The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [60]
Only one man, Alfred Rohde, knew the truth and he could no longer speak for himself. Kuchumov began to analyse the character of the German curator. He considered the letter sent by General Kuchler, the commander of Army Group North. Had Rohde actually sought out the Amber Room, requesting troops stationed beside it to transport the treasure to Konigsberg? Then there was Rohde's text book, Bernstein, published seven years before Operation Barbarossa began, and the scholarly article he wrote for Pantheon, apparently celebrating the arrival of the room in Konigsberg. Kuchumov wrote: 'Rohde dreamed for a long time of having the Amber Room in his collection. He expressed more than once his regret that it had left Prussia, that the Prussian King had made a great mistake in giving it to Russian barbarians.' Why would such a man leave his greatest treasure to the mercy of an army besieging the city, Kuchumov reasoned?
He concluded: 'The described circumstances force us to reject the claim of Dr Rohde that was treated as the truth by Professor Brusov about the destruction of the Amber Room in the fire in the Knights' Hall of the Castle.' Kuchumov was convinced that the answers lay outside Konigsberg.
He began to research the four months leading up to the fall of the city:
By mid-January the railway connections between Konigsberg and the rest of Germany had been cut off. So if they had used the road rather than the sea, they could only have taken the clumsy and heavy crates as far as some location within East Prussia. Moving the Amber Room to Germany by air or sea could have been done later, until mid-March, but these were the most dangerous ways possible, taking into account the proximity of the front and the domination of our air forces.
Kuchumov compiled a wish-list of Rohde's former friends and colleagues to interrogate. Where was Oberburgermeister Helmut Will? The NKVD reported that he had disappeared. Konigsberg Schlossoberinspektor Friedrich Henkensiefken? He was said to have fled to Germany. A 'Dr Gert', known to have been close to Rohde? No one even knew his full name. Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia? There had been no confirmed sightings of him since March 1945. Jurgen Sprecht, the restorer and amber craftsman? Sprecht did eventually turn up. He had been held in a Soviet detention camp but was discovered hanged in circumstances that were still under investigation. It was a criminal inquiry. 'Bodies, bodies,' Kuchumov wrote gloomily. 'Dead and missing.'
It would be virtually impossible for the two men to find these witnesses without outside help, since millions of Germans, soldiers and civilians, were in flight - a mass migration of half of Europe. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow for permission to place a letter in Vo Slavu Rodini (For the Glory of the Motherland), a journal read by Soviet soldiers in the field. 'Help Us Restore the Museums of Leningrad', the letter was entitled, and it contained Kuchumov's exhortation for 'soldiers, sergeants and officers to advise us through the editors of locations where valuables of historical and artistic significance might be found so that they can take their place again in our museum'.18
'We shall go to Moscow on 10 or 12 April,' Tronchinsky wrote to his wife, and he and Kuchumov caught a train to the capital. They went back to Professor Brusov, who was still working from home. They discussed the chaos of Konigsberg: how there were only potatoes to eat; the depravity of the fascists. And then Kuchumov began to probe. He was confused, he said. Witnesses claimed that the Amber Room had been removed from the castle in July or August 1944, while Rohde had told Brusov that the room was concealed in the south wing. Kuchumov handed Brusov the statements by Feyerabend and Schaumann. The professor read in silence before defending himself.
Schaumann had got it wrong. When Rohde had talked about 'the amber and picture collections'