Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to History Calling, where I bring you new videos
every Friday looking at the events of the past. Today I’ll be talking to you about
a fantastical room which was created for a King of Prussia, given to a Tsar of Russia,
stolen by the Nazis and lost in the chaos of war. This is the story of the Amber Room,
perhaps the most famous lost treasure of World War 2 and the fate of which has become known
as one of the world’s great historical mysteries.
The history of the Amber Room begins in 1701, when it was commissioned by this man, King
Frederick I of Prussia. This European country no longer exists, but (depending on which
point in time you’re talking about), it covered much of modern-day Germany and Poland.
The original designer of the Room was named Andreas Schlüter and after 8 years, his vision
had been brought to life by a number of expert workmen who could shape amber (which is hardened
tree resin) and who were named Gottfried Wolffram, Gottfried Tarau and Ernest Schacht. In this
case, the amber in question (like the example you see here) came from deposits in the Baltic
Sea which were over 30 million years old. In 1709, the room was complete and installed
in Frederick’s palace in Berlin. It was constructed from panels of amber in a variety
of shades, backed with gold leaf and stretching to 16 feet high. On these panels images had
been carved, including symbols of royalty and mythological scenes. All in all, it took
6 tons of the stuff to create the Room, and its contents, including vases and cutlery,
were also made from amber. Frederick died in 1713 and his son, Frederick
William inherited his crown and the Amber Room. In 1716, Frederick William then gifted
the Room to Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia in exchanged for military assistance against
the Swedes and because Peter had admired it during a trip to Berlin. The room was dismantled,
packed into crates and taken to St Petersburg, where it arrived in 1717. Peter however, promptly
forgot about it and the room was put into storage for many years. Eventually, in the
1740s during the reign of his daughter, Tsarina Elizabeth Petrova, it was erected in the Winter
Palace. Then, in 1755, she had it installed in the place where it would spend most of
its known existence; Ekaterininsky Palace (or Catherine Palace) in Tsarskoye Selo (which
means the Tsar’s Village and which is now known as Pushkin). As you can tell from these
images, when the Russians built palaces, they were of the ‘bigger is better’ mindset
and so the Amber Room was too small for its new surroundings. Its new location had 30
foot high ceilings for instance, rather than 16, as the Room had been designed for. The
Russians therefore continued to add to it for many years to come.
Under the direction of an Italian man, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who was the Chief Architect of
the Imperial Court, additional amber was brought in from Berlin and the room was augmented
by tall, slender mirrors with gilded frames. Four marble and onyx mosaic panels from Florence
which depicted the five senses were also added. These additions helped to fill in the gaps
caused by the larger space the room now had to inhabit and make it appear that the entire
area was covered in amber. When all was said and done, the room covered almost 600 square
feet and by the mid-1760s included objects such as amber snuff boxes, candlesticks and
altarpieces. Tsarina Elizabeth apparently used it as a meditation space. One of her
successors, Catherine the Great preferred to use it for meetings, while another member
of the Romanov dynasty, Alexander II, stored trophies in it made of (what else), amber,
which can only have added to its magnificence. At some point, it acquired the nickname the
eighth wonder of the world, apparently given to it by a British Ambassador according to
an article in The Times newspaper from 1988, though I haven’t seen that detail confirmed
in a primary source. The Room required constant care. Amber is sensitive to changes in temperature
and Catherine Palace, in the days before heating and air conditioning, could be freezing in
the winter and very warm in the summer. The changes affected the amber, changing its colour
and making it ever more brittle. There were multiple restorations during the nineteenth
century and another in 1935 when parts of the amber began to fall off the wall and had
to be glued back on. With help from all of these curators and restorers, the Room remained
intact in the Palace for nearly two hundred years, surviving even the Russian Revolution
of 1917, then came World War II.
