The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [52]
Kedrinsky has read diary extracts to us. Telemakov has transcribed sections too. But this is the first time we have seen an original part of Kuchumov's diary.
Arriving in Moscow, Kuchumov wrote, he called at the State Historical Museum, looking for Alexander Brusov, the man who had led the previous year's unsuccessful search for the Amber Room. The museum told Kuchumov that the professor was working from home. When Kuchumov and Tronchinsky eventually found him, they revealed that this was not a courtesy call. They had been ordered to Konigsberg to reinvestigate the fate of the Amber Room. They wanted to debrief the professor about his findings. There is no explanation here of why Moscow was at this time questioning the professor's conclusions. But by going to the expense of sending a second mission in search of the Amber Room, the Soviet authorities demonstrated the significance they attached to it.
From Brusov's interview with Kuchumov it is clear that he was nervous. Had Kuchumov and Tronchinsky read his report from July 1945, he asked them? Yes, they had, but was there anything else he would like to add for the record? Brusov thought. He did have something new that might assist them. The professor produced a translation of the correspondence that he had rescued from the bonfire set by Konigsberg Castle Museum director Alfred Rohde. The work had been done by V F. Rumiantseva, an expert in German paintings at Moscow's State Tretiakov Gallery, who had spent nine months reconstructing the charred documents.
Brusov confided in Tronchinsky. There was one event from his 1945 trip that now unsettled him. Kuchumov made notes:
It was the Hofbunker. In September 1944 Rohde reported in a letter to Berlin that he couldn't get into the Hofbunker because he had lost the key. But when we went with Rohde to find this bunker, he said he had a key. But there was no door to unlock. As soon as we got in we were excited and forgot all about Rohde. Suddenly, I realized he was not with us and he only reappeared when we all left. Where had Rohde been? We didn't search the whole bunker on that trip. Were we taken to the right bunker? Were there more rooms in this bunker that we were not shown? That is my regret.
In Brusov's diary we had read a confident account of how he had thoroughly searched this Hofbunker and found nothing connected with the Amber Room, and yet this account was shot through with self-doubt. Brusov must have felt threatened by having his conclusions queried. Kuchumov and Tronchinsky did not commit their impressions to paper. Instead, they thanked the professor. They had to rush if they were to catch the train to Konigsberg.4
March 1946 was an ominous month for a journey from east to west. On 5 March, Winston Churchill warned an audience in Fulton, Missouri, that 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent', while Stalin in Moscow responded by blaming the West for a war in which the USSR had lost more souls than anyone else. The General Secretary also warned that the 'Imperialist Camp' was planning to do it all over again.
Kuchumov and Tronchinsky spent the journey to Konigsberg poring over the newly translated Rohde letters, several of which concerned the security of treasures for which Rohde was personally responsible.5 Brusov's latest statement implied that Rohde might have lied to his Soviet captors. The letters that he had tried to destroy might provide an explanation.
The earliest was written by Rohde on 2 September 1944, the day after a second wave of British air raids on Konigsberg, and was addressed to Dr Gerhard Zimmerman at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. 'In spite of the destruction of Konigsberg Castle with explosives and incendiary devices... the art collection up to now did not lose any important items,' Rohde wrote. 'Those items which we are keeping from your collections