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By Root 1797 0

where they had been gathering over the past twenty-four months. But there was a problem. Many of the treasures had been stolen from the Soviet Union by roving units of Alfred Rosenberg's ERR, the Third Reich's art theft squad, whose knowledge of 'culture of the Russian and Soviet empires' was negligible. Original Soviet inventories had been destroyed and replaced with German index cards that were inaccurate. The Americans had relied on these indexes to determine the provenance of the stolen art. Kuchumov wrote: 'The crates had also been opened. Many of the pieces inside were missing.' The task of matching individual items to their original institutions was enormous. But not as large as opening every single box to check for traces of the Amber Room. Kuchumov would need staff, he told General Zorin. He would need transport. A lorry and a jeep were on call. He would need time.

He hired ioo German workers from the labour exchange. Every box was opened and resealed with a Soviet official present as a witness. Kuchumov was so eager to work quickly and comprehensively that he roped in all able-bodied people, even his German housekeeper 'Paul', who was sent off to search an annexe at Derutra.

And 'Paul' almost immediately came running back with news. Inside the annexe building, a former grain warehouse, he had found wooden-backed sheets poking out from beneath a tarpaulin. Having been told by Kuchumov that the panels of the Amber Room were backed with wooden boards, he was sure he had found it.

Kuchumov wrote: 'We scrabbled around with our hands. But what we found was a parquet floor, inlaid with Australian mother-of-pearl and rare hard woods, rose and amarantus, that had once been in the Lyons Hall in the Catherine Palace.' It might not have been the treasure he was after, but it taught Kuchumov a lesson. The Lyons Hall had been dismantled by the Nazis, who had then scattered pieces of it across Europe, a plaster mould abandoned in a field outside Pushkin, the bronze locks and a door in Konigsberg, and here in Berlin the floor itself. Kuchumov noted in his diary that the fate of the Lyons Hall demonstrated a Nazi methodology that might also apply to the Amber Room - stolen, packed and then spread about.

The Germans working in the Derutra warehouse went through tens of thousands of crates in the flickering paraffin lamplight, kneeling over artefacts long into the night. Kuchumov wrote: 'They brought with them food and thermoses, so there was no need to take breaks. They worked diligently and professionally. They are pedantic and tireless. Our relations were cordial.'

For all the detailed description of his work at the Derutra warehouse, Kuchumov did not comment on the fact he never had time to leave Berlin, to travel to the castles of Saxony to where Alfred Rohde had planned to evacuate the Amber Room.

What is palpable is Kuchumov's exhaustion. His writing began to deteriorate. The entries became breathless. The general forced him to take a few days off. Kuchumov heard a platform performance of Wagner's Gotterdammerung (the apocalyptic Twilight of the Gods) but he thought it sounded like the torching of Leningrad. Only when he found a Russian-run cinema screening Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin did he feel revitalized.

November came and his time was up. Kuchumov was dispatched to Leningrad alongside 2,500 crates packed into eleven railway carriages. Six more carriages left for Kiev and another four to Minsk. He wrote: 'A special flat-backed carriage was also used in the procession leading back to Russia and on it the huge bronze statues of Hercules and Flora, sawn from their podiums near the Cameron Gallery at the Catherine Palace.' They had been found in a smelting yard in Dresden, barely recognizable, having been dragged all the way from Russia by German tanks. 'They can be mended. Of that there is no doubt.'11

As he left the fallen capital, Kuchumov wrote: 'Here was the lifeblood flowing back to our cities.' But he must also have been conscious of what he was leaving behind, the unexplored lines of inquiry that had sped