I don't think I've talked about the Amber Room in this thread... It's one of my favorite lost art mysteries.
The Amber Room was built in 1701 and given to Peter the Great as a gift in 1716. Peter's daughter upgraded it and changed it around -- eventually commissioning ten years worth of labor and over 13,000 pounds of amber. The room itself is nearly 600 square feet.
The room was lit by about 500 candles and the amber would pick up the light, so the entire place glowed with a fiery gold hue that's, supposedly, the most amazing thing ever or whatever.
The room is pretty much priceless... The raw value of the amber comes to about $250 million, but you'd have to be insane to cannibalize the amber room if you found it. But, perhaps, something like that happened. In 2011, in Russia, $30 million of amber was found walled into a cellar, and the amber appeared to be (inconclusively) from the Amber Room.
In 1941, as the Germans closed in, attempts to disassemble the Amber Room resulted in some extensive damage (which probably explains that 2011 cache). The Soviets decided to cover it up instead. This fell through since the Germans had their own Monuments Men and knew exactly where to go... These experts then successfully disassembled the room and shipped it home where, from 1941 till the end of the war, it was on display at Konigsberg Castle.
Here we get into the mystery... Hitler ordered the room disassembled and hidden. Erich Koch, one of Hitler's chief civilian administrators, was in charge...but in 1945, he had other plans. He was cashing out and skipping town. Eventually arrested by the Brits in 1949, the Soviets demanded that he be extradited for trial. Sentenced to death, he successfully bargained to have the sentence commuted to life in prison by promising to reveal the location of looted art. Along with the recovery of several items, he promised that he knew the location of the Amber Room -- it was on a U-Boat that had been sunk shortly before the end of the war, destination top secret (this is part of the origin myth behind the Antarctic Base conspiracy theory).
It took till the 60s for technology to catch up with the requirements to make a dive for the U-Boat...and nothing was found. By then, Koch's deal had paid off and he clammed up. No more talk, just leave me alone. Though he did tell an interrogator in 1965 and, again, in 1967 that the Room was in a bunker in Konigsberg, and generally blamed everything on Himmler and played dumb as to the location.
So back to 1945. Koch gets the order to dissemble and hide the Amber Room. The details of the order are unknown, but it WAS issued. Surviving records indicate that Koch ignored Hitler and took off, leaving the Room to be destroyed by Allied bombers along with the castle museum where it was on display. A study of the ruins for amber was inconclusive, but the Soviets wouldn't let anyone near it. They sealed off the castle, claimed that they found nothing, and Brezhnev personally ordered that the castle's ruins be destroyed utterly and paved over in 1965.
So, the conspiracy theories:
1) It did make it onto a U-boat
2) It's in a bunker somewhere beneath Konigsberg
3) The Soviets recovered it but used its alleged loss as political leverage
So...the article below is the latest in this saga, pursuing the bunker theory.
A pensioner has started digging in Germany's western Ruhr region for the Amber Room, a priceless work of art looted by Nazis from the Soviet Union during World War Two and missing for 70 years, but says he needs a new drill to help him.
Dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Amber Room was an ornate chamber made of amber panels given to Czar Peter the Great by Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm I in 1716.
German troops stole the treasure chamber from a palace near St Petersburg in 1941 and took it to Koenigsberg, now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, before it disappeared.
Conspiracy theories abound about the whereabouts of what some say is the world's most valuable piece of lost art. Some historians think it was destroyed in the war, others say Germans smuggled it to safety.
Now 68-year-old pensioner Karl-Heinz Kleine says he thinks the chamber is hidden under the town of Wuppertal, deep in western Germany's industrial Ruhr area.
After analyzing the evidence, Kleine has concluded that Erich Koch, who was the Nazis' chief administrator in East Prussia, may have secretly dispatched it to his home town.
"Wuppertal has a large number of tunnels and bunkers which have not yet been searched for the Amber Room. We have started looking in possible hiding places here," Kleine said.
"But the search is very costly. We need helpers, special equipment and money," Kleine told Reuters, adding that a building firm which had lent him a drill had asked for it back.
"I only have a small pension, a new machine is too expensive for me. But whoever helps will get his share of the Amber Room when we find it," he told Reuters.
"I am optimistic. I just need the tools, then it could go quickly," he said.
Even Communist East Germany's loathed Stasi secret police tried and failed to find the Amber Room. Hobby treasure hunters have launched expensive searches for it across Germany, from lake bottoms to mines in the eastern Ore Mountains. But in vain.
Historians say Erich Koch, convicted of war crimes by a Polish court, amassed a hoard of looted art and had it transported west from Koenigsberg in the final months of the war as the Soviet forces drew closer.
Russian craftsmen, helped by German funds, have recreated a replica of the Amber Room at the Catherine Palace from where the original was stolen.