Amber Room - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

… and if not, where is it?

Published: 15 February 2023 ~ Is the Königsberg Amber Room still in Kaliningrad?

Last seen in Königsberg Castle before the end of the war, ever since the Amber Room went missing ~ missing presumed dead by some, missing presumed purloined by others ~ historians and treasure hunters alike have turned the search for the Amber Room into a latter day Holy Grail that has kept them guessing and occupied for more than three-quarters of a century.

We don’t all love mysteries, but we sure do like to solve them, and so it is with the Amber Room, which disappeared from Königsberg Castle in the final months of World War II. The search for what was once described as the Eighth Wonder of the World has become an historians’ and treasure hunters’ Holy Grail. Numerous theories abound regarding the room’s vanishing act and its whereabouts today.

Recently, my wife Olga attended a lecture delivered by one of these Argonauts, a man who has spent considerable time and energy researching the history of the Amber Room and most of his ambition engaged in a quest to locate it.

Unlike a good many historians, the gentleman in question does not hold with the popular conviction that the Amber Room was destroyed either as a result of the RAF’s bombing raids or by the artillery fire of the advancing Soviet army. Neither does he hold with the myriad theories that would have the room plundered and shipped elsewhere. In his opinion the Amber Room that was, is the Amber Room that very much is. Furthermore, he believes not only is it alive and kicking but kicking about in Kaliningrad.

Is the Königsberg Amber Room still in Kaliningrad?

For those of you unacquainted with the story of the Amber Room, it goes like this:

The Amber Room was a chamber richly decorated with ornate amber panels, elaborately highlighted with gold leaf, complemented by magnificent baroque-framed mirrors and illuminated with flickering candles. Those who had the privilege of beholding it in person were overwhelmed by its singular beauty.

Amber Baltic Coast Kaliningrad from an exhibition in the old Königsberg Stock Exchange

Amber: What it is and why is it so precious?

In order to protect themselves from parasites, harmful insects and to act as a restorative for external damage, trees produce a protective resin. This substance exuded through the bark of the tree, eventually hardens, forming a seal, against which the gnawing activities of harmful insects are rendered inoperable.

Extinct, fossilised tree trunks from primordial forests produce fossilised resin, and this is the substance we now call Amber. The Kaliningrad region on the Baltic Coast contains the world’s largest amber reserves; more than 90 per cent of the world’s amber is located in this region.

Amber has been appreciated for its natural beauty and colour for thousands of years. Its tactile quality and variation in hues from light yellow, dark brown, green, blue and white, the latter referred to as milk amber, make it the perfect gemstone for jewellery and for use in the creation of a wide variety of decorative and functional objects including framed art, vases, paperweights, plaques, pens and elaborate clocks.

Naturally sticky, in its mobile state amber resin would sometimes entrap plant life as well as small insects. Known as inclusions, amber containing organic matter from times of antiquity often command higher prices than pieces that are clean.

The three photographs above are from the 2020 exhibition, Rhythms of Kaliningrad.

The Amber Room was designed and crafted by the German sculptor Andreas Schlüter and the Danish amber artisan Gottfried Wolfram in the early years of the 18^th century and completed from 1707 by Gottfried Turau and Ernst Schacht from Danzig (now Gdańsk).

Originally part of the Berlin City Palace, in 1716 the Amber Room, then considered the Eighth Wonder of the World, was gifted by the Prussian King Frederick William I to Peter the Great of the Russian Empire. It was reassembled, renovated and expanded in the summer residence of the Russian tsars, the Catherine Palace, a grand Rococo edifice approximately 30km south of St Petersburg. By the time the room was completed, it is said to have contained over six tonnes of the precious resin, amber.

Amber Room is it still in Kaliningrad? — **Hand-coloured photograph of the original Amber Room, 1932**

Following the invasion of Soviet Russia in WWII, the Amber Room was swifty removed by the Germans, taken to Prussian Königsberg and reconstructed in Königsberg Castle. In early 1944, as Königsberg braced itself for the inevitable Allied onslaught, it is alleged that the Amber Room was dismantled and its components stashed away in the castle basement.

In August 1944, Königsberg came under heavy bombardment by the Royal Air Force (RAF). A large percentage of the munitions used were incendiary by nature and in the conflagration that followed the city was all but consumed.

Extensive damage was further inflicted by Red Army artillery fire in the days and hours immediately preceding Königsberg’s capitulation on 9^th April 1945.

Photographs and ciné films taken shortly after the Soviet victory document the extent of Königsberg’s destruction. Both city and castle were gutted, and the Amber Room was never found.

