The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [6]
Even after the Revolution, when the estates of the tsars were transformed into Soviet museums, the Amber Room remained Leningrad's most popular exhibit.3 But by the summer of 1941, the installation of central heating had made the amber brittle and the Catherine Palace staff feared dismantling it. When, eight days after Germany invaded, the first Soviet train loaded with exhibits steamed out of Leningrad and east towards Siberia, the Amber Room was not on board.
The curators left behind had no more time to think about it. They were enlisted to bolster the town's defences. One wrote in her diary: 'We carry out the work of guards, office workers, cleaners. All walls are bare.' Apart from the walls of the Amber Room.
By the end of August, the Nazis had taken Mga, a railway terminal 10 miles south of Leningrad, isolating two million citizens who would not see the outside world for almost 900 days. It was now too late to evacuate anything else. By 1 September a Nazi perimeter bristling with munitions had fenced the city in. The British monitored the advance: '9 September. XVI Panzer Korps is moving to Leningrad.'
On 13 September the town of Pushkin came under fire. 'Koluft Panzer Group Four now in Detskoye Selo [Pushkin].' The following day, the attack came from above. 'Fliegerkorps have landed. Attack on Pushkin has been carried out. All bombs have landed in the target area.'
Inside the Catherine Palace, a handful of curators continued to work, attempting to safeguard what they could, scattering sand on the floors to protect the precious inlaid wood, packing all but the most cumbersome pieces of furniture into storerooms. But there was still one thing that no one had properly secured.
Couriers carried reports from Pushkin back to the city authorities in Leningrad. The last came on 17 September at 5 a.m.: 'The park and north of the town are battling hard. Everyone is moving to the west. We have even taken the typewriters. We will leave nothing for them.'
Apart from the Amber Room, which was hidden in the dark beneath another, plainer room constructed out of muslin and cotton. Rather than evacuate it, Catherine Palace staff had decided to conceal the delicate treasure in situ. The irreplaceable amber walls had been covered over with layers of cloth and padding. If the Nazis managed to force their way into the Catherine Palace, it was hoped they would be deceived into thinking that here was just another ordinary, empty room.
Within hours the palace was overrun. One German officer described how almost immediately crude signs were nailed to the gilded doors, listing them 'reserved for the Lst Company etc., etc. ...'4 Everywhere there were 'sleeping [German] soldiers with their muddy boots resting on the precious settees and chairs'. The Nazi advance had been exhaustingly rapid. Then a cheer went up and the German officer raced to see what his men had discovered. On the first floor, in a room in the middle of a long corridor, 'two privates in curiosity toiled in tearing protective... covers off [the walls]. They revealed wonderfully shining amber carvings, the frames of a mosaic picture.'
When Soviet curators returned to the Catherine Palace in March 1944 they entered through the buckled iron gates and across a courtyard strewn with barbed wire and Nazi graves. Up to the first-floor suite of rooms they climbed - not by the marble stairs, as they had been blown to smithereens - and discovered that where they had concealed the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' there was now just a void. The Amber Room had vanished. All the Nazis had left behind were bare boards and a tangled mystery.
In the Autumn of 2001 we pieced together this much of the story about the Amber Room using a handful of published sources and the declassified Enigma files at the Public Records Office in London, in which are recorded some of the 2,000 signals intercepted every day by the Ultra project that eavesdropped on German communications throughout the Second World War.5
Our curiosity about the fate of the Amber Room, then a subject