What Happened to the Amber Room?

Rooms have a tendency to stay where you put them. Even if you change around the layout of a building, the location of the rooms is still going to be inside the main walls. So how is it possible for a room to go missing? And not just any old room, a room loaded with amber, jewels and gold leaf. A ton of mysteries have resulted from the Second World War, but one of the most enduring is “what happened to the Amber Room?”

Until recently, many people had never heard of this and were perplexed as to how a room could go missing, assuming it must be referring to something else. But no, it was an actual room, and it got moved around more than once in its lifetime—which is kind of weird when you think about it. This story contains Nazis, conspiracies, and a possible giant oopsie.

The History of the Mystery

Way back in 1701, German sculptor and architect Andreas Schlüter decided to really push the boat out and designed a set of enormous panels made of amber to decorate the walls of one of the rooms in Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace. This area was part of Prussia at the time and under the rule of King Frederick the First.

As many know from Jurassic Park, amber is fossilized tree sap or resin. It’s also been used in folk medicine and jewellery-making since forever and has always been highly regarded as a decorative substance. While there were large deposits of amber in the Baltic region, it had never been used to make giant panels before, or used for large-scale projects at all.

It took amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram and later on two further so-called “amber masters” several years to fully construct the panels. During this process they had to create a new way of working with the amber, which eventually involved heating it before treating it with a honey and linseed infusion. The amber was then poured over wooden panels that were covered in gold leaf so it glowed with a golden light when the room was lit with candles.

Amber in over 350 different shades was also cut into intricate patterns and mosaics to further display the craftsmanship of the amber masters. Mirrored panels, decorative precious jewels, and the usual design elements like golden cherubs and ornate decorative details added to the spectacle and value of the room, leading it to be known as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Yes, lots of other things have also been given this unofficial title, but it’s still a pretty big feather in the cap.

It took about ten years to complete the panels and then, perhaps foreshadowing the uncertainty of the room’s location in the future, it wasn’t installed in Charlottenburg Palace as originally intended. It was instead set up inside the Berlin Palace, previously known as the “Royal Palace.”

After Frederick’s death, his son Frederick William (or Friedrich Wilhelm) took over as king of Prussia and in 1716 had the Russian Tsar Peter the Great over for a visit. Peter was reportedly so impressed by the amber room that Friedrich Wilhelm offered it to him as a gift—for strengthening alliance reasons and perhaps getting some soldiers and support.

Despite Peter’s initial reluctance, given the enormous value of the room (estimated at around 100 million dollars in modern terms), Friedrich Wilhelm insisted. The whole room was dismantled, put into large boxes, and moved near the new city Peter the Great had just founded: St. Petersburg. Once there, the Amber Room was taken to Catherine Palace, a summer residence of the Tsar.

As it turned out, though, Peter the Great went off the panels after they arrived, thinking they were a bit gaudy, and never actually did anything with them. His daughter eventually got her hands on them, and it wasn’t until 1740 that she had them installed in a new room in the palace so the setting sun would hit the amber and make it look as amazing as possible.

The panels weren’t big enough to cover this much larger room, so they were actually expanded upon, eventually covering an area of 55 square metres (590 square feet) and containing over 6 tonnes (13,000 pounds) of amber. The rest of the room was filled with more mirrors, extra tile, paintings, and a fancy floor and ceiling.

While no exact monetary value can be put on the newly upgraded Amber Room, estimates have ranged from 140 million dollars to 500 million dollars. In 2007, the Smithsonian said that the room was worth the modern-day equivalent of 142 million dollars when it was in situ in Catherine Palace. Even adjusting for inflation from 2007, that rises to over 190 million dollars in 2021 money.

The Amber Room was now a feature of Catherine Palace and there it stayed, as rooms are supposed to, being admired and revered, all the way from 1740 into the twentieth century—1941, in fact.

The Disappearance

That date, of course, places us right in the middle of the Second World War. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa to invade the Soviet Union, the Soviets thought it prudent to hide all the treasures they could to stop them being destroyed or stolen by the Nazis. The Amber Room definitely counted as a treasure, possibly the most valuable treasure around, but it was hard to work out what to do with it, as it was a couple of centuries old by this point and getting fragile.

Anatoly Kuchumov, an art curator, was tasked with saving the Amber Room, but as the German army approached, all attempts to remove the panels resulted in bits breaking off. In a panicked dither, Kuchumov and his team ended up leaving the panels where they were and just trying to disguise them behind bits of wallpaper and hastily constructed thin cotton hangings.

