The Amber Room Page 0,30

Art Reviewmagazine and found the part he remembered:

... Alfred Rohde, the man who supervised the evacuation of the Amber Room from Konigsberg, was quickly apprehended after the war and summoned before Soviet authorities. The so-called Extraordinary State Commission on Damage Done by the Fascist-German Invaders was looking for the Amber Room and wanted answers. But Rohde and his wife were found dead on the morning they were to appear for questioning. Dysentery was the official cause, plausible since epidemics were raging at the time from polluted water, but speculation abounded they had been killed in order to protect the location of the Amber Room.

On the same day, Dr. Paul Erdmann, the physician who signed the Rohdes' death certificates, disappeared.

Erich Koch, Hitler's personal representative in Prussia, was ultimately arrested and tried by the Poles for war crimes. Koch was sentenced to death in 1946, but his execution was continuously postponed at the request of Soviet authorities. It was widely believed that Koch was the only man left alive who knew the actual whereabouts of the crates that left

Konigsberg in 1945. Paradoxically, Koch's continued survival was dependent on his not revealing their location, since there was no reason to believe the Soviets would intervene in his behalf once they again possessed the Amber Room.

In 1965, Koch's lawyers finally obtained Soviet assurance that his life would be spared once the information was revealed. Koch then announced that the crates were walled into a bunker outside Konigsberg but claimed he was unable to remember the exact location as a result of Soviet rebuilding after the war. He went to his grave without revealing where the panels lay.

In the decades following, three West German journalists died mysteriously while searching for the Amber Room. One fell down the shaft of a disused salt mine in Austria, a place rumored to be a Nazi loot depository. Two others were killed by hit-and-run drivers. George Stein, a German researcher who long investigated the Amber Room, supposedly committed suicide. All these events fueled speculation of a curse associated with the Amber Room, making the search for the treasure even more intriguing.

He was upstairs in what was once Rachel's room. Now it was a study where he kept his books and papers. There was an antique writing desk, an oak filing cabinet, and a club chair where he liked to sit and read. Four walnut bookcases held novels, historical treatises, and classical literature.

He'd come upstairs after eating dinner, still thinking about Christian Knoll, and found more articles in one of the cabinets. They were all short, mainly fluff, containing no real information. The rest were still in the freezer. He needed to retrieve them, but didn't feel like climbing back up the stairs again afterward.

By and large the newspaper and magazine accounts on the Amber Room were contradictory. One would say the panels disappeared in January 1945, another April.

Did they leave in trucks, by rail, or on the sea? Different writers offered different perspectives. One account noted that the Soviets torpedoed theWilhelm Gustloffto the bottom of the Baltic with the panels, another mentioned bombing the ship from the air. One was sure that seventy-two crates left Konigsberg, the next noted twenty-six, another eighteen. Several accounts were sure the panels burned in Konigsberg during the bombing. Another tracked leads implying they made it surreptitiously across the Atlantic to America. It was difficult to extract anything useful, and no article ever mentioned the source of information. It could be double to triple hearsay. Or even worse, pure speculation.

Only one, an obscure publication,The Military Historian, noted the story of a train leaving occupied Russia sometime around May 1, 1945, with the crated Amber Room supposedly on board. Witness accounts vouched that the crates were offloaded in the tiny Czechoslovakian town of T´ynec-nad-Sázavou. There, they were supposedly trucked south and stored in an underground bunker that housed the headquarters of Field Marshal von Schorner, commander of the million-strong German army, still holding out in Czechoslovakia. But the article noted that an excavation of the bunker by the Soviets in 1989 found nothing.

Close to the truth, he thought. Real close.

Seven years ago, when he first read the article, he'd wondered about its source, even tried to contact the author, but was unsuccessful. Now a man named Wayland McKoy was burrowing into the Harz Mountains near Stod, Germany. Was he on the right track? The only thing clear was that people had died searching for the Amber Room. What happened to Alfred Rohde and Erich Koch