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By Root 1779 0

Party (KPD), signed a pact with Stalin that tethered the East German state to the USSR. Three years on, Ulbricht, 'a scoundrel capable of killing his father and his mother' (according to Lavrenty Beria, the NKVD chief), founded the German Democratic Republic, which was to be governed by his new Socialist Unity Party (SED), and one of its first acts was to commandeer Pankow's nineteenth-century mansions as homes for its Politburo.1 Niederschonhausen Castle, where Queen Christine, the wife of Frederick the Great, was reputed to have died of boredom and the Nazis stored 'degenerative art', was also seized and transformed into a state guesthouse, later used by Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev.

By 1950, when the Stasi was formed, the sedate suburb of Pankow was completely encircled by its agents. Only the most trusted were permitted to enter, let alone live within the security perimeter of what was now a water-tight enclave. Dr G. Strauss was one of them.

In St Petersburg, the Kuchumov papers are still officially closed. But Our Friend the Professor has used her connections to help us once again and has secured a few documents from a correspondence file of Kuchumov's, stored in the literature archive, concerning contacts in East Berlin.

She has sent us a batch of notes she has taken and written a covering letter. She recalls we were looking for a source known as 'the Doctor'. She is excited, she writes, having come across an intelligence briefing and interrogation report of a former German internee who, in 1949, claimed to know the location of the Amber Room. His name was Dr G. Strauss and his file bears the stamp of the Soviet Ministry of State Security, Comrade Viktor Abakumov's MGB (the former Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence agency that was a forerunner to the KGB).2

Abakumov, Beria's pupil, had become the Soviet's spymaster and chief of the new MGB in 1946, inheriting the old NKVD's extensive network of interrogation and holding centres that had been set up at the end of the war to imprison Nazis, collaborators and anyone else whom the system deemed objectionable. Abakumov's agents stalked the Baltic and Eastern Europe, seeking out opposition and arresting saboteurs and dissidents. Abakumov also fostered the growth of like-minded security organizations within the Soviet's new partner nations, including the Stasi.3

We see that the MGB file Our Friend the Professor has sent to us was prepared for Anatoly Kuchumov and it is dated October 1949, a briefing prepared for his meeting with Dr G. Strauss in Kaliningrad that December. Attached to it is a komandirovat for Kuchumov to travel to Kaliningrad. It stated that General Zorin, in Berlin, had finalized the arrangements for transporting Dr G. Strauss. We are now certain that Soldier Kazakhov's source, 'the Doctor' and this former German internee are one and the same.

In the MGB briefing, Strauss was described as 'an art historian' with long-established links to East Prussia. He was born there in 1908 in Mohrungen (today Morag in Poland), a market town founded by the Teutonic Knights, not far from Prince Alex's castle at Schlobitten. Dr G. Strauss studied art history at Konigsberg University and on graduation was recruited by East Prussia's Provincial Memorials Office. In 1939, he was appointed as an assistant to the city's director of art collections. This makes it likely that he was a contemporary of Alfred Rohde, Konigsberg Castle Museum's director.

There is more. In 1934 Strauss became a brown-shirted street fighter, joining the Sturmabteilung and three years later, while many others chose not to, he joined the Nazi Party. His service record shows that during the war he was a Wehrmacht officer, stationed in East Prussia, and for the last two years of the war he was assigned to protecting the state and its treasures from Allied air raids, a job of great importance considering the value the Third Reich placed on the haul of artefacts stashed in the region. It was a posting that also revealed a degree of political favour, as Strauss could have been ordered