'My guess is this chamber wasn't sealed by the Nazis, but by whoever looted it after the war. The Germans would have needed to get the amber panels back after they were stashed. It makes no sense to blast the entrance shut. But the guy who came in here in the 1950s, now that bastard wouldn't want anyone to know what he'd found. So he murdered the help and collapsed the shaft. Our findin' this was a fluke, thanks to ground radar. The fact that we gained entrance, just another fluke.'
Rachel seemed to understand. 'Always pays to be lucky.'
'The Germans and the looter probably didn't even know that another shaft passed this close to the chamber. Like you say, just dumb luck on our part, lookin' for railroad cars full of art.'
'They had rail lines going into these mountains?' Paul asked.
'Damn right. That's how they moved munitions in and out.'
Rachel stood and gazed at the trucks. 'Then this could be the place Daddy talked about going to see?'
'It well could,' McKoy said.
'Back to the original question, McKoy. What did you mean about what you'd done?' Paul asked.
McKoy stood. 'You two I don't know from shit to shine-ola. But for some reason I trust you. Let's walk back outside to the shed, and I'll tell you all about it.'
Paul noticed the midmorning sun as it cast a dusty hue through the shed's dingy panes.
'How much do you know about Hermann Goring?' McKoy asked.
'Just what's on the History Channel,' Paul said.
McKoy smiled. 'He was the number-two Nazi. But Hitler finally ordered his arrest in April 1945, thanks to Martin Bormann. He convinced the Fuhrer that Goring intended to mount a coup for power. Bormann and Goring never got along. So Hitler branded him a traitor, stripped him of his titles, and arrested him. The Americans found him just as the war ended, when they took control of southern Germany.
'While he was imprisoned, awaitin' trial on war crimes, Goring was heavily interrogated. The conversations were eventually memorialized in what came to be called Consolidated Interrogation Reports. These were considered secret documents for years.'
'Why?' Rachel asked. 'Seems like they would be more historical than secret. The war was over.'
McKoy explained that there were two good reasons why the Allies suppressed the reports. The first was because of the avalanche of art restitution requests that came after the war. Many were speculative and spurious. No government had the time or money to fully investigate and process hundreds of thousands of claims. And the CIRs would have done nothing but amplify those claims. The second reason was more pragmatic. The general assumption was that everyone--apart from a handful of corrupt people--nobly resisted Nazi terror. But the CIRs revealed how French, Dutch, and Belgian art dealers profited from the invaders by supplying art for the
'Goring tried to have his pick of the art spoils before Hitler's thieves arrived in any conquered country. Hitler wanted to purge the world of what he considered decadent art. Picasso, van Gogh, Matisse, Nolde, Gauguin, and Grosz. Goring recognized value in these masterpieces.'
'What does any of that have to do with the Amber Room?' Paul asked.
'Goring's first wife was a Swedish countess, Karin von Kantzow. She visited the Catherine Palace in Leningrad before the war and loved the Amber Room. When she died in 1931 Goring buried her in Sweden, but the Communists desecrated her grave, so he built an estate he called Karinhall north of Berlin and encased her body there in an immense mausoleum. The whole place was gaudy and vulgar. A hundred thousand acres, stretching north to the Baltic Sea and east to Poland. Goring wanted to duplicate the Amber Room in her memory so he constructed an exact ten-by-ten-meter chamber ready to accept the panels.'
'How do you know that?' Rachel asked.
'The CIRs contain interviews with Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, the department Hitler created to oversee the looting of Europe. Rosenberg talked repeatedly of Goring's obsession with the Amber Room.'
McKoy then described the fierce competition between Goring and Hitler for art. Hitler's taste reflected Nazi philosophy. The farther east the origin of a work, the less valuable. 'Hitler possessed no interest in Russian art. He considered the entire nation subhuman. But Hitler didn't regard the Amber Room as Russian. Frederick I, King of Prussia, had given the amber to Peter the Great. So the relic was German, and its return to German soil was considered culturally important.
'Hitler himself ordered the panels evacuated from Konigsberg in 1945. But Erich Koch, the Prussian provincial governor, was loyal to Goring. Now here's the rub. Josef Loring and Koch were connected. Koch desperately needed raw materials and efficient factories to deliver the quotas Berlin imposed on all provincial governors. Loring worked with the Nazis, opening family mines, foundries, and factories to the German war effort. Hedgin' his bets, though, Loring also worked with Soviet intelligence. This may explain why it was so easy for him to prosper under Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia after the war.'
'How do you know all this?' Paul asked.
McKoy stepped over to a leather briefcase angled from the top of a survey table. He retrieved a sheaf of stapled papers and handed them to Paul. 'Go to the fourth page. I marked the paragraphs. Read 'em.'
Paul flipped the sheets and found the marked sections:
Interviews with several contemporaries of Koch and Josef Loring confirm the two met often. Loring was a major financial contributor to Koch and maintained the German governor in a lavish lifestyle. Did this relationship lead to information about, or perhaps the actual acquisition of the Amber Room? The answer is hard to say. If Loring possessed either knowledge of the panels or the panels themselves, the Soviets apparently knew nothing.
Quickly after the war, in May 1945, the Soviet government mounted a search for the amber panels. Alfred Rohde, the director of the Konigsberg art collections for Hitler, became the Soviets' initial information source. Rohde was passionately fond of amber, and he told Soviet investigators that crates with the panels were still in the Konigsberg palace when he left the building on April 5, 1945. Rohde showed investigators the burned-out room where he said the crates were stored. Bits of gilded wood and copper hinges (that were believed part of the original Amber Room doors) still remained. The conclusion of destruction became inescapable, and the matter was considered closed. Then, in March 1946, Anatoly Kuchumov, curator of the palaces at Pushkin, visited Konigsberg. There, in the same ruins, he found crumbled remains of the Florentine mosaics from the Amber Room. Kuchumov firmly believed that while other parts of the room may have burned, the amber did not, and he ordered a new search.
By then, Rohde was dead, he and his wife having died on the same day they were ordered to reappear for a new round of Soviet interrogations. Interestingly, the physician that signed the Rohdes' death certificate also disappeared the same day. At that point, the Soviet Ministry of State Security took over the investigation along with the Extraordinary State Commission, which continued to search until nearly 1960.
Few have accepted the conclusion that the amber panels were lost at Konisgberg. Many experts question if the mosaics were actually destroyed. The Germans were very clever when necessary and, given the prize and personalities involved, anything is possible. In addition, given Josef Loring's intense postwar efforts in the Harz region, his passion for amber, and the unlimited amount of money and resources available to him, perhaps Loring did find the amber. Interviews with heirs of local residents confirm that Loring visited the Harz region often, searching the mines, all with the knowledge and approval of the Soviet government. One man even stated Loring was working on the assumption that the panels were trucked from Konigsberg west into Germany, their ultimate destination south to the Austrian mines or the Alps, but the trucks were diverted by the impending approach of the Soviet and American armies. Best estimates state three trucks were involved. Nothing can be confirmed, however.
Josef Loring died in 1967. His son, Ernst, inherited the family fortune. Neither has ever spoken publicly on the subject of the Amber Room.
'You knew?' Paul said. 'All that Monday and yesterday was an act? You've been after the Amber Room all along?'
'Why'd you think I let you hang around? Two strangers appear out of nowhere. You think I'd have wasted two seconds with you if the first things out of your mouth weren't 'We're looking for the Amber Room,' and 'Who the hell's Loring?' '
