The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [94]
We try to calm things down. Talk him back. He is almost at the door. We do need your expertise, we say. We are interested in your career. But we also need to understand the Freie Welt articles, what they really meant. Would he like a coffee? 'Stolz' goes quiet. We point to the room's personal chrome Gaggia machine and push a small black button marked ESPRESSO. A lush coffee oozes out. 'OK,' says 'Stolz'. The former Stasi officer is hypnotized by such sophistication and he sits back down at his perch by the window.
'You're never going to understand Freie Welt until you understand the nature of disinformation,' he says, savouring the espresso shot.
'Our textbooks were Lenin. Of course.'
We nod.
'And Sefton Delmar.'
Who was Sefton Delmar, we ask?
He tut-tuts. 'Sefton Delmar was the genius behind the science of disinformation. I am surprised you have never heard of him, as he was a famous journalist with your Daily Express.' He's deviating again, but we do not interrupt this time.
'Stolz' explains how all Stasi operatives in his directorate were ordered to study Delmar's two-volume autobiography, Trial Sinister and Black Boomerang, in which the former Daily Express Berlin bureau chief revealed his double life.13 In 1940 Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) had employed Sefton Delmar, a fluent German speaker, to devise methods of weakening the morale of the Wehrmacht. Delmar set up a phoney German radio station, Soldatensender Calais, perfect in every way apart from the fact that it broadcast from Ashdown Forest in Sussex and its presenters were British intelligence officers.
Delmar's radio persona was a belligerent Prussian diehard, an army officer known to German listeners as Der Chef, who was deeply loyal to the Fatherland but outspoken on certain policies. 'Stolz' recounts how in one of the first broadcasts, Der Chef bitterly attacked Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, who, a few days previously, had made his flight to Scotland. Stolz becomes animated: I have studied the transcripts. Delmar was a subtle master. Der Chef stormed, "As soon as there is a crisis, Hess packs himself a white flag and flies off to throw himself and us on the mercy of that flat-footed bastard of a drunken old cigar-smoking Jew, Churchill!" 'Don't you see,' 'Stolz' says, putting down his empty cup. 'The message was plausible. What was false was the source.'
Is 'Stolz' saying that Freie Welt (which we know to be a genuine GDR publication) ran a phoney story about the Amber Room, one that had been generated in the Soviet Union?
'No,' 'Stolz' says. 'It wasn't the story that was false. The story was partially true, although some details may have been exaggerated. It was the source of the information that had been disguised. New evidence had been unearthed that confirmed that the Amber Room had been evacuated from Konigsberg to a secret location, but there were conflicting stories about its precise location.
'A major investigation was being planned. But to be certain, the authorities needed to identify anyone out there who knew about the Amber Room, who was connected with it, and who had gone to ground after the war. They needed assistance in testing and honing their hypothesis. Thousands of GDR citizens had been convicted of being Nazi collaborators, of looting, of war crimes, and the Stasi was still hunting down people. No one would come forward voluntarily if the request was made by the state, but a respected East German academic like Strauss, a former citizen of East Prussia, a man already connected with the Amber Room story who was not afraid to say so in public, gave people the confidence to write in. And thousands of letters arrived in response to the Freie Welt articles.'
What did the letter-writers reveal?
'It was not my responsibility. All I know is that Freie Welt was dealt with at the very top, by the Committee of the Minister for State Security, Comrade General Erich Mielke, and that soon after the