(One of the places the Amber Room has rested. This one is what used to be Koenigsburg, in the former East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, the city of Kant now named for a Soviet Apparatchik).
They may have found it. Buried treasure worth millions, a traveling moveable feast from the darkest days one can imagine, including the one I am wrestling with this last couple of weeks. Maybe worse, I don’t know.
I wish I could still go down to the concierge desk at Big Pink and ask Elsbeth what it was like to be a young girl in East Prussia when the Soviet 3rd Belorussian Front stormed Koenigsburg. It was not a pleasant experience, from what she said. But she is gone now, along with her stories, which I will treasure forever.
I was interested in the place for a couple reasons. At the time, I was researching the time there for another friend who had purchased a horse, whose lineage came from Frederick the Great, and a product of the 600 years of German expansion to the East, all overthrown in a matter of months when the East Front collapsed and the Russians laid waste to orderly farms and German villages.
I understand all the issues, and all the justifications for the manifold horrors, but am really just happy that the Ossies in my family line fled the region a hundred years before that particular human disaster occurred.
So, the area has always had a fascination for me, though no family memories of the region were ever passed down. I had reason to turn my attention to the area again a couple weeks ago. When I heard the news about the buzzing of the USS Donald Cook (DDG-75), I first assumed it was a part of some Freedom of Navigation Act (FON) deployment in the Black Sea or something. Unpleasant, to be sure, but not unusual in the conduct of the necessary demonstration that the seas are a global common for all nations.
It wasn’t until days later that someone told me the incident had occurred in the Baltic, and far from being a semi-provocative demonstration of the right of innocent passage in waters adjoining the Russian Federation, it was the freaking Baltic, off the coasts of NATO member states.
That dragged me back into the story of the strange enclave known now as “Kaliningrad,” the former East Prussian Koenigsburg, which is cut off from Russian territory by hundreds of miles of Estonian and Latvian territory. Mr. Putin has heavily militarized the place, and frankly, the situation is more than a little creepy.
Our pal Chris was A/ALUSNA in Moscow back in the day, and he remembers vividly what it was like to visit the military outpost thrust into what was the eastern part of the Reich. It is weird, home both of philosopher Emmanuel Kant and a bunch of Soviet-era junk.
Anyway, horses and current geopolitics aside, there is the matter of the Amber Room. The Nazis took back the gift given to Russia by a rising Germany in order to counter the aggressive Swedes- if you can imagine anything like that. It is a roiling emotional tale that has everything: history, vast treasure, and the smell of cordite.
The “room” isn’t anything of the sort. It is paneling made originally to be a cabinet, but so spectacular that it was transformed into paneling for the walls of a state chamber constructed of by several tons of the gemstone Amber, the Jurassic Park substance found on on the Baltic coast that is the petrified remains of sap from the indigenous trees. In the movie, the insects trapped within gave the DNA to re-create dinosaurs.
In our world, it went to create the last great mystery of World War II.
The Amber Room was called “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” and it has been missing since Elsbeth and her sisters tried to (unsuccessfully) flee the predations of the Byelorussian Front. Installed in the castle of Koenigsburg, the room disappeared as the Russians advanced for the final conquest.
Well, maybe it was the final conquest. I guess we will see about that.
Anyway, since the Amber Room was worth about a half billion bucks in today’s money, you can imagine people have been interested. The original story was that it was completely vaporized by Allied bombing in the last days of the war. It is plausible, I suppose, but people have been wondering since early 1945 where it actually went. The Germans were meticulous about a lot of things, and it seems unlikely that they would have just left the treasure to await the tender mercy of the advancing Red Army.
Of course, they did abandon the families of East Prussia, but this is neither the time nor place for that discussion.
Technology is a wondrous thing. Ground penetrating radar is one of its marvels. Just this year, in Egypt, they scanned the walls of King Tut’s tomb, and scientists announced that they may have found another burial chamber contained within, that of the famed beauty Nefertiti.
I hope it is true. I would like to see the artifacts before I become one myself.
Anyway, the news out of Poland is that they may have used the same techniques on an old Nazi-era bunker to find a concealed space that could contain the panels of the Amber Room.
A Polish museum curator named Bartlomiej Plebanczyk has announced that he thinks he has discovered a previously unknown underground room in a bunker complex that has he conducted a search of a complex of Nazi tunnels and bunkers.
The hidden room- “measuring two metrers by three meters” has never previously been recorded in any study of the warren of bunkers in the Mazrian Lake District, which contains one of the best-preserved complex of undamaged Nazi bunkers and barracks, frozen in the Cold War desolation of what was the East Front. .
At the height of its power, the complex had its own Panzer tank division on call, though I can think of other places that might have been more secure, like Chile. But what the hell. Everyone likes the resolution to a good mystery.
And the Amber Room is one for the ages.
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com