The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [44]
The professor's diligence began to pay off almost immediately, with caches of art extracted from air pockets in the rubble. 'We have dug continuously,' he wrote, 'and we have eventually found success: 1,OOO items, Italian paintings, porcelain and many silver items.' But still no sign of the Amber Room. The search was widened to incorporate other areas of the city.
On 1O June, eight days after their dig began, Brusov and his team forced their way into a municipal building on the corner of Lange Reihe and Steindamm Strasse, the city's former high street. Here was evidence of a hasty evacuation. Tens of thousands of loose pieces of amber lay on the floor. Others had been packed into boxes. Besides them an inventory in German suggested that scores more crates also containing amber had already left Konigsberg 'in the care of Karl Andree'.
After an initial flush of excitement, Brusov learned from one of his German workers that Karl Andree was director of the Institute of Palaeontology and Geology at Konigsberg's Albertus-University. Brusov concluded he had found the remnants of an amber collection once famed throughout Europe, consisting of more than 120,000 pieces, the most valuable being 'a life-size reptile carved from the resin'.14 Although Brusov had stumbled over something of immense value, this collection was not connected to the Amber Room.
That evening the professor composed a communique to Moscow that was witnessed by Captain Chernishov and copied to the Soviet commandant in Konigsberg.
We have examined a building on the edge of Lange Reihe 4 where there was a collection of items from the amber and geological museum. It seems that the Germans started packing but something disturbed them. Most of the items are labelled. It is probably a good idea to pack all of these items and transport them to somewhere safer, a protected building. It really is one of the best collections and perhaps could be sent to Moscow. Geological collection, beautifully systematized and very wide.
Brusov was clearly thinking of his museum in Red Square and calculated that packing would take 'eight or ten days with the help of ten workers'.
Brusov ventured further afield in search of anything connected to the Amber Room. He investigated claims of a Nazi stash at Wildenhoff Castle (today Zikova in Poland), the ancestral home of Countess von Schwerin, an East Prussian aristocrat. Dr Rohde claimed it was pointless. When the Soviet team arrived, Wildenhoff was in a dismal state. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen a retreating SS unit set fire to it. But not everything had been destroyed. 'In three chambers were heaps of remarkable documents, handwritten papers and legal articles from the sixteenth century, all in order with numbers. Because of our small car we could take only a few of these documents and will have to come back with bigger car on 16th,' Brusov wrote. But no Amber Room.
The night before he was due to return to Wildenhoff, Brusov could not sleep. He was in his sixties and suffered from insomnia. Before dawn he went for a walk in the ruins of Konigsberg Castle where he noticed smoke rising from behind a broken wall. Clambering over the rubble to investigate, Brusov found Alfred Rohde, the German curator, crouched over a smouldering bundle. As he had cooperated with the Soviets, Rohde had been given special privileges. He was not locked up at night as other German prisoners were, although he had been ordered to observe a dawn to dusk curfew. 'Today I found some documents,' Brusov wrote, revealing that he had rescued from Rohde's fire thirty charred letters. Rohde claimed he was burning rubbish, but Brusov dismissed the excuse as 'plainly absurd'. Brusov would have to translate the papers that Rohde was so keen to destroy. But Captain Chernishov warned that he had little time as he was also attached to the NKVD, which was still processing German citizens.
Brusov returned to the castle site now even more wary of Alfred