Crafted out of amber, gold and precious stones, the Amber Room was a masterpiece of baroque art — and remains one of the last great mysteries of the Second World War.
When its 565 candles were lit, the whole room was said to glow a fiery gold.
For more than 70 years the whereabouts of the room, looted by the Nazis during the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, have been unknown.
Now the discovery of a Nazi train said to have been found buried in a tunnel in Poland has prompted speculation that one of the greatest treasure hunts of modern history could be drawing to a close.
The room was presented to Peter the Great in 1716 by the King of Prussia. Later, Catherine the Great commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, outside the city.
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“When the work was finished, in 1770, the room was dazzling,” wrote the art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov.
After the war, the fate of the Amber Room became an obsession for a generation of treasure hunters. The Maigret author Georges Simenon founded the Amber Room Club to track it down once and for all. Everyone had a different theory of what might have befallen the work.
Those who believe it still exists have seized upon the alleged discovery of a legendary Nazi gold train to fuel hopes that it will be found at last.
The freight wagons of the train are said to have been found buried in tunnels under Ksiaz castle outside the Polish town of Walbrzych — German before the war, now part of Poland.
Polish authorities started looking for the train last month, tipped off by a German and a Pole who said through lawyers that they had found it in Walbrzych and expected 10 per cent of the value of the findings as a reward.
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Piotr Zuchowski, Poland’s deputy culture minister, said last week that photographs taken using groundpenetrating radar equipment showed that there was a train in one tunnel.
It was an armoured train, suggesting it was carrying a special cargo, “probably military equipment but also possibly jewellery, works of art and archive documents”, Mr Zuchowski said. Tom Bower, the author of a book about Nazi gold, reignited interest in the Amber Room at the weekend. However, he admitted that his speculation about the fabulous treasure being aboard was more about hope than facts.
He is not alone. “New trace of the Amber Room” said the news.de website in Germany when the train was discovered ten days ago.
The Amber Room was taken by the Germans to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, which is now the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. The theory is that it was destroyed when the Red Army stormed the city in 1945.
However, there are people who claim it was spirited away before the fall. Thirteen years ago, a documentary in Germany concentrated on the actions of Albert Popp, a brigadier with the Nazi flying corps. The programme alleged the Amber Room was moved by Popp to old mine workings in eastern Germany.
Given that the bulk of the booty looted for Adolf Hitler’s planned museum of world culture in Linz was found in salt mines in Austria, the Nazis could well have transported the room to inside the crumbling Reich.
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Lost and found
Alexanderplatz cellar
Sculptures by Marg Moll, among others, that the Nazis had deemed inappropriate, were discovered in a cellar in Berlin in 2010 during construction work to extend Berlin’s underground rail line.
Munich artworks
Up to 300 artworks believed to have been looted by the Nazis were discovered among 1,000 pieces in the Munich apartment of the art dealer Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012. They included works by Chagall, Renoir and Matisse. Gurlitt’s father had been appointed by Joseph Goebbels to sell the “degenerate” paintings to boost Germany’s foreign currency reserves.
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Chiemsee cauldron
Made with 10kg of 18 carat gold at the order of Albert Pietzsch, a top Nazi, the object — nicknamed Hitler’s bedpan — was found by a diver in Chiemsee lake in Bavaria.
Merkers salt mine
On April 8, 1945, General Patton’s 3rd Army found a hoard of looted art and much of the reserves of the German central bank in a salt mine about 200 miles south of Berlin. The haul included 8,000 bars of gold.