The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [79]
What could Strauss tell Kuchumov of the evacuation plan? Strauss claimed that he had attempted to get the Amber Room out of Konigsberg in the spring of 1944. 'It was then that I warned Rohde for the first time that it was dangerous to keep it on the third floor of the castle as it could be destroyed. There was an obvious danger of aerial bombing.' But, according to Strauss, Rohde was reluctant. 'Only after several warnings from me did he agree to board up the window to prevent shrapnel from getting in. But even so we only boarded up the bottom third of the castle window.'
Strauss said that his persistence led to the room eventually being dismantled, packed into crates and moved to the south-wing cellars, only days before the first Allied air raids - 27-28 August 1944. Yet another asterisk. Kuchumov wrote a name beside it: 'Castle restaurateur Paul Feyerabend'. He had told Kuchumov that Rohde had temporarily evacuated the crates to an undisclosed location outside the city in July 1944, before the air raids.
Was Strauss sure about his dates? 'Yes,' he replied. He knew this was the case because, although he had missed the bombing raids, he had returned to Konigsberg on E September 1944 and gone straight to the castle. 'It was entirely burned but the outside walls were still standing. I met Dr Rohde by chance in the castle yard outside the entrance to the south-wing cellar. He was surrounded by boxes, big and small, and told me the room had been stored in the cellars during the raids and wasn't damaged.' If it had not been for Strauss's insistence, then the Amber Room would not have been moved and would have taken a direct hit.
And then? Kuchumov was plotting times, dates and places. What happened next? Strauss thought for a moment. In December 1944 Rohde began to travel, Strauss said. Another mark in the margin. From Rohde's reconstructed correspondence, saved from the fire by Brusov, Kuchumov knew that it was in November 1944 that Alfred Rohde began looking in earnest for hiding places outside the city.
Strauss corrected himself. Yes, now he remembered. It was November 1944. Rohde had made a few local trips to find hiding places for the castle treasures in that month. But in the end these stores in castles and manors were not safe enough. Strauss had heard it said that Rohde had written in a letter that he intended to evacuate the Amber Room to Wechselburg Castle in Saxony. So did Rohde carry out the plan? 'About the moving of the room from Konigsberg, I don't know,' Strauss replied.
Kuchumov asked about the Knights' Hall, where Brusov concluded that the Amber Room had burned. Was it used as a temporary store for the Amber Room? Strauss replied: 'Maybe [Rohde] told me that he wanted to put the boxes in the Knights' Hall, I'm not sure.' Strauss was becoming defensive but Kuchumov would not let up and asked about the last time that he saw Rohde. 'Some time between 11 and 15 January [1945]. But I cannot recall if the Amber Room was even discussed,' was Strauss's vague response.
Suddenly the pace and direction of the interrogation transcript changed. The cool-headed doctor asked to return to Berlin. He claimed that he needed to winkle out more witnesses. Not Nazis, but Germans, like him, silent, concealed opponents of Hitler who had weathered the final weeks of the war. 'Ernst Schaumann, for example, lives in Berlin. His address I can figure out and somebody can check it,' Strauss suggested to Kuchumov. 'Maybe it's possible to ask the general [Lasch] who capitulated and was taken as a POW? Maybe Lasch knows something about the Amber Room,' he said.
Strauss had only just arrived and, from the correspondence and files that surrounded the preparation for this trip, it had been arranged at significant political and financial cost. It was unlikely that the Soviets would let him go so quickly. We contrast Strauss's imprecise responses with his letter