The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [45]
And then, with only a few days before the Brusov/Beliaeva mission was due to return to Moscow, Chernishov appeared with a rough translation of a selection of the documents partly burned by Rohde. According to Brusov's diary, one of them was a draft letter to Berlin written on 2 September 1944, confirming that the Amber Room had been packed into crates, having narrowly escaped an Allied air raid on the night of 27-28 August 1944. Rohde's office in the castle had been flattened and he noted that he was now working from his home in Bickstrasse. Among the other charred fragments were travel permits issued to Rohde, including one for a five-day trip to oversee the evacuation of Countess Keyserlingk's 'furniture, weapons, marble sculpture and LOO paintings' from Rautenburg to Konigsberg Castle. There was also correspondence between Rohde and other East Prussian aristocrats, among them Prince Alex Dohna-Schlobitten of Elbing and Countess von Schwerin. There was a passing reference to Soviet pictures from Kiev. Another missive mentioned paintings taken from Soviet museums in Minsk.
Chernishov was puzzled by one document in particular. In it Rohde wrote to Berlin that he had lost the key to an underground palace storage facility called the Hofbunker. Rohde had never mentioned a Hofbunker before. Brusov immediately summoned the German curator. Had the remains he had found in the ruins of the Knights' Hall been placed there as a decoy? Was the Amber Room in fact concealed in this secret Hofbunker?
Rohde was nonchalant. 'He said the Hofbunker was on Steindamm Strasse and that he would lead us there. He said he had now found the key,' Brusov wrote in his diary. The professor and Rohde walked there in the last week of June, accompanied by a young Red Army lieutenant, Ilya Tsirlin, who had been asked to come along as a witness. Near to the corner of the crossing with Rosen Strasse, they found a cellar, four storeys deep, on the left side of the street and a long staircase that led down 'until we found ourselves in a very well-equipped bomb shelter'. This was no ordinary air-raid bunker. Brusov wrote: 'Here were rooms for sleeping and things thrown over the floor. There were paintings and sculptures. We chose two or three of the better things and then left.' Although there was nothing to indicate that the Amber Room had ever been stored here, Brusov still could not give up hope that it was hidden elsewhere.
As Rohde had lied about this Hofbunker, Brusov decided to interrogate him formally. He forced the German curator to sign a confession: 'Destiny of Museum Treasures for Which I was Responsible'. We have it before us.
The German curator's story changed. Rohde admitted that Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's ideologue and the head of the Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg (ERR), an art-looting organization, had used Konigsberg as a store for plundered art works. In autumn 1941 Rohde had been sent works stolen from the Minsk Museum, 'eighteenth-century paintings from the historical dept, items from the heritage of the tsar's department, including furniture'. All of them 'became the target of Anglo-American aviation attacks in August 1944 and were destroyed' in the eastern wing of Konigsberg Castle. In the summer of 1943 Rohde received 'the properties of the museum of Kharkiv, Western and Russian paintings as well as icons'. These had been sent to Wildenhoff, only to be transferred back to Konigsberg in January 1945, when the Red Army loomed. Treasures from Kiev arrived in December 1943, 'packed in ninety-eight boxes and sent to Wildenhoff Castle. There were about 800 icons - the most significant collection of icons in the world.' All had now vanished.
But what about the Amber Room? Rohde finally addressed the central issue. 'Yes,' he admitted, he had personally 'received the Amber Room from