The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [58]
On 25 March 1946 Tronchinsky wrote again to his wife: 'Dear Katya, We have to work very hard indeed. We walk and run each day about six miles. We have revealed something.' But he did not tell his wife exactly what they had discovered.
But three days later, when he wrote again, he was in an altogether different mood: '28 March, Dear Katya, Yesterday was a week since we arrived in this city. We have walked now about 90 miles. Results of our work are small. We did not find the main thing: the mystery of the Amber Room has not been revealed to us.' Tronchinsky had good reason to be deflated. '[Rohde], the castle director is dead. He died three months ago. We cannot find any other collaborators.'
The man at the centre of the Soviet inquiry. The well-plotted thirty-three questions. The mystery of the evacuation to Saxony. Kuchumov and Tronchinsky were to have squeezed Alfred Rohde hard. No one had seen Rohde since December 1945. Not General Vasilev. No one at the NKVD headquarters in the Moscow Hotel. None of the SMERSH operatives. It was thought to be impossible to get in or out of the city and yet Alfred Rohde, together with Use, his wife, and Lotti and Wolfgang, his daughter and son, had vanished.
A German informant claimed that they had died from malnutrition. Kuchumov found this hard to believe as the Soviets had been feeding Rohde emergency rations to keep him alive. ' Werwolfs, members of the secretive Nazi resistance, had taken or executed them to conceal the secret of the Amber Room,' an anonymous letter that found its way to Kuchumov stated.14 He dismissed this out of hand. Tronchinsky knew that Germans who offered to collaborate had been hanged and that there were now ten such incidents under investigation. However, Kuchumov conducted his own inquiry and wrote to Moscow: I have learned that Alfred Rohde committed suicide. His wife is also dead. That's what people in the hospital have told me.' But Kuchumov also admitted in the same report that he had been unable to find the graves, the post-mortem reports or the death certificates. No doctors in Konigsberg could recall treating Rohde or any of his family. This was a city living in terror where it was virtually impossible to keep a secret, a city that had dematerialized along with Alfred and Use Rohde and their children.
But Tronchinsky and Kuchumov struggled on and on L April Tronchinsky wrote to his wife:
Dear Katya, we once again have found tracks of the Amber Room... If the room was demolished... it was not here in Konigsberg [Castle]... We have also found important furniture from the Amber Room... and are about to go on and follow the trail left by the Amber Room... We shall go to Moscow on 10 or 12 April.
Kuchumov wrote to Moscow that he and Tronchinsky had located three of Rohde's close associates. Paul Feyerabend, owner of the Blutgericht, the Blood Court historical restaurant that Kuchumov noted with distaste was 'located for 200 years in the old Teutonic Order's torture chambers beneath the Knights' Hall', had come forward claiming he was a Communist who had been forced to conceal his party card. Feyerabend claimed to have witnessed a puzzling event in July 1944. The interrogations were attached.
Blutgericht, the Nazi restaurant located in the former torture chambers of Konigsberg Castle
Feyerabend. Statement 1, 2 April 1946: July 1944 - two cars entered the castle yard, heavily loaded with cases. Small cases among the larger load were then placed on the ground. But the rest, the huge cases, were left on the cars. I asked Rohde what were these gigantic cases and Rohde said to me they were the amber walls from Russia.15
Feyerabend described how Rohde was called to an urgent meeting with Dr Helmut Will, the Oberburgermeister or Lord Mayor of Konigsberg. Kuchumov noted: 'Find Helmut Will.'
Feyerabend said: