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The first document in this file is another report written by Strauss in 19 50 for Dr Paul Wandel. Strauss provided a detailed breakdown of all that he could recall about the events of 1945. And there was a lot. He wrote that on 15 January 1945 he returned to Konigsberg from a tour of castles in East Prussia, having learned of plans to evacuate art works from the city's castle. He found Dr Alfred Rohde and ten workmen surrounded by half-packed crates, duvets and pillows in the castle yard.

Strauss even recalled the names of the blacksmith and joiner employed to make the crates: Herr Weiss and Herr Mann. Rohde complained that the task to evacuate treasures was being slowed down due to his additional responsibilities as a Leutnant with the Volkssturm (the Nazi home guard). Instead of spiriting priceless art works from the doomed city he was digging defences. Strauss wrote that he advised Rohde to take urgent action, particularly regarding the Amber Room. But Rohde informed him that it was of such value to the Nazi hierarchy that he could not move it without authorization from Dr Helmut Will, the city's Oberburgermeister. Getting permission from Dr Will was proving difficult. Strauss then left the city on other duties as an air-raid warden and returned only at the beginning of March 1945, by which time there was no sign of Rohde. The last thing Strauss heard about the Amber Room was from a junior civil servant at the Konigsberg office of the Ministry of Culture, who told him that it had been evacuated to 'somewhere east of Gorlitz'. So this was the source of his Gorlitz story, the hook in Strauss's letter of 1949 sent to Major Kunyn in Berlin, offering his assistance to the Soviet's Amber Room search. Strauss had then written: 'in March 1945 I did overhear that the evacuation of the Amber Room was assigned to one place, east of Gorlitz'.

Nothing about his coming forward in 1949 had been down to chance. Prior to travelling to Kaliningrad in that year, he had spent four years researching the fate of the Amber Room using documents from the Soviet archive of Nazi files at Potsdam, a heavily militarized area south-west of blockaded Berlin. The Soviet Military Administration had discovered caches of Nazi files all over Germany that they locked into this high- security archive. To gain access to them Strauss must have offered his services as a translator and convinced the Soviets of his Communist credentials. We cannot yet understand why a man who must have been trusted by the Soviet authorities in Berlin treated his comrade Kuchumov in Kaliningrad with contempt.

Strauss studied the Nazi plan to evacuate art from Konigsberg thoroughly and, even though he would not meet Anatoly Kuchumov until December 1949, this research shows that both men were working independently on the same theory as to the fate of the Amber Room - that it was not destroyed in the Knights' Hall.

In the dossier prepared for Wandel in E950, Strauss cited a letter dated November 1944 from Gauleiter Erich Koch to Martin Mutschmann, the Gauleiter of Saxony, in which Koch advised his counterpart that, due to the worsening military situation in East Prussia, he was sending a museum official to Dresden, in Saxony, to search for potential storage facilities.

In November 1944 Saxony was still a safe haven, with an array of disused mines, caves and medieval fortresses in which things of value could be concealed. It was also a gateway to Bavaria and Austria, where the Nazi High Command had built its eyries and Hitler had his southern headquarters, the Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden.

The next wartime document in Strauss's dossier for Wandel was a report from the man chosen by Koch as his emissary, Helmut Friesen, head of the Provincial Memorials Office in Konigsberg. Friesen arrived in Dresden on 22 November 1944 and met Arthur Grafe, chief of Saxony's Department of State Collections of Art, Science, Castles, Gardens and Libraries. An account of this meeting written by Arthur Grafe revealed