The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [29]
In the Enigma files in London, scattered among the 2,000 signals intercepted every day by the Bletchley Park decoding station, where the British eavesdropped on German communications, are fragments of intelligence describing the encircling of Kuchumov's city: '9 September. Most Secret. XVI Panzer Korps, tank division, is moving to Leningrad.. .'4
The following day the Germans began to move on Pushkin and its palaces:
10 September, 03.28 hours, railway line to Krasnoye Selo (K.S.) has been cut. On road between K.S. and Detskoye Selo [an old name for Pushkin] are fifteen [Soviet] horse-drawn vehicles.
04.56 hours: motorized column moving on Detskoye Selo. Enemy column is motorized and horse-drawn, all in about 150 vehicles.5
The Nazi communiques make no mention of the load being carried by the Soviets but what the Germans had spotted was the ongoing evacuation of treasures from Leningrad's suburban palaces.
On 13 September the attack began. 'Most Secret: Koluft Panzer Group Four now in Detskoye Selo, reports Hauptmann Falk.' The following day, the Nazis came from above. 'Fliegerkorps have landed. Attack on Pushkin has been carried out. All bombs have landed in the target area.'
Inside the Catherine Palace a handful of curators who had chosen to remain continued to evacuate treasures. One of them, Comrade Sophia Popova, reported: 'i6 September, 20.00 hours, the situation has become treacherous.' Popova's bulletins from the front line would be combined into a longer report submitted to the Leningrad authorities in November 1941. Four decades later journalist Vladimir Telemakov would find it.6
Popova wrote:
Enemy is coming closer to Pushkin from the Strelna side [south-west of St Petersburg] and has begun shooting with machine guns at the cottage in the direction of the garage where Nicholas II kept his cars. It is almost impossible to move right now. Park and town are under hard artillery fire and bombing every night. We are surely going deaf. But what is deafness compared to death!
Still the museum workers crept out, throwing camouflage netting around the palaces. Late on the night of 16 September, Comrade Popova wrote: 'Firemen and military have set up posts.' Families were evacuated to shelters. 'We are told to keep in touch with commanders from regular units for when it will be time to abandon the palaces.' A German regiment broke through and moved towards the Alexander Palace, only a block away from the Catherine Palace's golden enfilades. 'We are watching the fascists. The Red Army is on Anrov Street,' Comrade Popova wrote.
A directive arrived from the chairman of IsPolKom, (the executive committee of the Leningrad Soviet): 'Comrade Pavlov [Dmitry Pavlov, Leningrad's Chief of Food Supply] has ordered work to stop in all factories ready for the evacuation of our palaces. All documents must be burned.'
On 17 September a fire-fight illuminated a grey dawn over Pushkin. '5 a.m.: the park and north of the town are battling hard. Everyone is moving to the west,' Comrade Popova wrote. Staff tried to hide in Oranienbaum, the former estate of Alexander Menshikov. 'We have even taken the typewriters. We will leave nothing for them.' Pushkin was overrun.
Stuck in his freezing cellar in Gorky, Kuchumov could only wonder at the fate of his friends and of the palaces.7 He would not have known that on a hill overlooking Leningrad, General Wilhelm von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, was dug in and advised Hitler on 21 September that this position in the suburb of Pushkin was to be the forward station for the final assault on the city. There was to be no infantry invasion, just remote obliteration. Relaying instructions from the Fiihrer on 21 September, the chief of naval staff described Kuchumov's city as one of 'no further interest after Soviet Russia is destroyed'.8
All the while Leningrad radio played rousing messages. From her bomb shelter, the poet Anna Akhmatova recited