The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [77]
Strauss contradicted Alfred Rohde's testimony by saying that the Amber Room had survived the fall of Konigsberg. 'But it cannot be in the Soviet Zone [of Germany] since despite my requests it wasn't moved in time,' he wrote. Major Kunyn marked the passage with a question mark. What was Strauss's exact role in wartime Konigsberg? He seemed to be suggesting here that he was directly responsible for the safe-keeping of the Amber Room.
Strauss's letter continued: 'No amber objects have appeared on the Berlin art market but in March 1945 I did overhear that the evacuation of the Amber Room was assigned to one place, east of Gorlitz [an area that was part of Saxony until 1949, when it became part of Poland].' Again Major Kunyn drew three bold exclamation marks. Strauss signed off 'Chief of Applied Arts Museums, Monuments and Education, GDR, Berlin'. He had been rehabilitated into the new East German regime remarkably quickly and had risen to an influential post. But drawing attention to himself in this way was a risky endeavour.
The next document is a poor carbon copy of a long interview conducted on 12 December 1949. As we slowly trace the sentences we realize that this is the transcript of Gerhard Strauss's interrogation. The man asking the questions was Anatoly Kuchumov.6
The two men talked at the Hotel Moscow in Kaliningrad. Pre-war photographs show it to have been a historic red-brick building. As one of the few Konigsberg-era edifices still standing in April 1945, the NKVD had commandeered it as their headquarters before the MGB occupied it. In order for Strauss to have reached Hotel Moscow, he would have been driven past the ruins of the castle, past the statues of Bismarck and Prince Albrecht with missing limbs and their heads shot off, and along what he knew as Steindamm Strasse. It had been renamed Leninsky Prospekt and led into Prospekt Mira, where the Hotel Moscow stood. We wonder if seeing the levelled city of his youth shocked Dr Gerhard Strauss.
There is no scene setting in the file but we can imagine the likely circumstances, Kuchumov wrapped in his heavy tweed overcoat, wearing his pork-pie hat and black suit. No doubt the battered leather attache case lay open by his ankles. Kuchumov's granddaughter still has it, although his former colleague Valeria Bilanina has probably obtained its contents. Opposite him, cool and confident, 'the doctor': Gerhard Strauss, his dark hair slicked so that not even one strand would become unruly.
At the outset these two men should have had much in common: a love of art history, a background in conservation, an overwhelming desire, albeit for different reasons, to find the Amber Room. But while they were now on the same side, recent events had created a gulf between the haughty Prussian and the shabby Russian.
Session One: '12 December 1949. What I know about the Amber Room, (translated by Captain Shukin)'.
Translated. Kuchumov had no language apart from Russian. We know from Strauss's daughter-in-law that the doctor could only speak German. And so all the nuances, the tucks and nips of language that help friendships settle, were lost as they sat down in the (no doubt freezing) Hotel Moscow during a Kaliningrad winter for a formal discussion, encumbered by an intermediary, the translator Captain Shukin.
Kuchumov began by asking about Alfred Rohde. What could Strauss say about the castle curator? Strauss was fluent on his former chief: Rohde had been born in Hamburg and served as an officer during the First World War, during which he had been gassed. Kuchumov noted that this might have accounted for the Parkinson's-like shakes observed by