LOCATION Purportedly in an underground cavern on the German-Czech border
NEAREST POPULATION HUB Chemnitz, Germany
SECRECY OVERVIEW Site of historic mystery: an ornate room seized by the Nazis and later lost.
Sometimes described as the “eighth wonder of the world,” the Amber Room was constructed using 6 tons of amber backed with gold leaf. Once given by Prussia to Russia as a symbol of peace, it was stolen from the USSR by Nazi forces during the Second World War. In the chaos that accompanied Germany’s defeat in 1945, the location of the room was lost, sparking an enduring quest to recover it.
A woman of unerringly expensive tastes, Queen Sophia Charlotte of Hanover persuaded her husband, Friedrich I of Prussia, to commission the Amber Room for Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Designed in the baroque style by Andreas Schlüter, it was crafted under the supervision of a Dane, Gottfried Wolfram, between 1701 and 1709.
By the time it was finished, Sophia Charlotte had been dead for four years, and Friedrich would die, too, in 1713. He was succeeded by his son, Friedrich Wilhelm I. Keen to consolidate good relations with Peter the Great of Russia, Friedrich Wilhelm made him a gift of the room in 1716. It was packed into 18 large crates and sent to St. Petersburg, where it was installed in the Winter Palace. In 1755 the Tsarina Elizabeth had it moved once more, this time to the Catherine Palace in Tsarkoye Selo (now part of Pushkin, a suburb of St. Petersburg).
FIT FOR A TSAR The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg became the official residence of Russia’s rulers from 1732. The Amber Room’s journey from Berlin in 1716 took six arduous weeks, and the panels are believed to have been left unassembled in a palace wing for several years.
An Italian designer called Bartolemeo Francesco Rastrelli oversaw a redesign for this new space, importing yet more amber from Berlin for the job. After subsequent renovations, the room covered 55 square meters (590 sq ft) and is estimated to have been worth something approaching US$150 million in today’s money.
The room remained at Tsarkoye Selo until 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, sending 3 million German troops into what was now the Soviet Union. Among the many crimes committed at this time, looting of art treasures was widespread. Officials at the Catherine Palace hurriedly set about dismantling the Amber Room to put into safe storage, but as they began their work, they found the antique amber crumbled. They decided instead to cover the room in conventional wallpaper, in the hope that the Germans would fail to realize what lay behind it, but the plan was an utter failure.
Within 36 hours of the arrival of German troops at the Palace, they had taken the room apart and stored it in 27 boxes that were soon transferred to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) on the Baltic coast. Here, it was put back together again in the city’s castle museum. When the tide of the war turned against Germany after 1943, the museum director was charged with once again disassembling the room and moving it to a safe place. However, in 1944 Königsberg was bombed by British forces and much of the city, including its museum, burned. The fate of the Amber Room is unknown.
Over the subsequent years, theories have abounded. Some believe that it perished in the fires or was destroyed by a direct hit. Others say it was burned by Russian soldiers who captured the city in 1945, while another theory suggests that the room was dismantled and put to sea on a German ship that was then torpedoed and sunk. It has even been suggested (though not very credibly) that after his suicide Hitler’s body was not burned in Berlin, but was buried in this legendary room.
But for many, the paths lead inextricably to the town of Deutschneudorf, near the border of Saxony and the Czech Republic. In 1997, a single panel from the original room was found during a raid by German police. It belonged to the family of a soldier who was allegedly present when the room was dismantled during the war. In 2008, a team of excavators claimed that they had found a man-made chamber 20 meters (66 ft) below ground near Deutschneudorf and that, after conducting electromagnetic tests on the site, they were convinced it contained some 2 tons of Nazi gold. The mayor of Deutschneudorf, Heinz-Peter Haustein, said that the area is home to a vast network of underground storage rooms from the period, and that he was “90 percent sure” that the Amber Room lies somewhere within the complex. Indeed, the area is honeycombed by old silver, tin and copper mines, so there is no shortage of hiding places. But to date, the Amber Room’s location remains a mystery.
In the meantime, a reconstruction of the room may now be seen at Tsarskoye Selo in the Catherine Palace. It opened in 2003, having taken 24 years to complete. Much of the US$11 million funding for the project was donated by German companies—perhaps one day it will be possible to compare it with the original.
