The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [92]
These claims wildly conflict with Professor Brusov's own diary in which we read that his primary objective was to travel to Konigsberg to bring home the Amber Room and that Rohde was his key source. Dmetriev was lying.
He then claimed that 'Barsov' came into contact with Rohde and his wife only by chance, when he hired them to help search the castle for other missing treasures, giving them the same pay and food rations as those received by Soviet helpers. 'Rohde and his wife had a wonderful, comfortable life and work,' Dmetriev wrote, 'until they disappeared.'
From 'a high-level military source' Dmetriev learned the true fate of Rohde and his wife, who did not die of sickness, malnutrition or suicide. 'Both had been poisoned,' Dmetriev revealed, 'murdered to stop them giving away the secret location of the Amber Room.' Dmetriev wrote that two death certificates found by 'Barsov', stating that Rohde and his wife had contracted dysentery, were fakes and that the doctor who allegedly signed them after carrying out post-mortems had vanished. When the Soviet authorities opened the graves to re-examine the bodies, there was nothing inside them. 'Even today, we have not found [Rohde's] real tomb,' wrote Dmetriev. Yet Brusov had written in his diary that Rohde was still alive when he left the city in July 1945.
The second Dmetriev article concluded with a confession from 'Barsov' that we read in astonishment. I am a historian,' he told the newspaper. I am naive about the character of people. I am not able to see their mood. I cannot understand if a person is joyful or sad. This became a problem after I got orders to search for treasures with the Soviet Army.'
It is hard to reconcile this voice with the one in the diary we have read. Either 'Barsov'/Brusov must have been compelled to make this humiliating public statement for reasons that we do not yet understand or the entire article was a fabrication.
The third and final piece for Kaliningradskaya Pravda, published on 12 July 1958, was far shorter but equally explosive, as it touched on the issue of treason. Reporter Dmetriev wrote that military sources had revealed to him that a number of Soviet museum curators were traitors who collaborated with the Nazis: 'Our German friends and their little Soviet helpers know the secret of the Amber Room. It did not burn. It is still not found. The search continues. Dear comrades, send your notes and proposals to Kaliningradskaya Pravda. '
The Freie Welt and Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles contained identical idiosyncrasies and errors. They both called Rohde's daughter Use, claiming she left Konigsberg in 1944, when her name was Lotti and she had stayed in the city until 1945. They both used the same awkwardly worded retraction made by muddle-headed 'Barsov'. Both contained the identical revelations that Alfred Rohde had been murdered and the Amber Room had survived the fall of Konigsberg. It would be easy to dismiss these articles as spurious if we had not then discovered that the same story was also carried by Soviet Russia on 21 June 1959 and by the Soviet newspaper Front six days later, as well as by all the regional editions of Pravda.
After all the years of silence following Professor Brusov's interview with TASS on 13 July 1945, with not so much as a word said about the fate of the Amber Room, an entirely new story had tumbled out. And when all the versions of it, published in the Soviet Union and the GDR, are placed side by side, it strikes us that what we have before us is a deliberate campaign to end any lingering speculation that the Amber Room was destroyed in the Knights' Hall of Konigsberg Castle in April 1945. The public focus