefit from the renewed interest in the Amber Room too. Ruhrgas AG, a German energy provider with considerable assets