The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [99]
Enke found a war diary for the 18th Army and in it an entry for 29 September 1941 that, he argued, proved the dismantling of the Amber Room had been overseen by the Nazi High Command: '16.oohrs: Cavalry Captain Count Solms, from the Supreme Army Command, who has been commissioned to record the works of art in the tsarist palaces, asks for protection for the tsarist palace in Pushkin... It is now in the immediate vicinity of the front line and is endangered by the thoughtless behaviour of our troops.'12
Dr Ernst-Otto Count zu Solms Laubach
Enke tracked down Captain Solms's unit, the 50th Corps, and in its journal he found this entry: '14 October 1941. Krasnogwardeisk. Removal of the works of art salvaged by Cavalry Captain Dr Count Solms and Captain Dr Ponsgen in Gatchina and Pushkin, including the wall panels of the amber hall from the Pushkin Palace to Konigsberg.'
From military archives held in the GDR, Enke learned that the cavalry captain's full name was Dr Ernst-Otto Count zu Solms Laubach and that he was an aristocrat from Frankfurt-am-Main and a museum curator in civilian life. One week before the Count had arrived in Pushkin, he had been in the Leningrad palace of Peterhof, supervising the looting of the Neptune Fountain, an art work that was also on the list prepared by Otto Kiimmel for Goebbels. Hitler had personally requested that the Neptune Fountain be returned to Nuremberg, where it had been cast in the mid-seventeenth century.13 If the Count had been acting in Peterhof for Hitler, then it was, Enke argued, likely that he was acting for Hitler in the Catherine Palace too.
But having established that the Nazi High Command had ordered the Amber Room theft, who had taken specific responsibility for it in Konigsberg and after? Enke reported that 'General [sic] Marshal Goering, Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler, Reichsleiters Lammers and Bormann, Rosenberg and foreign minister Ribbentrop' had all used their positions to amass large art collections and were possible contenders.14
However, it was Alfred Rosenberg that Enke focused on and he discovered some interesting connections.15 Although Rosenberg was of German descent, he had been born in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, on the Baltic coast. The son of a cobbler, he had been sent to college in Petrograd (Leningrad), where, Enke reasoned, it was likely that he would have learned of the legendary Amber Room. When Rosenberg fled Petrograd in 1917, finding common cause with 600,000 White Russian refugees who converged on Germany, he joined the Freikorps, roving counter-revolutionary units that held back the Bolshevik advance. When disbanded, these Freikorps veterans remained closely linked through the Baltic Brotherhood, an organization for ex-servicemen whose ceremonies were steeped in Norse and Teutonic myths of heroism and self-sacrifice. Many, including Rosenberg, converged on Munich, forming a pseudo-intellectual circle around Hitler and joining the secretive Thule Society, which conjured the existence of a mythical island, the source of amber, a land locked into the ice flows of the far north whose pagan inhabitants adopted a creed of strength and loyalty.
Through his tenacity and hard work, the weekends spent researching in Potsdam, Enke had identified a senior member of the Nazi High Command who not only was responsible for looting art but also had clear links with the Baltic culture surrounding the Amber Room and the coast from where it originated.
On 18 November 1941 Alfred Rosenberg won another portfolio as head of Hitler's Reichsministerium fiir die besetzen Ostgebiete, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, The Times of London commenting: 'Rosenberg is Hitler's Eastern expert... Rosenberg, who hates everything Russian, will certainly conduct his office with ruthless brutality.' The only part of