The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [7]
The St Petersburg and Moscow authorities gushed about their new Amber Room, describing it as a memorial to everything the Soviet Union had lost in the Second World War. Publicity from the German sponsors extolled the rebuilding project as a symbol of the new Europe, without a Wall or Iron Curtain. The Kremlin announced it would invite forty heads of state and government to the opening, which was set to coincide with the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg on 31 May 2003. The event was to be televised live from a specially constructed press centre that could house L,OOO journalists. The budget for the celebrations would run into billions of roubles. So much was being invested in the new Amber Room and yet no one seemed able to resolve the fate of the original masterpiece. It was now said to be worth more than 250 million dollars, a figure that made it the most valuable missing work of art in the world.
There are, we discovered, many different types of treasure hunters. Key 'Amber Room' into an Internet search engine or any online newspaper library and see over 800,000 entries pop up.
A group of salvage experts have for years been scouring the catacombs that run beneath the German city of Weimar in the belief that the Amber Room was secretly transferred to the Baltic city of Konigsberg and then on to Weimar by Nazi agents acting for the Gauleiter of East Prussia.
Divers regularly explore the rusting wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff a German liner torpedoed on 31 January 1945 as it sailed from the Baltic port of Gotenhafen, north-west of Danzig. The liner was evacuating LO,582 wounded Germans away from Konigsberg and the advancing Soviet front. It was also said to be carrying the Amber Room.
Mining experts regularly congregate in western Saxony and Thuringia where the countryside is honeycombed with deep ore and potash pits in the belief that as the Nazis had used mines and caves to hide important art works, the Amber Room too had been secreted in the subterranean tunnels.
These different theories and their backers, a league of treasure hunters from Europe, the United States and Russia, have spawned thousands of potential leads and a dizzying world of conspiracy. As we write this, there are more than a dozen German digs under way, each underpinned by a different theory.
However, in Russia there is an information black hole. Almost every official directly connected to the original Amber Room is dead or missing. Political and economic conditions have led to their files, diaries and memorabilia being broken up, stolen, concealed and classified. Even after glasnost and perestroika, the most important Russian archives that might contain material on the official searches for the Amber Room are arcane. The museum authorities in Moscow and St Petersburg are awkward and often inhospitable (especially to those who come without offers of international funding or research exchanges).
We had no previous experience of working in Russia or the former Eastern bloc, but had for more than a decade earned a reputation for chasing difficult stories, researching out in the field and inside archives in America, Britain, China and India, for British newspapers and broadcasters. Russia seemed like the best place to start. It was vast, obstreperous and secretive. It was also therefore likely to be the place that had retained the most secrets, even if they were difficult to extract.
In December 2001 we flew to St Petersburg and made slow progress through official channels. However, friends from the former Leningrad University, experts at living creatively, suggested another, more lateral strategy. They helped us piece together a network of subordinate