6 – The Vanishing Treasure Chest – Where is the Amber Room?
The incredible Amber Room was considered to be the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ and was a gift to Peter the Great to celebrate peace between Russia and Prussia in 1716. It was created in Prussia and construction began in 1701 but when Peter saw the room and expressed his admiration, King Frederick William I offered it as a gift and had it shipped to St. Petersburg in 18 boxes. Czarina Elizabeth moved the room again, this time to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin in 1755.
The already impressive room was expanded and renovated, and when completed, it covered 55 square meters and contained approximately 13,000 pounds of amber and other valuables. The amber panels were adorned with gold leaf, and historians believe the room was worth around $400 million in today’s money.
When Hitler initiated Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, approximately three million soldiers entered the USSR. When the marauding German army entered Pushkin, the curators of the Catherine Palace desperately tried to disassemble and hide the precious Amber Room, but the Germans found it, tore it down within 36 hours and shipped it to Konigsberg (modern day Kaliningrad) in 27 crates. It was reinstalled in the city’s castle museum. In late 1943, the curator of the museum, Alfred Rohde, was told to dismantle the Amber Room yet again and store it elsewhere. The city was bombed by the Allies in August 1944. At that point, the trail of the Amber Room went cold.
Historians tried to come up with theories as to the whereabouts of the Amber Room. Some believe that Rohde did not follow orders, so it was destroyed in the bombing of the city. Another theory is that the amber was loaded onto a ship and is located at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Such theories have not dissuaded treasure seekers who continue to search for the Amber Room in the same way that explorers kept looking for El Dorado. One problem with the search is that Leonid Brezhnev ordered the destruction of Konigsberg Castle in 1968; this act made it impossible to investigate the last known location of the Amber Room.
An intrepid group of senior citizens believes the room is hidden beneath the city of Wuppertal in Germany and began drilling to find it in 2016. There is also a suggestion that the treasure is hidden beneath the Mamerki Museum in Poland. However, no one has found any proof of the existence of the room in any of these locations.
As an aside, there is apparently a ‘curse’ on the Amber Room as a number of people connected with it met untimely deaths. Rohde and his wife died from typhus while a Russian intelligence officer died in a car crash immediately after talking about the Amber Room to a journalist. A German Amber Room hunter was murdered in a Bavarian forest in 1987. Construction of a ‘new’ Amber Room began in 1979 and is now on display in the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum Reserve which is located just outside St. Petersburg.