Amber Room
The Amber Room was looted during World War II by the Army Group North of Nazi Germany, and taken to Königsberg for reconstruction and display.
[6] The Amber Room was begun in 1701 with the purpose of being installed at Charlottenburg Palace, the residence of Frederick, the first King in Prussia, at the urging of his second wife, Sophia Charlotte.
[2][3] The original Berlin design of the Amber Room was reworked in Russia in a joint effort by German and Russian craftsmen.
[7][2] It was Peter's daughter Empress Elizabeth who decided the amber treasure should be installed at Catherine Palace, where the Russian Imperial family typically spent their summers.
[10] However, before the Amber Room could be moved, Erich Koch, who was in charge of civil administration in Königsberg during the final months of the war, abandoned his post and fled from the city, leaving General Otto Lasch in command.
[13] Several eyewitnesses claimed to have spotted the famous room being loaded on board the Wilhelm Gustloff, which left Gdynia on 30 January 1945, and was then promptly torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine.
[16][17] Official assessments, set out in documents from the Russian National Archives written by Alexander Brusov, head of the Soviet team charged with locating the Amber Room following the war, agreed with this theory.
A few years later, Brusov publicly voiced a contrary opinion;[19] this is believed to have been done due to pressure from Soviet authorities, who did not want to be seen as responsible for the loss of the Amber Room.
[21] Scott-Clark and Levy also assessed that others in the Soviet government found the theft of the Amber Room a useful Cold War propaganda tool.
Adelaida Yolkina, senior researcher at the Pavlovsk Palace, reportedly stated: "It is impossible to see the Red Army being so careless that they let the Amber Room be destroyed".
[23] After the report was made public, Leonid Arinshtein, who was a lieutenant in the Red Army in charge of a rifle platoon during the Battle of Königsberg, said: "I probably was one of the last people who saw the Amber Room".
[24] Then in 1968, despite academic protests worldwide, Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev ordered the destruction of Königsberg Castle, thus making any onsite research of the last known resting place of the Amber Room all but impossible.
[25] Another hypothesis involves a bunker in Mamerki in northeastern Poland, or that Stalin ordered the Amber Room replaced with a replica prior to its looting, hiding the original.
The main problem with finding the Amber Room is that the Nazi regime hid many items in many difficult-to-reach places, usually without documentation, leaving a wide search area.
[26][27] In October 2020 Polish divers from the Baltictech group found the wreck of the SS Karlsruhe, a ship which took part in Operation Hannibal, a sea evacuation which allowed more than a million German troops and civilians from East Prussia to escape advancing Soviet forces.
[30] The new room was dedicated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the 300th anniversary of the city of Saint Petersburg.