Unsurprisingly, this failed to disguise the Amber Room adequately. When the Germans made it to the palace, they seemed to have no such trouble with the panels and promptly removed them, boxed them up, and sent them back to what was then called Königsberg, which was controlled by Germany.

The Germans saw this as a total win—a repatriation of the room to its original home—and it was eventually put back up again, this time inside the Königsberg Castle Museum where members of the public could go and see it in all its glory for the next couple of years.

Eventually, in 1944, due to the tide now turning in the Allies’ favour, Hitler ordered the panels to be taken down once more and they were again put into crates and taken to the basement cellars for safe-keeping. And that’s really the last time anyone knew for sure where the Amber Room was. The castle was bombed later in 1944, and Königsberg became part of the Soviet Union in 1946 and was renamed Kaliningrad.

Since then, a few tantalizing clues have cropped up over the fate of the Amber Room, but its overall whereabouts are still unknown.

Decoding the Unknown

Because of its historical and monetary value, there have been many parties interested in finding out what happened to the Amber Room. There are several theories as to its possible location.

Theory 1: It’s in a Bunker in Poland

We know that the Nazis loved looting. When the Allies came calling towards the end of the war, a lot of the Nazis’ ill-gotten gains were hidden again and spirited away to secret bunkers, mines, and even caves—many probably still undiscovered to this day. There are eyewitnesses stating that they saw the large boxes containing the amber panels standing outside the castle ready for transport in 1944.

As recently as 2016, a Polish historian and museum curator called Bartlomiej Plebanczyk thought he had finally found the resting place of the priceless panels. Locals near the town of Mamerki in Poland had reported seeing trucks unloading large boxes around the end of the war in 1945, and Plebanczyk headed over there in 2016. Scanning a known former German bunker with ground-penetrating radar, he found a hidden tunnel or possibly another bunker under the ground, and after digging for a bit, he and his team found a metal hatch. They were confident that it hadn’t been opened since the war as there was a tree growing over it.

When they finally opened the hatch, there wasn’t really anything inside, but further excavations have confirmed that there’s a whole network of underground tunnels down there. The bunker is also only about 13 miles (21 km) away from Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s old military HQ. Maybe this whole bunker was a secret escape route to or from the HQ, or just some sort of nearby storage facility. If so, it’s very plausible that there might also be quite a lot of loot hidden down there.

So far, five entrances have been found to this underground network, but a lot more excavation still needs to be done as many of the passageways have been filled in. Plebanczyk was apparently still waiting on official approval to get going. While there were references to this project with 2021 dates, most of the action appears to have happened in 2016, so it’s not clear how much progress has been made.

There have been many other bunkers, caves, swamps, mineshafts, and holes in and near Germany that have been touted as the resting place for the Amber Room over the years, with similar supposed eyewitness accounts. And there are also some completely different locations proposed for the Amber Room.

Theory 2: It’s at the Bottom of the Sea

There are eyewitness accounts that the Amber Room was boxed up and put aboard a German ship of some sort. Here’s where we know at least one person is completely wrong, as there have been at least two ships named in the stories, and mentions of submarines also pop up here and there.

The first boat mentioned was a transport ship called the Wilhelm Gustloff. Originally built as a cruise ship, it was turned into a military transport ship for the war effort, and on January 30, 1945, it was sunk by Soviet submarine torpedoes. This was when it was carrying out evacuations under the large-scale sea operation, Operation Hannibal, and it’s been estimated that over 10,000 people were on board, along with a lot of cargo. Over 9,000 people died in the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, making it the biggest maritime disaster of all time. It was rumoured that the Amber Room panels had also been aboard, but many dives have been taken to the wreckage site since and nothing like that has ever been found.

Another boat that was named as a possible transporter of the panels was the Karlsruhe, a German steamer which was also being used in Operation Hannibal for the evacuation of German personnel from East Prussia. It left from Königsberg, the last confirmed location of the Amber Room, and was accompanied by two minesweeper ships, perhaps indicating that there was something of great value on board.

We know that the Karlsruhe was packed with cargo including military vehicles and other artwork, weighing over 360 tons in total. This ship was hit by Soviet missiles from the air and sank somewhere off the coast of Poland to lie undisturbed on the bottom of the Baltic Sea for the next several decades. The wreck wasn’t even discovered until 2020, and because of all the storage containers that had survived intact, hopes were high that the Amber Room might be found amongst them.

An initial survey carried out by the Baltictech diving group confirmed the presence of some “non-military crates” and locked storage boxes, and cameras also showed the hold to be largely intact. Unfortunately, though, in September 2021, divers confirmed that while they had found military equipment and lots of personal possessions, the Amber Room panels were definitely not on the Karlsruhe.

Theory 3: It was Destroyed

Let’s apply Occam’s razor here. We know that the Amber Room was on display in Königsberg Castle until 1944. We also know that Königsberg Castle was bombed in 1944 and caught fire. It was later completely demolished in 1968. The question is: were the Amber Room panels removed, stored, and moved in time to escape from the bombing?

While there are eyewitnesses saying they saw the crates being loaded and carted off to wherever, there are many different versions of this story mentioning many different modes of transport, and there were probably also many other precious things being moved out of the city at the same time.

The Soviets sent Professor Alexander Brusov into Königsberg to try and recover the big-ticket loot. He, however, quickly came to the conclusion that as a consequence of the Soviets bombing the castle and the fires it caused, the Amber Room had, in fact, been almost totally destroyed. Checking out the burnt-out cellar of the castle, Brusov apparently found the remains of three out of four stone mosaics known to be from the room, along with hinges and other metal fittings.

Does this mean that the amber panels themselves were indeed smuggled out? Probably not. At high temperatures, amber doesn’t really melt but actually decomposes and disintegrates, so it’s possible that it wouldn’t leave much of an obvious trace in a cellar that was full of other ashes and rubble. This has been the accepted consensus for several different parties looking into the mystery.

Brusov only found three out of the four mosaics because one had been stolen at some point during the room’s many removals by a German soldier. It and a cabinet also confirmed as having been part of the room were eventually repatriated to Russia in the year 2000. While the appearance of these pieces has convinced some that the Amber Room still exists somewhere, it seems more likely that they are the only remaining pieces, as they were stolen before the castle was destroyed.

Remember Anatoly Kuchumov, he of the panicked dithering and inadequate wallpaper camouflage? Perhaps because it was his fault that the Germans had found the room in the first place, he stuck to his guns that it was still around somewhere. He refused to accept Brusov’s conclusions and launched his own investigation with the help of the KGB. Searches were carried out all around the city, but as we know, nothing was found.

Kuchumov ended up leading a commission to search for the Amber Room between 1967 and 1984. However, it seems likely that he was just desperately trying to keep himself out of prison, or worse. While there was still hope that the Amber Room might have been secreted away down a mineshaft or in a cave somewhere, he could keep the blame off himself for having let it fall into enemy hands in the first place. Apparently other people tasked with protecting Soviet treasures had been sent to the gulags for failing, so it’s hardly surprising that he’d want to drag out the possibility of finding it again for as long as he could.

Those in power weren’t really convinced, though, and perhaps because they were embarrassed that they accidentally destroyed their own priceless historical artwork, Brezhnev had the castle demolished in 1968, preventing any further searches for potential traces to be carried out.

A book published in 2004 called The Amber Room: The Fate of the World’s Greatest Lost Treasure by investigative journalists Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy also concluded that Brusov was probably right and the KGB had covered up the mistake by publicly carrying out extensive searches for the lost room as a front, even though they knew there was nothing left to find.

There is, in fact, an Amber Room in Russia right now. Thanks to black and white photos, one coloured picture, and a big donation from a German energy company, a new Amber Room was commissioned in 1979. Because of the lack of amber masters around, this one took a quarter of a century to be finished and installed back in the Catherine Palace, but it’s now there in all its glowing glory. This seems to indicate that the Russians have given it up for lost after all, as why would you bother going to all that time and expense to recreate something that could still be in an underground bunker somewhere?

The Search Continues

Of course, the probable theory that it was destroyed hasn’t stopped people carrying on the search for the lost panels. There have even been television programmes about it. You might not want to look too hard for the original Amber Room, though, as there have been a couple of nasty incidents over the years.

German farmer Georg Stein was one of the biggest Amber Room fanatics around—until he was found dead. Perhaps getting too close to the whereabouts of the Amber Room, he was apparently lured into the middle of a forest and killed. Stein really was obsessed with tracking down the Amber Room and had discovered other looted treasure that was subsequently given back to the then Soviet Union. He was even the first Western European to be awarded the Order of Vladimir from the Russian Orthodox Church for his troubles, so he really seemed to know what he was doing.