On 22 June 1941, on Hitler’s orders, Operation Barbarossa began. This was the German invasion
of Russia by over 3 million troops and as it would turn out, it spelt disaster for the
Amber Room. By the middle of September German forces had reached St Petersburg, then known
as Leningrad, which they proceeded to besiege. They had always reached the former Tsarskoye
Selo, by then known as Pushkin. There were frantic attempts to evacuate the Amber Room
to safety and its movable contents, such as furniture and ornaments were taken out, but
when the curatorial staff at the Catherine Palace, tried to get the amber panels off
the wall, the amber began to crumble. In desperation, they covered it with gauze, cotton wool and
wallpaper, hoping to evade the Nazis in that way, but it didn't work. German soldiers came
in, quickly found the room and took it apart in just a day and a half. It was packed into
27 crates and dispatched to the Prussian Fine Arts Museum in Königsberg Castle. This process
of rapid dismantlement caused some damage to the room and when it arrived in Königsberg,
pieces of it were missing (more on that in a minute), but the Germans had teams of professional
art curators and restorers and the fact that the Room was still in pretty good condition
upon removal from Russia, indicates that it was treated carefully.
The Amber Room was installed in the Castle under the care of the Museum’s director,
Dr. Alfred Rhode who had something of an obsession with it. In a 1942 article in the journal
Pantheon, he wrote that: ‘The Amber Room has literally and figuratively returned to
its Motherland, the territory of Great Germany. There is no doubt that this great masterpiece
will never return to Russia for that would be tantamount to one thing-the ruination of
everything we call Great Germany.’ This claim that the Amber Room was German is dubious
to say the least. It had been constructed during a time period when the Germany of the
1940s didn’t yet exist as a nation, made for a King of Prussia, and his son had willingly
given it away to Peter the Great. The Romanov royal family had then made significant alterations
and additions to it over the ensuing centuries. At the very least, the Room as it stood in
1942 was a hybrid creation and certainly it legally belonged to Russia. Saying it was
German, would be like the French turning around today and saying that the Statue of Liberty
belongs to them, because it was largely financed and built by the French, and given as a gift
to the US. I can’t imagine that would go down too well with the Americans!
The Room remained on display in Königsberg Castle until at least 1943. The following
August, Allied air raids began on the city, which destroyed much of the Castle, though
basement areas survived. On 2 September 1944, Rhode reported that ‘the Amber Room was
undamaged except for six plates of the plinth.’ It may have already been dismantled and packed
up by this stage, or else quickly packed up at that point. The sources I’ve looked at
give conflicting information on this issue, but I tend to think, given the damage the
Castle sustained in the air raids, that it was already off the walls and in crates by
then. We aren’t sure what happened next either as there is further disagreement as
to whether the Room remained crated up in the Castle, or was removed from it. The German
solider in charge of Königsberg at the time and who might well have known what had happened
to the Room, was Erich Koch. However he abandoned his post in January 1945 as the Red Army approached
and was later captured in Hamburg in 1949 by the British. We’ll return to him in a
moment. By the time the Russians occupied what was left of the Castle in April 1945
(having also shelled it first, destroying it even further), all traces of the Amber
Room were gone and ALMOST nothing of it has been found by investigators since. Again,
we’ll come back to this point in a minute.
Rhode and his wife remained in Königsberg and were interrogated by the Soviets who wanted
to know what had happened to the Room. Soon however, both died under mysterious circumstances
and right before they were due to be questioned again about the Room. Officially, they had
suddenly expired overnight from typhus, which was then rampant in the city, however their
bodies and the doctor who signed the death certificates couldn’t be traced.
Decades passed and it seemed that nothing of the Amber Room would ever be seen again.
Erich Koch was handed over to the Poles, convicted of war crimes and eventually died in a Polish
prison in 1986 aged 90, without ever having revealed anything about the Room’s fate.
Then, in 1997 German investigators got wind of someone trying to sell a piece of the Amber
Room. After raiding the offices of the seller’s lawyer, they found, in Bremen, one of the
Florian mosaic panels mentioned earlier, this one depicting the senses of smell and touch.
The seller was the son of a deceased soldier and claimed not to know where his father had
acquired the piece. Soon afterwards a wooden chest of drawers which had sat in the Room
was also discovered in Germany. Both appear to have been stolen at the time the room was
being packed or shipped from Catherine’s Palace to Königsberg as they are missing
from photos of the room taken while it was in the Castle. They were ultimately returned
to Russia in April 2000 in a kind of prisoner exchange for art, as at the same time Russia
returned numerous paintings to Germany which had been taken by the Soviets during World
War II.
