The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [90]
That was not all. Kunz informed Strauss that a special Red Army brigade arrived at Kriebstein in July 1945 had carried out another search. They seemed to know about art and, Kunz claimed, he overheard them talking about Konigsberg and missing treasures from there. But, as far as Kunz knewr, the Soviets found no more. Strauss turned his attentions to Wechselburg Castle, dismissing Kriebstein as a possible location for the Amber Room.
At Wechselburg, he found an old Catholic father, Gottfried Fussy, who had been caretaker of the basilica for more than thirty years. Fussy confirmed to him that in December 1944 he had shown Dr Alfred Rohde and a museum administrator from Dresden (Arthur Grafe) around but had heard nothing more until Grafe returned shortly before Germany's surrender. Strauss wrote: '[Fussy] was then told [by Grafe] that the transports from Konigsberg had not got through. The railway lines were cut by the Soviet army near Elbing.' According to Father Fussy, the next visitors to Wechselburg were American soldiers in mid-April. Strauss reported to Wandel: 'They found a few crates which they took away.'
There was only one conclusion that Strauss felt able to convey to his superiors. High-level plans had been made for the evacuation of the Amber Room to Saxony that were thwarted by Allied troop movements and the interruption of transportation routes out of East Prussia. However, given the status of these plans, the high-ranking Nazi officials involved in them and the cachet attached to the Amber Room as an 'irreplaceable treasure', Strauss wrote that it was 'inconceivable' that the Amber Room would have been abandoned in the unsecured Knights' Hall, in a wrecked castle at the epicentre of a besieged city whose future was getting bleaker by the hour. It had survived the war, concealed somewhere in Konigsberg.
There is only one more document in this Ministry of Truth binder, a June 1959 edition of Freie Welt, an illustrated magazine published by the German-Soviet Friendship Society that contains an 'exclusive' two-part series entitled 'Where is the Famous Amber Room?'
The article began: 'For the first time all citizens of the GDR will learn the true and fascinating story of the Amber Room, thanks to the generosity of our guest editor, Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss, director of the Faculty of Art History, Humboldt University, Berlin.'
We are surprised to see Strauss revealing to his fellow citizens something that had up until then been a state secret: 'a covert investigation conducted into the fate of the Soviet Union's greatest treasure'. Strauss informed readers that contrary to the earlier conclusions reached by Professor Alexander Brusov of the State Historical Museum, Moscow, the Amber Room was not destroyed in the defeat of Konigsberg. It was still missing and readers were encouraged to write in to Freie Welt with any information that might help their Soviet comrades find this national treasure.
It is unthinkable that such a revelation would have appeared without the blessing of the Stasi and the KGB. And that raises the possibility that the recently promoted Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss was a Soviet agent of influence or a Stasi informer. The strands of Cold War intrigue are becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle.
We revert to the Russian files. In an attempt to understand the precise nature of the relationship between Anatoly Kuchumov and Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss, we have requested all material from the Leningrad curator's papers relating to the 1950S. A slim package has arrived from St Petersburg. Our Friend the Professor says she is busy and has not been able to visit the archive as frequently as she had hoped. Also, she tells us that the archive director intends to limit our research - we can only have