The Amber Room was the pride of the Russian royal family. Empress Elizabeth used it as a meditation room. Catherine the Great, the consort of Elizabeth’s successor Peter III, was one of the most famous Russian rulers to occupy the space, using it as a gathering chamber. Nineteenth-century Emperor Alexander II had a fascination with amber itself, and he used the space as a trophy room.
The Amber Room remained intact at the Catherine Palace until the 20th century. In 1941, the Nazis initiated Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. The Germans stole as many art treasures as they could find, but they had their eye on one treasure in particular.
The Nazis believed that it should be returned to German hands. It was originally installed in a German castle, and it was designed for King Frederick I of Prussia by a German sculptor. They moved into Pushkin, determined to find the great room. As the Nazis drew closer to the Catherine Palace, Soviet guards tried to take the panels apart and hide them. After all, the Amber Room had belonged to the Russians for almost 200 years. They couldn’t let the Germans just take it. The guards were unsuccessful: the amber was so fragile that it began to break.
Instead, they covered the walls with wallpaper, desperate to hide it from the Germans. The Nazis didn’t fall for the trick. With an art specialist present, they took the room apart piece by piece and sent the fragmented chamber to Konigsberg Palace in modern-day Kaliningrad for display.
In April 1945, when the Allied Forces bombed Konigsberg, the Amber Room was initially believed to be lost forever among the rubble. Still, that hasn’t stopped historians and art curators from looking for it. Beginning in the ruins of Konigsberg, the search has reached as far as the mines underneath Wuppertal, Germany, as well as in the Harz Mountains in Eastern Germany. Except for one piece found in the late 1990s in possession of a descendant of a Nazi officer, the searches to find the room in its entirety has always turned up empty.
It seemed as though the Amber Room would always be one of the war’s most enduring mysteries. In 2003, a reproduction of the grand room opened in St. Petersburg, where it remains to this day. An in-depth investigation launched in 2004 by two British researchers became the definitive theory that the bombings of Konigsberg destroyed it, and the trail was lost.
Everything changed about ten years ago. A cook who worked in the kitchens of Frýdlant Castle in Bohemia, located in the present-day Czech Republic, claimed she had seen SS soldiers carting unknown crates into the cellar. The officers then mysteriously disappeared, and she never saw them again.
Two German treasure hunters, Erich Stenz and Georg Mederer, heard about this woman’s confession and were intrigued by the mention of hidden containers. They visited the palace in question and found something extraordinary. The basement was sealed shut! What was behind the wall of brick?