Whilst the simplest and most credible explanation for the disappearance of the celebrated room is that like the rest of the castle and most of the city it had gone up in smoke, absence of hard evidence to nail this theory firmly to fact sparked a plethora of alternatives whose versions of the room’s fate live on to this day. So far, however, none of these would-be explanations have come up with the goods, and thus the Eighth Wonder of the World is currently having to bide its time as one of the world’s enduring mysteries.

It is well to remember, however, that mysteries rarely live alone; they tend to cohabitate in tormented sin, in a hotbed of rampant reveries, many of which over time turn radical or romantic. And the Amber Room is no exception.

Of course, there are conspiracy theories. It is far more palatable to indulge the notion of the Amber Room spirited away, living the life of privileged ease in some Oligarch’s chateau or other, than to accept the unthinkable thought that this irreplaceable work of art has been indifferently obliterated. Nevertheless, the official position seems to endorse this postulate.

This is because once Königsberg had fallen, Soviet soldiers were dispatched post-haste to investigate the castle ruins for the presence of the Amber Room. It is a matter of public record that their report concluded ‘Amber Room not found’, from which intelligence it was inferred that the Amber Room had perished.

However, drawing a line under the mystery with no hard evidence to back it up was and continues to be a red flag to more bullish minds, which persist in bringing into the field of debate alternative theories, speculation and hope.

For example, eyewitness reports place the missing room’s whereabouts in at least two underwater locations: one, that it went down with the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship sunk by a Soviet submarine on 30 January 1945; two, that it lies in part at the bottom of the sea, put there by Soviet aircraft when they attacked and destroyed the SS Karlsruhe, a German evacuation ship that sailed from Königsberg in 1945.

Such theories, which provide the basis for the ongoing search, gained particular impetus from the 1997 discovery of one of a series of four stone mosaics, ‘Feel and Touch’, which, once an integral part of the Amber Room, turned up in the family home of a former German soldier, who claimed that he acquired the mosaic whilst helping to pack the dismantled room in crates for transportation. As far as I am aware, however, he did not recall, or did not name, the final destination for which those crates were bound.

A year later, two unrelated teams, one German and the other Lithuanian, stated publicly that they had found the Amber Room. The German team alleged that it was secreted in a silver mine; the Lithuanian team that it was immersed within a lagoon; neither were correct.

Although a detailed assessment of the evidence such as it was, as undertaken in 2004 by two British journalists, concluded that the Amber Room may not have survived the combined devastation of the 1944 air raids and subsequent shelling by Soviet artillery, which was also the official Soviet line, not everyone is convinced.

Amber Room last seen in Konigsberg — **The Amber Room in the Catherine Palace, 1917**

One of the most enticing theories, by virtue of its ongoing nature, is that the Amber Room never left Kaliningrad. This theory postulates that it is either squirreled away in one of the many tunnels that are alleged to form a labyrinth beneath the Royal Castle or is safe and secure in secret rooms beneath the bunker of Otto Lasch, the general who was tasked with the unenviable responsibility of commanding the defence of Königsberg in 1945.

Otto Lasch’s command bunker survives to this day. Known simply as the Museum Bunker, it is situated at the front of the Kaliningrad State University, a few minutes’ walk from Victory Square and likewise from Königsberg Cathedral.

From what I can gather, the theory that the last resting place of the Amber Room is but a short distance away from the place where it was last displayed, namely Königsberg Castle, is not new. It has been in circulation for years.

Indeed, in a news report published on 5 December 2022*, it was made public that surveys of the bunker of the last commandant of Königsberg, Otto Lasch, had been resumed ~ resumed meaning that the latest investigations were a continuation of those last undertaken in autumn 2009.

The 2022 resumption, which was supervised by the head of the bunker museum, as well as local historian Sergei Trifonov, used echo radar in an attempt to penetrate the voids behind the walls and the ground beneath the bunker.

“Trifonov himself said that the researchers ‘found what they were looking for’, but the press service of the museum noted that the survey report is not yet ready and will be published in the near future.”*

We wait with bated breath.

I hear tell, but don’t quote me on this, that what they found was a considerable depth of concrete, so considerable that anything that might be concealed beneath it fell outside the range and spectrum of the electronic equipment used.

Apart from being a historic treasure, and one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring interior works of art that the world has ever known, the estimated value of the Amber Room in strictly material terms was quoted as $500 million in 2016. One presumes that in the past eight years its value has appreciated.

The decision to excavate the historic Königsberg bunker presumably rests on the presentation of sufficient credible evidence to justify the disruption and ultimately the cost of the amount of work involved. It is by no means an easy decsion to make. On the one hand, it might unearth a unique historical legacy immense in artistic and material value; on the other, a whole lot of concrete, half a dozen incumbent worms and the odd German helmet or two.

Until that decision is taken of one thing we can be sure, the search for the Amber Room goes on.