The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [96]
Paul Enke, KSII404/82, is waiting for us on a white plastic table in a sterile reading room. This personal file on the author of Bernsteinzimmer Report is a brick of paperwork. With Enke dead, Wermusch reluctant and the book out of print, getting hold of it is better news than we could possibly have hoped for and there is plenty to read. Enke's book jacket carried no biography. There was no author photograph. No explanation as to how he had become, as the blurb claimed, ' . . . involved in the inquiries and investigations about the fate of the Amber Room ...' Judging by the length of what we have before us, Enke was obviously significant to the Stasi and we open his file, unsure whether we are about to read of a lowly informer and weekend Amber Room fanatic or discover between the pages a forensic investigator at the heart of a state-sponsored inquiry.
First are pages of photographs. The earliest, a black-and-white shot, is clipped to a 19 50 Volkspolizei service record. Enke was a people's policeman. It shows him as a dashing young recruit, proud of his gilt epaulettes, his collars stitched with the emblem of the force. The next frame portrays Enke, about a decade later, now dressed as a purposeful bureaucrat in a tight black suit, wearing heavy-framed glasses. We wonder if he became a plain-clothes officer. The last pictures are of Enke in his late middle age with receding hair, his face now puggish. He wears a look unique to the GDR, a garish checked sports jacket, a black shirt, a clashing light tie and a distant expression. This strip, probably taken in the early 1970S in a photo booth, recurs throughout the file.
Paul Enke, c.i960
Next is a report by Major Schmalfuss, a Stasi departmental director, who seems to know everything about Paul Enke.1
Born: Magdeburg, 20 January 19 2 5. Social class: worker. 'In his parents' home, Paul Enke received a Protestant education and consequently joined a Christian youth organization in 1931,' Major Schmalfuss wrote.2
Left school at thirteen. Apprenticed as a lathe operator. Early political development: 'Christliche Jugend and Hitler Jugend'. The Stasi had uncovered a serious black mark against Enke that would surely impact on his adult life in the GDR, membership of the Hitler Youth. But Major Schmalfuss was satisfied that the blame lay with Enke's parents: 'Due to the inadequacy of positive political-ideological influences [at home], Comrade Enke became a member of the Hitler Jugend in 1935 and volunteered in 1942.'
Enke was seventeen when he set out to fight for the Fatherland. Schmalfuss wrote: 'Served in fasch. Wehrmacht, FunkmeBer [radar technician] Marinebrigade (1 May 1942 to 8 May 1945), lance-corporal, stationed in Gdingen, Poland; in Kiel, northern Germany; in Courland, on the Baltic coast. He has never been decorated.'
Enke served through the war in and around the Baltic's amber coast, which might provide a tenuous personal connection between him and the Amber Room. We wonder if he heard about the triumphal arrival of the Amber Room in Konigsberg Castle after it was opened to the public in the spring of 1942.
The war ended for Lance-Corporal Enke on 8 May 1945 when he surrendered to the Red Army that marched him and hundreds of thousands of others to prison camp. Major Schmalfuss listed Enke's POW record: 'Soviet Camp 27/2 Moscow (May 1945 to January 1946); Soviet Camp 7711 Leningrad (January 1946 to May 1949); Zentralschule 2041, Kursant (June to December 1949).
Zentralschule 2041. By 1949 Enke must have convinced his Soviet captors that he could be rehabilitated, and while thousands of others languished in camps until 1955,