The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [65]
The second document in the file is a telegram dated October 1947. It is yet another komandirovat, a supposed business trip, this one to Moscow. Once again Kuchumov was to tell his colleagues that he was on holiday. In Moscow, he reported to the Committee for Cultural Institutions, a body that came under Zhdanov's empire and received instructions from Committee Chairman Comrade T. M. Zuyeva.5
The next document is an account of the meeting, written by Kuchumov in purple ink on graph paper. Chairman Zuyeva introduced Kuchumov to Comrade Georgy Antipin of the State Historical Museum, who was attached to a 'special unit of the Military Department', and Comrade David Marchukov, representative of the Committee for Cultural Institutions. Kuchumov noted that Antipin was an intense, brooding man. All three were issued with special passports and permits to travel and were then driven to the Sheremetyevo military airstrip, where they boarded a DC3 bound for Kaliningrad.6 It seemed that Kuchumov was being sent back to reinvestigate the Amber Room again.
The whole region was under the tightest security and at Kaliningrad airport the border guards inspected the three men's papers and luggage. According to Kuchumov's notes, he was held up for hours by security staff. He had packed 500 photographs of the pre-war palaces of Leningrad in his suitcase and was accused of being a spy. It was Marchukov who eventually persuaded the guards that Kuchumov was on a classified mission. Only then did the DC3 take off again, this time heading for Tempelhof airport. The final destination of the mission was not Kaliningrad but Berlin.
Kuchumov wrote that his digs in that city were 'not far from the Gestapo headquarters' in Prince Albrecht Strasse and that he, Antipin and Marchukov 'rambled through the streets, eager to see what this capital of terror was really like, this city that gave birth to the Third Reich'.
In Pravda Kuchumov had read how the Soviet Fifth Shock Army had been first into the city and by the morning of 25 April 1945, when US troops met with their Soviet counterparts on the River Elbe, the noose had been pulled tight, Berlin surrounded. Russians pressed on to the Brandenburg Gate, fighting house by house, using T-34 tanks and katyu-sha rockets, devastating firepower for such a close-quarters battle. The rows of bombed-out houses reminded Kuchumov 'of skulls with hollow eye sockets'.7
When the mint at the National Bank of Prussia fell in April 1945, Soviet riflemen had forced their way into its vaults to find piles of banknotes as well as remarkable antiquities from Assyria and Persia that had once been displayed in the city's Pergamon Museum. By 27 April 1945 the Soviet Eighth Guard Army had reached the Zoological Gardens, in the western suburbs, where they pounded the Zoo Flakturm, an enormous concrete anti-aircraft tower with thick steel shutters, inside which more than 3,000 civilians cowered alongside paintings and collections (including a priceless golden hoard excavated from Anatolia that was said to have once been worn by Helen of Troy).8
Allied air raids during the first three months of 1945 had levelled much of Berlin's historic Prussian centre and in 1947 Kuchumov was anxious to see what remained of Museum Insel, the small island on the River Spree, in which had been housed priceless treasures excavated by German archaeologists from Turkey in the 186OS and 1870S. Here should have been the legendary altar of Zeus from Pergamum with its delicately
Victorious Soviet troops pose in front of the Berlin Reichstag, 194s
carved frieze. But Kuchumov could find nothing. A British soldier who was there at the same time wrote of a 'shambles of crumbling rubble, with the great monuments from