The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [98]
Straight away we find references to Enke's private research in Potsdam. But it is not clear whether he gave his material voluntarily or if the Stasi requisitioned it.
Written in a forward-slanting, purposeful hand is a report by Enke himself. It began in hyperbolic fashion with Enke describing 'the German fascist's robbery of Europe's cultural heritage' as far worse than those carried out by 'the Persians at Babylon, the Romans at Athens or the Crusaders at Constantinople'. The theft of the Amber Room was, according to Enke, 'the most painful loss of all'.7
Enke substantiated his claim. He set out to prove that the pillage of Europe and the theft of the Amber Room were premeditated. The Nazis had been preparing to cherry-pick Eastern Europe as far back as 1933, he reported. They had gathered information about Eastern European museum collections via a cover organization called the German Academic Exchange Service. Free excursions, conferences and training workshops were offered to museum staff from the USSR, while Germans of Baltic origin were dispatched to spy on their collections. Even while Molotov and Ribbentrop were negotiating the non-aggression pact in E939, and Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were being constituted as Soviet republics, this team of art spies was drawing up lists of collectables for Hitler.8
On 15 November 1940 team leader Dr Nils von Hoist, an Eastern art expert and head of the Berlin State Museums' external affairs department, issued a secret circular to museum directors across the Reich, asking them
Dr von Hoist was still writing up his Soviet findings when Operation Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941. Two days later he presented his report on 'the most important collections of cultural possessions in the Baltic countries' to Dr Hans Posse, then director of the Dresden Gallery and, more significantly, a key art adviser to Hitler.9 Enke found a dispatch order dated 8 July 1941 forwarding the list of collectables on to the 18th Army headquarters, from where it was disseminated to the commanders of German units advancing on Leningrad.
On 1 September 1941 Dr von Hoist was sent back to the Soviet Union, initially to Smolensk, recently captured by the Wehrmacht s Army Group Centre, with instructions to help establish the eastern headquarters for Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg, the art-looting organization headed by Hitler's ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. By 26 September, Dr von Hoist was at the front, camped at the Catherine Palace with Army Group North, charged with safeguarding 'the art treasures of [the tsars' palaces at] Krasnoye Selo, Peterhof and Oranienbaum and later also Petersburg [sic]\ according to a letter from the Fiihrer's aide-de-camp, dated 26 September.10 Although initially sceptical we are now gripped by how closely Enke was able to follow a Nazi art expert all the way into the Catherine Palace.
Next Enke reported that he had found a copy of Dr von Hoist's list, attached to Hitler's order from July 1941, reserving the first pick of art works plundered from the East. But here was a set-back. The Amber Room was not on it.
Enke was undeterred. He dug on until he discovered a second list, compiled for propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels by Otto Kiimmel, the seventy-year-old director of the Berlin State Museums and Dr von Hoist's boss.11 This one consisted of all German art works that had gone abroad since 1500 and were to be repatriated. Prominently placed on it was the Amber Room. If Enke's research was reliable, he had proved that the theft of the Amber Room was premeditated. And whoever had planned its theft would possibly have also worked out how to conceal it in 1945.
Enke wrote that all items on the Kummel list were to be returned to their German towns of origin or set aside for