The Amber Room, lost in Königsberg

In September 1941 German troops reached Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial estate outside Leningrad, now called Pushkin. In the Catherine Palace stood the Amber Room, a hall lined with amber panels. Curators could not take it down, because the amber was brittle, so they hid it behind cloth. The soldiers saw through the disguise. A small party removed the room in about 36 hours. Gems & Gemology reports 27 crates.

Andreas Schlüter designed the room in 1701 for Frederick I of Prussia. It held about six tonnes of amber, mirror pilasters and four Florentine stone mosaics. In 1716 Frederick William I of Prussia gave the unfinished panels to Peter the Great of Russia. The room was finished in the Catherine Palace about 1770. It was called the eighth wonder of the world.

The crates went by rail to Königsberg in October 1941. Alfred Rohde, director of the castle museums there and a specialist in amber, had the room put up in the castle. The room stayed on show for about two years. The sources disagree on when and why it came down: March 1944 after a fire (The Art Newspaper), or late 1943 or later against air raids (Gems & Gemology).

RAF raids on 26 to 27 and 29 to 30 August 1944 burned the castle. On 2 September Rohde wrote to a superior in Berlin that the room had survived “apart from six dado panels”, The Art Newspaper reports. Gems & Gemology gives a letter of 12 January 1945 as the last record: Rohde wrote that the panels were being crated for Saxony. The Art Newspaper says no one saw the room after March 1944. The last firm trace is therefore a letter, not a sighting. Atlas Obscura reports that he died in Königsberg in 1945. The Red Army took the city in April 1945, and no trace of the room has been found.

No theory about what happened is confirmed. Most historians, Gems & Gemology says, think the room burned in the 1944 raids or the 1945 battle. A Soviet art historian concluded in 1945 that it burned, probably in a fire set by Soviet soldiers. The curator Anatoly Kuchumov led a new search in 1946 and reported that the Germans had moved the room to an unknown place. The Guardian reported in 2004 on a study that found a 1946 account saying the hall burned after Red Army gunners took the castle. It said Kuchumov left the account out of his report. Others think the room left Königsberg before the siege, or lies hidden near the castle, because no burnt amber was found, the BBC reports.

Parts did surface. On 13 May 1997 German police in Bremen recovered a Florentine mosaic from the room, offered for $2.5 million. Der Spiegel traced it to an officer who took it in 1941. Manhard Kaiser, the Bremen lawyer who offered it for sale, was convicted of aiding attempted fraud, Der Spiegel reported in April 2000. He received two years, suspended, and a fine, and he appealed. The sources do not give the outcome. A chest of drawers with Cyrillic palace inventory marks also surfaced, in Berlin. On 29 April 2000 Germany returned the mosaic and the chest to the Catherine Palace.

Russia decided in 1979 to rebuild the room, working from 86 black-and-white photographs and some amber fragments. Vladimir Putin and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, opened the new room on 31 May 2003. The original is still missing. The museum’s page of 31 May 2023 says it disappeared.