The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [181]
But these truths, like so many surrounding the Amber Room, have been suppressed and deceit has been allowed to fill the resulting vacuum. The Russian government and museum authorities continue to promote the 'German scholar' George Stein whose laudable attempts to find the Amber Room were 'interrupted' by his 'tragic death'. Russian and German newspapers still suggest that Stein was murdered and speculate about fascist assassins or Cold War hit-men. All of this keeps alive the unsupportable and yet widely held view that the Amber Room was stolen and conceded as part of a Nazi conspiracy that has destroyed so many of those who have attempted to uncover it.
Some of the same newspapers that publish these claims continue to fund costly searches for the Amber Room. In summer 2003, teams from Hamburg excavated the tail end of the 'Rudi Ringel' story in Kaliningrad, looking for the secret hiding place known as BSCH. Others were scouring the old fortifications of Konigsberg and the castle cellars beneath the 'Monster'. In Saxony, as we write, two competing expeditions are approaching one tunnel in the Nicolai Stollen silver mine from opposite directions. Heinz-Peter Haustein, Mayor of Deutschneudorf, burrows on the German side. Helmut Gansel, a mining entrepreneur from Miami, digs from the Czech village of Stechovice. And in the virtual tunnels and castles of Internet chatrooms, website editors continue to spin the Amber Room story. An e-mail sent to us in December 2003, from a website we had contacted that sponsors digs for the Amber Room in the German state of Thuringia, concluded: 'Please send some donations now. Give us what you can. We have made some major, ground-breaking discoveries and within a month, or two, will reveal the burial location of the Amber Room.'
However, the evidence, when we examined it, is clear. Soviet news footage shot inside Konigsberg Castle shortly after the city fell on 9 April 1945 shows that some rooms in the castle remained intact. German eyewitnesses hiding inside the castle told Soviet interrogators that it was not burned to the ground when they surrendered on the evening of 9 April, or in the early hours of LO April. Yet when the first official Soviet investigators arrived in Konigsberg, on 31 May 1945, they reported that the castle was a charred ruin and the city's storage facilities in disarray. Professor Alexander Brusov wrote in his diary in June 1945 that many of the hiding places carefully selected by Alfred Rohde, the director of the Konigsberg Castle Museum, were flooded, on fire and empty, having been opened, torched or vandalized after the German surrender by the Red Army.
We know the Soviet authorities were presented with these facts and advised by Brusov that, alongside many other treasures, the Amber Room had been destroyed between 9 and 11 April 1945. His findings were classified and buried for more than five decades, and in their place Leningrad curator Anatoly Kuchumov, who directed the campaign to discredit Brusov, fostered a fragile theory that depended for its success on no one examining it too closely.
The great curator feared that his failure to dismantle the room in the summer of 1941 would be judged as negligent. His guilty response fitted the needs of the Motherland: its Red Army stood accused by the Allies of wanton destruction and its museum storerooms were revealed to be brimming with looted German treasures. A great untruth was born and it enabled the Soviet people and their sympathizers in Europe and America to continue to believe that the East was the victim of the worst excesses of the West. The real story portrayed the Soviets as rapacious liars, something the leadership feared, given the instability across the bloc in the tumultuous decades after the war when