There are many theories as to what became of the Amber Room. One story which does the
rounds is that a woman named Liesel Amm, who knew Alfred Rhode, was taken into the Castle
basement with him the day after air-raids on 30 August 1944 and shown ‘a charred, honey-coloured
mass’ which she said he told her was the remains of the Amber Room. This has been discounted
as true though, as the fire would have burned so hot that the amber (which melts at 300
degrees Celsius) would have been reduced to ash. It also would have produced an overwhelming
smell like burning incense which Liesel Amm and others in the city couldn’t have failed
to notice or remember. Furthermore, it contradicts Rhode’s own statement on 2 September that
the room remained virtually intact.
Another idea is that it was placed on a ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff which was one of many
boats being used to evacuate German soldiers and civilians across the Baltic Sea as Russia’s
Red Army approached in January 1945. This ship was torpedoed and sunk in the Baltic
on 30 January with a loss of over 9000 lives and perhaps, say some, the Amber Room too.
The wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff has been extensively dived in the decades since it
sank however and no trace of the room has been found. In fact, it was attracting so
much attention that in 2006 it was made illegal to dive within 500m of it, as it's designated
as a war grave.
Some think the Room may still be buried somewhere under Königsberg, in an abandoned and now
lost tunnel or basement, once accessible from the Castle. Others believe that it made it
out of the building and is hidden somewhere beneath the German city of Weimar. In 1991
the former President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, announced that he knew the Room was buried
in East Germany, but despite searches, nothing was found. In the later 1990s there were also
investigations made of a lagoon near the town of Neringa in Lithuania where SS officers
were supposedly seen burying wooden crates near the end of the War (at a time when the
water levels were lower) and a silver mine 100km south of Berlin, where former SS officers
claimed it had been interred was also searched. Nothing was found in either of these locations however, or indeed
anywhere else that has been checked.
The simplest and to my mind, most likely explanation is that the crates containing the amber panels
and other objects, were destroyed either during the Allied bombing, Soviet shelling or resulting
fires at Königsberg Castle in 1944 or 1945. This was the conclusion reached by a Soviet
investigator sent into the city just after the War and by modern investigators Adrian
Levy and Cathy Scott Clark, whose book on the Room’s fate I’ll leave linked in the
description box. They had access to declassified KGB and Stasi records which suggested that
the Soviets inadvertently destroyed the Room in 1945 in the process of seizing the remains
of the Castle. There are issues with these theories though. As I mentioned, if it burned
the smell would have been intense and would likely have drifted over the whole city, so
that surely there would be accounts of it from those who were present at the time. If
it was blown to smithereens, we might expect to have stories of shards of amber being found
in the Castle ruins, but we don’t. Of course this information could have been suppressed
and no further checks can be made of the Castle’s remains as Königsberg became the Russian
city of Kaliningrad after the War and the shell of the Castle was blown up by the Soviets
in 1968. I therefore live in hope that I’ll be proved wrong in my suspicion that the Room
was destroyed and that one day it will show up. If it is still out there, estimates of
its modern financial worth run into hundreds of millions of US dollars. We have to consider
what condition it might be in by now however, having been dismantled and put back together
o many times and kept in who knows what kind of conditions since the 1940s. Even if it
wasn’t destroyed in Königsberg, it may have disintegrated in the decades since.
Fortunately, though we may never see the real Amber Room again, we can still get a great
idea of what it was like to see it in situ in Russia. In 2003 a reconstructed Amber Room
(which you’ve seen pictures of during this video) was opened in Catherine Palace to mark
the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city of St Petersbourg. It had taken nearly
a quarter of a century to build, cost US$11 million and was partly funded by a German
gas company. As you can see from photographs, it is absolutely stunning and though not the
original, it’s likely just as beautiful to look at.
But tell me, what do you think happened to the Amber Room. Let me know in the comments
below and if you enjoyed this video, please also give it a thumbs up and subscribe to
the channel with notifications switched on so you never miss an upload. If you love a
good historical mystery, I have a playlist dedicated to them which you might want to
check out next. It includes videos on the mysterious skeleton lake in the Indian Himalayas,
the Dancing Plagues which afflicted early modern Europe and the story of an Irish countess
who supposedly lived to be 140 years old. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until
next time, keep learning.