The Amber Room – ‘Янтарная комната” (from Russian). While many Americans associate amber with the casing for dinosaur DNA in 1993’s Jurassic Park, the stone has enthralled Europeans, and especially Russians, for centuries because of the golden, jewel-encrusted Amber Room, which was made of several tons of the gemstone. A gift to Peter the Great in 1716 celebrating peace between Russia and Prussia, the room’s fate became anything but peaceful: Nazis looted it during World War II, and in the final months of the war, the amber panels, which had been packed away in crates, disappeared. A replica was completed in 2003, but the contents of the original, dubbed “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” have remained missing for decades.
During WWII, Hitler’s Nazis stole some 600,000 pieces of art from across Europe. By the end of the war, billions of pounds worth of artwork had been scattered to the four winds, the Nazi looting had been on an industrial scale. Whilst some pieces of stolen art have been returned to their rightful owners, many are still missing, including a priceless collection of stunning amber panels, known as the Amber Room – perhaps the most valuable items ever looted by the fascist regime. The room was called the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ and one of Russia’s most treasured artefacts. After its looting, the room was returned to Germany and put on display, but it disappeared in the closing months of the war. Its fate is one of the greatest mysteries of WWII…
The Amber Room was intended in 1701 for the Charlottenburg Palace, in Berlin, Prussia, but was eventually installed at the Berlin City Palace. It was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Construction of the Amber Room began in 1701. It was originally installed at Charlottenburg Palace, home of Friedrich I, the first King of Prussia. Truly an international collaboration, the room was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and constructed by the Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Peter the Great admired the room on a visit, and in 1716 the King of Prussia—then Frederick William I—presented it to the Peter as a gift, cementing a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden.
The Amber Room was shipped to Russia in 18 large boxes and installed in the Winter House in St. Petersburg as a part of a European art collection. In 1755, Czarina Elizabeth ordered the room to be moved to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, named Tsarskoye Selo, or “Czar’s Village.” Italian designer Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli redesigned the room to fit into its new, larger space using additional amber shipped from Berlin. After other 18th-century renovations, the room covered about 180 square feet and glowed with six tons of amber and other semi-precious stones. The amber panels were backed with gold leaf, and historians estimate that, at the time, the room was worth $142 million in today’s dollars. Over time, the Amber Room was used as a private meditation chamber for Czarina Elizabeth, a gathering room for Catherine the Great and a trophy space for amber connoisseur Alexander II.
The room remained a Russian treasure throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and even survived the Revolution in 1917. However, its time on Russian soil came to an end in 1941, when Hitler’s forces closed in on St Petersburg (then called Leningrad) as part of Operation Barbarossa. Head art curator Anatoly Kuchumov was tasked with taking the precious Amber Room apart and prepping it for safe removal to the east. On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler initiated Operation Barbarossa, which launched three million German soldiers into the Soviet Union. The invasion led to the looting of tens of thousands of art treasures, including the illustrious Amber Room, which the Nazis believed was made by Germans and, most certainly, made for Germans. As the forces moved into Pushkin, officials and curators of the Catherine Palace attempted to disassemble and hide the Amber Room. When the dry amber began to crumble, the officials instead tried hiding the room behind thin wallpaper. But the ruse didn’t fool the German soldiers, who tore down the Amber Room within 36 hours, packed it up in 27 crates and shipped it to Königsberg, Germany (present-day Kaliningrad). The room was reinstalled in Königsberg’s castle museum on the Baltic Coast.
The museum’s director, Alfred Rohde, was an amber aficionado and studied the room’s panel history while it was on display for the next two years. In late 1943, with the end of the war in sight, Rohde was advised to dismantle the Amber Room and crate it away. In August of the following year, allied bombing raids destroyed the city and turned the castle museum into ruins. And with that, the trail of the Amber Room was lost.
The KGB conducted thorough investigations around Königsberg, leading many to believe the artwork lay hidden under the city in its labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. Again, nothing has ever been found there. Other claims place the room in old salt mines on the Czech border, sunk in a lagoon in Lithuania and even stripped down and shipped off to the U.S. The most absurd states that Stalin had a fake Amber Room constructed, so the Nazi’s never even got their hands on the real thing. Leads were followed left right and centre but nothing conclusive was ever found. The only pieces of the room ever recovered were a cabinet and the fourth Florentine mosaic – a German soldier had stolen the latter during the room’s removal in 1941 or 1945. It was in the possession of his son in 1997 when German authorities finally recovered it. It seems hard to believe that crates of several tons of amber could go missing, and many historians have tried to solve the mystery. The most basic theory is that the crates were destroyed by the bombings of 1944. Others believe that the amber is still in Kaliningrad, while some say it was loaded onto a ship and can be found somewhere at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. In 1997, a group of German art detectives got a tip that someone was trying to hawk a piece of the Amber Room. They raided the office of the seller’s lawyer and found one of the room’s mosaic panels in Bremen, but the seller was the son of a deceased soldier and had no idea as to the panel’s origin. One of the more extreme theories is that Stalin actually had a second Amber Room and the Germans stole a fake.
Another bizarre aspect of this story is the “Amber Room Curse.”
Many people connected to the room have met untimely ends. Take Rohde and his wife, for example, who died of typhus while the KGB was investigating the room. Or General Gusev, a Russian intelligence officer who died in a car crash after he talked to a journalist about the Amber Room. Or, most disturbing of all, Amber Room hunter and former German soldier Georg Stein, who in 1987 was murdered in a Bavarian forest. The history of the new Amber Room, at least, is known for sure.
The room remains on display to the public at the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum Reserve outside of St. Petersburg. In 1979, the Soviet government ordered a replica of the room. Twenty-four years later and at a cost of $11 million (£8.4 million), partly funded by the Germans, it was finally completed and installed in the Catherine Palace once again. The original has been replaced but not forgotten, many still believe the hunt for the world’s greatest lost treasure is far from over.
By Olga Bejuà / 2020 for D&F Magazine
Design & Fashion Magazine 