The Amber Room: What Really Happened to the Lost Treasure of Königsberg

The Amber Room: What Really Happened to the Lost Treasure of Königsberg

A room made of amber, looted by the Germans in 1941 and missing since 1945. Treasure hunters have chased it for decades. The documents point to a less romantic ending.

Königsberg, April 1945. The city is surrounded by the Red Army. In the cellars of the old castle lie crates that a few years earlier were shown to visitors as one of the wonders of Europe. A few days later the castle is burning.

01The Story: The Amber Room

The Amber Room began in Berlin. It was planned in 1701 for the Prussian court, designed by the architect Andreas Schlüter and built with amber craftsmen from Danzig. In 1716 King Frederick William I gave it to Tsar Peter the Great, which sealed an alliance against Sweden. In Russia it was installed and later enlarged in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg, covering more than 55 square metres of wall.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, soldiers of Army Group North dismantled the room in about 36 hours. It reached Königsberg in October 1941 and was displayed in the castle museum under the director Alfred Rohde.

In early 1944 the room was taken down and crated for storage in the castle cellars. In August 1944 British bombers hit Königsberg and damaged the castle badly. Orders in January 1945 to move looted treasures out of the city came too late for the room. Soviet troops took Königsberg on 9 April 1945.

A Soviet commission led by Alexander Brusov concluded that the room had been destroyed between 9 and 11 April 1945. Brusov later publicly contradicted this, which is widely attributed to Soviet pressure. The castle ruin was demolished in 1968 on Brezhnev’s orders.

In 1979 the Soviet government decided to build a replica. It took 24 years, and when money ran short a German energy company, Ruhrgas (now part of E.ON), contributed about 3.5 million US dollars. Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder opened the new room in 2003 at the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg. A few original pieces, among them a Florentine mosaic found in Germany in 1997 and a commode, were returned to Russia.

02Why It’s Not in the Textbooks

Because the Amber Room is told as a treasure hunt. Bunkers, mines, shipwrecks: every few years a new theory appears. That story pushes aside what is documented. The room was plundered cultural property from a country the Wehrmacht was invading, Tsarskoye Selo was looted and left in ruins, and Königsberg, the home of the East Prussians who lived through the end of the war, ceased to exist in its old form. After 1945 it became Kaliningrad, and the castle was razed.

Among the unproven theories: that the room was loaded onto the Wilhelm Gustloff, hidden in a bunker in Poland, or that Stalin hid the original and had a copy made. None of them rests on a confirmed find. In 2020 divers reported military equipment and personal belongings, but no amber, from the wreck of the cruiser Karlsruhe.

✚Myth-Check

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The Wolf Girl

Königsberg lost its treasures, then its people and its name. The Wolf Girl tells what happened to the city’s children after 1945, based on my interviews with Ursula Dorn, who fled Königsberg alone at age eleven and survived as a wolf child in Soviet-occupied Lithuania.

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03Sources & Further Reading

• Scott-Clark, Catherine, and Adrian Levy. The Amber Room: The Controversial Truth About the Greatest Art Theft in History. Walker, 2004.
• Tsarskoye Selo State Museum-Reserve. History of the Amber Room and its reconstruction.