The Amber Room Page 0,26

more concerned with building the Russian Navy than with collecting art, simply stored them away. But, in gratitude, he reciprocated the gift with 248 soldiers, a lathe, and a wine cup he crafted himself. Included among the soldiers were fifty-five of his tallest guardsmen, this in recognition of the Prussian king's passion for tall warriors. Thirty years passed until Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, asked Rastrelli, her court architect, to display the panels in a study at the Winter Place in St. Petersburg. In 1755 Elizabeth ordered them carried to the summer palace in Tsarskoe Selo, thirty miles south of St. Petersburg, and installed in what came to be known as the Catherine Palace.

It was there that the Amber Room was perfected.

Over the next twenty years, forty-eight square meters of additional amber panels, most emblazoned with the Romanov crest and elaborate decorations, were added to the original thirty-six square meters, the additions necessary since the thirty-foot walls in the Catherine Palace towered over the original room the amber had graced. The Prussian king even contributed to the creation, sending another panel, this one with a bas-relief of the two-headed eagle of the Russian Tsars. Eighty-six square meters of amber were eventually crafted, the finished walls dotted with fanciful figurines, floral garlands, tulips, roses, seashells, monograms, and rocaille, all in glittering shades of brown, red, yellow, and orange. Rastrelli framed each panel in a cartouche of boiserie, Louis Quinze style, separating them vertically by pairs of narrow mirrored pilasters adorned with bronze candelabra, everything gilded to blend with the amber.

The centers of four panels were dotted with exquisite Florentine mosaics fashioned from polished jasper and agate and framed in gilded bronze. A ceiling mural was added, along with an intricate parquet floor of inlaid oak, maple, sandalwood, rosewood, walnut, and mahogany, itself as magnificent as the surrounding walls. Five Konigsberg masters labored until 1770, when the room was declared finished. Empress Elizabeth was so delighted that she routinely used the space to impress foreign ambassadors. It also served as akunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities for her and later Tsars, the place where royal treasures could be displayed. By 1765, seventy amber objects-chests, candlesticks, snuffboxes, saucers, knives, forks, crucifixes, and tabernacles-graced the room. In 1780, a corner table of encrusted amber was added. The last decoration came in 1913, an amber crown on a pillow, the piece purchased by Tsar Nicholas II.

Incredibly, the panels survived 170 years and the Bolshevik Revolution intact. Restorations were done in 1760, 1810, 1830, 1870, 1918, 1935, and 1938. An extensive restoration was planned in the 1940s, but on June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. By July 14, Hitler's army had taken Belarus, most of Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, reaching the Liga River less than a hundred miles from Leningrad. On September 17, Nazi troops took Tsarskoe Selo and the palaces in and around it, including the Catherine Palace, which had become a state museum under the Communists.

In the days before its capture, museum officials hastily shipped all the small objects

in the Amber Room to eastern Russia. But the panels themselves had proved impossible to remove. In an effort to conceal them, a layer of wallpaper was slapped over, but the disguise fooled no one. Hitler ordered Erich Koch, gauleiter of East Prussia, to return the Amber Room to Konigsberg, which, in Hitler's mind, was where it rightly belonged. Six men took thirty-six hours to dismantle the panels, and twenty tons of amber was meticulously packed in crates and shipped west by truck convoy and rail, eventually reinstalled in the Konigsberg castle, along with a vast collection of Prussian art. A 1942 German news article proclaimed the event a "return to its true home, the real place of origination and sole place of origination of the amber." Picture postcards were issued of the restored treasure. The exhibit became the most popular of all Nazi museum spectacles.

The first Allied bombardment of Konigsberg occurred in August 1944. Some of the mirrored pilasters and a few of the smaller amber panels were damaged. What happened after that was unclear. Sometime between January and April 1945, as the Soviet Army approached Konigsberg, Koch ordered the panels crated and hidden in the cellar of the Blutgericht restaurant. The last German document that mentioned the Amber Room was dated January 12, 1945, and noted that the panels were being packed for transport to Saxony. At some point Alfred Rohde, the Room's custodian, supervised the loading of crates onto a truck