The Amber Room

A real, documented WWII loss, hunted for 80 years and still missing

The Amber Room was a chamber lined with carved amber panels backed with gold leaf and set with mirrors, and in its day it was called the Eighth Wonder of the World. It began in 1701 as a commission for Frederick, the first King in Prussia, at the urging of his wife Sophia Charlotte. The German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter designed it and the Danish amber master Gottfried Wolfram built it, with craftsmen from Danzig finishing the work, and it was installed in the Berlin City Palace.

It did not stay long. Peter the Great admired it on a visit, and in 1716 King Frederick William I gave it to him to seal a Russian-Prussian alliance against Sweden. It travelled east in 18 large boxes. In 1755 Empress Elizabeth had it moved to the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence outside St Petersburg, where the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli enlarged it with gilded and mirrored elements to fill a far bigger hall. After later renovations it covered more than 55 square metres and held over six tonnes of amber, glowing by candlelight.

Then came the war. When the Germans invaded in 1941, curators tried to take it down and evacuate it, but the amber had grown dry and brittle and began to crumble, so they hid the walls behind ordinary wallpaper. The trick failed. Soldiers of Army Group North dismantled the room in 36 hours, packed it into 27 crates and shipped it to Königsberg in East Prussia, where it went on display in the castle in October 1941. The museum director, Alfred Rohde, an amber enthusiast, studied it there for two years. With the war turning, the room was taken down again and crated, and in August 1944 Allied bombing raids reduced the city and the castle to ruins. The trail ends there.

The search has never stopped. Some think the crates burned in the bombing, some that they still lie hidden in Kaliningrad, others that they went down on a ship in the Baltic. In 1997 German investigators acting on a tip seized one of the room's original mosaic panels in Bremen from the son of a dead soldier who had no idea where it came from. People connected with the hunt have died in ways that inspired talk of a curse: Rohde and his wife of typhus during the Soviet investigation, and the amber hunter Georg Stein, murdered in a Bavarian forest in 1987.

A reconstruction begun in 1979 was finished in 2003, after decades of work by Russian craftsmen and with German donations, and is on show at the Catherine Palace. The original has never been found.