Some sources say he died by suicide after incurring huge debts due to his treasure-hunting obsession, but he was found naked in the middle of a forest a couple of hundred miles from his home, with his stomach flayed open by a scalpel.

And what about General Yuri Gusev? He was the deputy head of the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence unit, until 1992 when he was apparently outed as a source for a journalist investigating the Amber Room. He then died in a mysterious car accident, with news site Svobodnaya Pressa writing that his colleagues were sure it was murder. It said: “Spies of that rank are well protected. As a rule, they don’t die by chance.”

There’s one more mysterious disappearance involving the Amber Room. Alfred Rohde was the museum director who got the Amber Room set up in Königsberg Castle. He was apparently obsessed with it and would stare at the amber for hours. He definitely did have the panels all packed by March 1944 but never gave any real indication of what happened to them after that.

Was he saving them from the Soviets, believing as many did that they rightfully belonged in their Prussian home? Or did he just have nothing to give as they’d all been destroyed?

Rohde’s son had seen him in January 1944, and his father had told him the Amber Room had been moved to a safe place. Rohde wrote a letter to his superior in September 1944 saying that the majority of the room had survived. When he told his son the room was in a safe place, he may just have meant the castle cellars, as we’re pretty sure it was still there a couple of months later in March 1944.

Rohde was questioned by the KGB but gave a couple of different versions as to where he had stored the panels. When he was next due for questioning, he and his wife conveniently died the night before of the typhus epidemic that was sweeping the area. When the KGB went to look for the bodies, they had disappeared. There was also no trace of the doctor who had signed their official death certificates.

Conclusion

As with most “missing things” mysteries, it would be amazing if the original Amber Room panels did turn up one day. It would be naive to say with 100% certainty that it was destroyed and just burned away to nothing, but that may well be wishful thinking.

Now that the last known Amber Room site has been demolished, no definitive explorations can be carried out anymore, leaving treasure-hunters and mystery buffs with just the tiniest hope that maybe, just maybe, the Amber Room is still out there somewhere, waiting to dazzle the world again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Amber Room?

The Amber Room is a room decorated with amber panels, jewels, and gold leaf. It was originally designed by German sculptor and architect Andreas Schlüter and was considered the 8th Wonder of the World.

Where was the Amber Room originally located?

The Amber Room was originally designed for Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace but was later installed in the Berlin Palace, previously known as the Royal Palace.

How did the Amber Room end up in Russia?

In 1716, King Frederick William of Prussia gifted the Amber Room to Russian Tsar Peter the Great to strengthen their alliance. It was later installed in Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg.

What happened to the Amber Room during World War II?

During World War II, the Amber Room was dismantled and moved to Königsberg Castle in Germany by the Nazis. It was later put into crates and stored in the castle’s basement cellars, but its whereabouts remain unknown after the castle was bombed in 1944.

What are some theories about the Amber Room’s current location?

There are several theories about the Amber Room’s location, including that it is in a bunker in Poland, at the bottom of the sea, or that it was destroyed during the bombing of Königsberg Castle.

What is the value of the Amber Room?

The value of the Amber Room is estimated to be between $140 million and $500 million. In 2007, the Smithsonian estimated its value at $142 million, which would be over $190 million in 2021 dollars.

Has a new Amber Room been created?

Yes, a new Amber Room was commissioned in 1979 and completed in 1997. It is now installed in Catherine Palace in Russia.

What happened to Anatoly Kuchumov, the art curator tasked with saving the Amber Room?

Anatoly Kuchumov refused to accept that the Amber Room was destroyed and led a commission to search for it between 1967 and 1984. It is suggested that he was trying to avoid blame for letting the room fall into enemy hands.

What happened to Alfred Rohde, the museum director who set up the Amber Room in Königsberg Castle?

Alfred Rohde and his wife reportedly died of typhus in 1944, but their bodies and the doctor who signed their death certificates disappeared, adding to the mystery surrounding the Amber Room.

What is the significance of the Amber Room?

The Amber Room is significant for its historical value, craftsmanship, and the mystery surrounding its disappearance. It was considered one of the greatest lost treasures of the world.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: What Happened to the Amber Room?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.