What happened to the Amber Room?
Built beginning in 1701, the Amber Room was a chamber of gold-backed amber panels and mirrors, originally constructed in Prussia before being installed in the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. By World War II St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad, and when the German Army closed in on that city in 1941 they overran the Catherine Palace. The Amber Room was taken apart by German troops and sent to Konigsberg, where it was intended the originally German splendor of the work would be displayed to boost morale.
By the autumn of 1941 the room, which was considered to be priceless, was under reconstruction in Konigsberg, and the following January announcements appeared in newspapers describing its exhibition. There is little further documentation concerning the room. In 1945 a general order to remove looted artwork and other items from the path of the advancing Red Army went out from Berlin.
There were no reports of the Amber Room being moved in the post-war German records and the officer in charge of the room and removing it to safety fled his post in the face of the Russians. The Amber Room and its fate was not discovered at the end of the war and has not been determined since, although a few cryptic clues have emerged. A single mosaic authenticated to have been from the room showed up at an auction in the late 1990s, leading experts to speculate it had been stolen by a German soldier when the room was shipped to Konigsberg in 1941.
Experts are building a growing consensus that the Amber Room was shipped to an underground bunker facility built by the Germans in Poland, near the town of Mamerki. The site has yet to be excavated and tests are being used to determine what contents it may be hiding, but to date, they have been inconclusive.
The Russians gave a collective shrug of their shoulders and built a new Amber Room, a twenty-four-year project which was completed in 2003. Motivated in part by the belief that the original Amber Room could not have survived more than seventy years of improper storage, the new Amber Room has been placed on display near St. Petersberg, which the Russians claim is its rightful and proper home. The whereabouts of the original remain to be explained.