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Paul Wandel GDR Minister for Education during the 1950s. Wandel was the person to whom Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss reported and was the inspiration behind the early searches in East Germany for the Amber Room.

Giinter Wermusch Editor at the former East German publishing house, Die Wirtshaft. Wermusch worked on Bernsteinzimmer Report, Paul Enke's influential book on the Amber Room.

Gottfried Wolfram Master craftsman to the Danish court. Wolfram, an ivory cutter by trade, travelled to Berlin in 1701 to work with Andreas Schliiter on the original Amber Room, only to see the project collapse twelve years later.

Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov Leader of the Red Army offensive against the Third Reich, as well as a key player in the battle for Berlin, Zhukov's subsequent military and political career in the Soviet Union was ended in 1946 by allegations of looting during the Second World War.

1. Konigsberg Castle, pre-April 1945

2. Kaliningrad, c.2004 (Historic names are shown in brackets.)

3. East Prussia, c.1945

4. Germany, c.2004

5. St Petersburg and environs, c.2004

6. USSR, post-1947

THE AMBER ROOM

Introduction

An urgent order arrived just after midday on 22 June 1941: pack up Leningrad. The Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union at 4 that morning without a declaration of war. So rapid was the advance that the Kremlin calculated Leningrad's southern gateway of Moskovsky Prospekt would be overrun within weeks.

But 22 June was a radiant Sunday, the first in what had been a lousy year. Weekend revellers strolled along the banks of the River Neva, popping bottles of sweet Soviet champagne, or headed out to the suburban estates of the former tsars, their hampers filled with herrings and pickled mushrooms. The scale of the crisis only filtered through the city by 6 p.m. Grinding across the Soviet Union was the greatest invasion force in history: 4 million German soldiers, 207 Wehrmacht divisions, 3,300 tanks.

Evacuate Leningrad's treasures. The order came from LenGorlsPolKom (the city's executive committee). Everyone was listening now. Collections from the city's palaces and museums had to be saved. But there were 2.5 million exhibits in the State Hermitage, and hundreds of thousands more in the Alexander, Catherine and Pavlovsk Palaces as well as the collections housed at Peterhof, Oranienbaum and Gatchina.

A curator at the Catherine Palace in the town of Pushkin scribbled in his diary: '22 June. Flown through the halls this evening, packing what we can.'

But there was too much work: '24 June. Comrades having nosebleeds from leaning over the packing crates. Run out of boxes and paper... Had to use the tsarinas' dress trunks and their clothes to wrap up our treasures.'1

And what should they do with the city's most unique treasure, an artefact that was often said to encompass old Russia's imperial might? At the centre of a chain of linked halls on the first floor of the Catherine Palace, where salon opened into salon, stood a gorgeous chamber made of amber, a substance that, at the time of its construction, was twelve times more valuable than gold.

The idea of panelling a room entirely in amber had first been mooted at the Prussian court in 170L. The resulting radical and complex construction came to symbolize the Age of Reason in which it was conceived. Tons of resin, the Gold of the North, had been fished in nuggets from the Baltic Sea, then heated, shaped and coloured before being slotted together on huge backing boards like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. When, sixty years later, the panels of the Amber Room were gifted to Russia, they were heralded by visitors to the court in St Petersburg as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'. 'We have now reached one of the most remarkable rarities - I want to tell you about the Amber Room,' wrote a French novelist. 'Only in The Thousand and One Nights and in magic fairy tales, where the architecture of palaces is trusted to magicians, spirits and genies, can one read about rooms made of diamonds, rubies,