So we are in Königsberg, Germany. The city is under attack, and we can’t see if the amber was taken by Alfred Rohde and hidden before the fire started, but as I was telling you last time, we didn’t feel the smell of amber all over the city as it should be if such a quantity of amber would be burnt.

As we are here and couldn’t figure out what happened with amber, we will go for another trip in time. We will go to 1950, when the Nazi ex. the chief administrator of East Prussia, Erich Kock

 

, was incarcerated and kept alive after the war, hoping to reveal where the Amber Room was concealed. It was supposed that he knew where the treasury was transported. The treasury was supposed to be moved from Königsberg to Wuppertal in Germany. Erich Kock was also taken from prison to the museum site to show Polish officials the concealed amber. Kock was unable to identify where the location was.

We will go to the 1960 and watch how Kock is again taken out of prison, this time to the Bunker 31, in Bremen, Germany, hoping that he will find the location where the treasury was concealed. But again, we will see that he will fail to find it.

We will go to another place where people believed the treasury might be found. We will go to the Mamerki museum near Wegorzewo in Poland. This place was one of the most important command centers of the Third Reich. We can also see a replica fragment of the Amber Room in this museum. We can have a closer look at the history of the museum here: http://www.mamerki.com/en/strona.xhtml?p=mamerki

Museum leaders think that the treasury might be in here behind a false wall, hidden in an old war bunker. They believe it can be here after discovering an unknown room measuring 1,98 m wide and 3 m long using a geo-radar. This theory is also based on testimony from an ex-nightguard from wartime. One night in the winter of 1944, he saw a heavily-guarded truck driving to the bunker and unloading an oversized cargo. The room was sealed after they finished unloading the truck. The museum leaders want to drill a hole into the wall to see if they can find the amber or other treasuries that might have been left behind by the Nazis. The museum curators found out earlier about this possibility, but they wanted to make sure that this might be the place, so they asked a few experts who confirmed that this place should be the most logical place where the treasury might be.

This time we will follow others who have tried to find the treasury, watching from the shadow. We will go to 1997 when a group of German art detectives found out that a piece from the Amber chamber was on the market. They identified the seller; he was the son of a soldier. He didn’t know that the amber piece was from the Amber Room. The fact that one amber piece was on the market sustains the idea that the Amber Room wasn’t destroyed in the city attack, or at least not all of it.

Now we will follow another attempt to find the Amber Room. This attempt was made by 3 guys (Leonard Blume, Guenther Eckardt, and Peter Lor). They think that the treasury is concealed in the Ore Mountains in one of the caves called Prince’s cave. They have a few reasons to believe that, one is that the railway used to be nearby. There was a train from Königsberg in 1945. Using a geo-radar, they found that the caves have some cavities that look like a bunker. On the walls of the caves, they found cables that might have been used to lower the cargo deeper in the cave. These guys have also been reading the witness testimonials that the Stasi and KGB had.

Unfortunately, they can’t explore much as they need funds to do it.

Fortunately, we can visit the replica of Amber Room, completed in 2003 in Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg. The construction of the model started in 1979, and it was finished in 2003. The cost was over $11 million. The replica is as beautiful as the first Amber Room, maybe even more beautiful.

 

I hope you enjoyed our trip and the story.