The Amber Room Page 0,107

and encased her body there in an immense mausoleum. The whole place was gaudy and vulgar. A hundred thousand acres, stretching north to the Baltic Sea and east to Poland. Goring wanted to duplicate the Amber Room in her memory so he constructed an exact ten-by-ten-meter chamber ready to accept the panels."

"How do you know that?" Rachel asked.

"The CIRs contain interviews with Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, the department Hitler created to oversee the looting of Europe. Rosenberg talked repeatedly of Goring's obsession with the Amber Room."

McKoy then described the fierce competition between Goring and Hitler for art. Hitler's taste reflected Nazi philosophy. The farther east the origin of a work, the less valuable. "Hitler possessed no interest in Russian art. He considered the entire nation subhuman. But Hitler didn't regard the Amber Room as Russian. Frederick I, King of Prussia, had given the amber to Peter the Great. So the relic was German, and its return to German soil was considered culturally important.

"Hitler himself ordered the panels evacuated from Konigsberg in 1945. But Erich Koch, the Prussian provincial governor, was loyal to Goring. Now here's the rub. Josef Loring and Koch were connected. Koch desperately needed raw materials and efficient factories to deliver the quotas Berlin imposed on all provincial governors. Loring worked with the Nazis, opening family mines, foundries, and factories to the German war effort. Hedgin' his bets, though, Loring also worked with Soviet intelligence. This may explain why it was so easy for him to prosper under Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia after the war."

"How do you know all this?" Paul asked.

McKoy stepped over to a leather briefcase angled from the top of a survey table. He retrieved a sheaf of stapled papers and handed them to Paul. "Go to the fourth page. I marked the paragraphs. Read 'em."

Paul flipped the sheets and found the marked sections:

Interviews with several contemporaries of Koch and Josef Loring confirm the two met often. Loring was a major financial contributor to Koch and maintained the German governor in a lavish lifestyle. Did this relationship lead to information about, or perhaps the actual acquisition of the Amber Room? The answer is hard to say. If Loring possessed either knowledge of the panels or the panels themselves, the Soviets apparently knew nothing.

Quickly after the war, in May 1945, the Soviet government mounted a search for the amber panels. Alfred Rohde, the director of the Konigsberg art collections for Hitler, became the Soviets' initial information source. Rohde was passionately fond of amber, and he told Soviet investigators that crates with the panels were still in the Konigsberg palace when he left the building on April 5, 1945. Rohde showed investigators the burned-out room where he said the crates were stored. Bits of gilded wood and copper hinges (that were believed part of the original Amber Room doors) still remained. The conclusion of destruction became inescapable, and the matter was considered closed. Then, in March 1946, Anatoly Kuchumov, curator of the palaces at Pushkin, visited Konigsberg. There, in the same ruins, he found crumbled remains of the Florentine mosaics from the Amber Room. Kuchumov firmly believed that while other parts of the room may have burned, the amber did not, and he ordered a new search.

By then, Rohde was dead, he and his wife having died on the same day they were ordered to reappear for a new round of Soviet interrogations. Interestingly, the physician that signed the Rohdes' death certificate also disappeared the same day. At that point, the Soviet Ministry of State Security took over the investigation along with the Extraordinary State Commission, which continued to search until nearly 1960. Few have accepted the conclusion that the amber panels were lost at Konisgberg. Many experts question if the mosaics were actually destroyed. The Germans were very clever when necessary and, given the prize and personalities involved, anything is possible. In addition, given Josef Loring's intense postwar efforts in the Harz region, his passion for amber, and the unlimited amount of money and resources available to him, perhaps Loring did find the amber. Interviews with heirs of local residents confirm that Loring visited the Harz region often, searching the mines, all with the knowledge and approval of the Soviet government. One man even stated Loring was working on the assumption that the panels were trucked from Konigsberg west into Germany, their ultimate destination south to the Austrian mines or the Alps, but the trucks were diverted by the impending approach of the Soviet