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By Root 1729 0

appreciated the value of amber. We know from the court order books that one of the ten rooms she selected for renovation was the Amber Room. Over the next four years, the Empress ordered an enormous amount - more than 900 pounds - of prohibitively expensive amber that had to be shipped from the Samland Peninsula in East Prussia. She hired four carvers from the Konigsberg Guild to carry out the work, replacing all of the fake sections that bulked out Elizabeth's room with real amber. Catherine II also commissioned Giuseppe Dzokki, an Italian craftsman, to create four Florentine stone mosaics depicting the senses to hang in the room. 'Sight', 'Taste', 'Hearing' and 'Touch and Smell' were all to be stimulated in a chamber that, when lit by candles, exuded a languorous glow, the colour of autumn and a sunset over Stettin.20

Almost a century later, the crowning glory of the Catherine Palace had become legendary throughout Europe. 'We have now reached one of the most remarkable rarities - I want to tell you about the Amber Room,' the poet Theophile Gautier wrote in his Voyage en Russie in 1866.

Only in The Thousand and One Nights and in magic fairy tales, where the architecture of palaces is trusted to magicians, spirits and genies, one can read about rooms made of diamonds, rubies, jacinth and other jewels Here the expression 'the Amber Room' is not just a poetic hyperbole but exact reality, and it is not, as you could believe, a small boudoir or study. On the contrary, the room is rather large, with... walls wholly adorned with amber mosaic from top to bottom, including a frieze. The eye, which has not adapted to seeing this material applied in such scale, is amazed and is blinded by the wealth and warmth of tints, representing all colours of the spectrum of yellow - from smoky topaz up to a light lemon. The gold of carvings seems dim and false in this neighbourhood, especially when the sun falls on the walls and runs through transparent veins as those sliding on them.21

Working on his book about the Amber Room can have done little to alleviate the isolation that Kuchumov must have felt, entombed in Novosibirsk. Occasional copies of Pravda still reached Siberia, brought by couriers, but his sense of foreboding would have only mounted as he scoured the Soviet newspapers for news. Among Kuchumov's documents transcribed by Telemakov was a newspaper article, saved by the great curator during his Siberian days.

On I7 November 1942 Pravda carried a front-page confession from a Nazi officer, Norman Forster, who had been captured in Mosdok, in the northern Caucasus. Forster, an Obersturmbannfuhrer (lieutenant-colonel) in the Waffen SS, had told his NKVD interrogators an intriguing story, one that in less than two years would be cited at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Forster had bumped into an old schoolfriend while in Berlin in August 1941, a 'Dr Focke', who was a fellow graduate of Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University, and was currently working for Ribbentrop, Hitler's Reichsaussenminister (Foreign Minister) as a press officer. Focke offered to get Forster assigned to a new and prestigious job with the 4th Company of a secretive Special Task Battalion.

The Sonderkommando Ribbentrop, as it was known, was headquartered at 6 Herman Goring Strasse in Berlin and staffed by 800 members of the SS. In August 1941 three of its four companies were placed on active service on the Eastern front, attached to troops who were converging on the Soviet Union. According to Pravda, Dr Forster's company was to follow Army Group South, led by Field Marshal von Runstedt. Forster told his Soviet interrogators, 'Prior to leaving, we were instructed that when we arrived on enemy territory in Russia we were to comb thoroughly all scientific establishments, institutions and libraries and all the palaces; search all the archives and to lay our hands on every cultural treasure, sending everything to Germany.'

Forster's troop set out across the Ukraine, but he learned that the 2nd Company of the Sonderkommando Ribbentrop, attached