Who stole the Amber Room?

Often hailed as "the eighth wonder of the world," the Amber Room is an opulent room adorned with gold and precious amber. History buffs would love to see the room for themselves, but there's one problem: it's missing. Learn more in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And one thing
you should know about us is that we have a
deep and abiding love for American girl dolls. I had

(00:23):
Kirsten and Sarah had Felicity. And the only non felicity
accessory that I think Sarah wanted was Kirsten's amber necklace. Yeah.
I also liked ADDIE's Coweri shell necklace, but I really
loved Kirsten's little heart shaped amber necklace, as did I. UM.
You might also know amber because of Jurassic Park, probably

(00:43):
also around the same time here, the early mid nineties. Um,
a glob of it contains a mosquito when they take
the DNA from it and recreate the dinosaurs. But we
are not going to be talking about Amber in either
of those senses today. No no American girl dolls and
no dinosaurs. Instead, we're going to talk about something more

(01:03):
impressive and less fictional. It's the Amber Room of Russia,
called by some the eighth wonder of the world. There
are lots of many things, lots of eighth wonders. Nothing
is ever the eleventh wonder of the world. So it's
this magnificent room, though made out of precious amber and gold.
It's an ornate Baroque masterpiece, and being inside of it

(01:25):
is often described as being like being inside of a
jewelry box. But I kind of imagine it like Scrooge
mcdock wallowing in his chamber of golden treasure. But the
other cool thing about the Amber Room is that it's missing.
So what happened to it? And that's what we're going
to answer today. But before we get to that, we're

(01:45):
going to go back to the history of the Amber Room.
It's not actually from Russia. It's from Prussia and construction
began in seventeen o one. It was originally installed at
the Charlottenburg Palace, which was the home of Frederick the First,
who was the King of Prussia. It was designed by
a German Baroque sculptor, Andreas Schluter, and constructed by a

(02:07):
Danish amber craftsman, Gotfrid Wolfram. So it's truly this international effort.
From the start. Peter the Great of Russia managed to
come around see the Amber Room, and he liked what
he saw and by this point Frederick William the First
had inherited the throne from his father, and he was
much more interested in his army than an art, especially

(02:30):
in completing the Amber Room, which wasn't quite finished yet.
So he saw a good opportunity for diplomacy and gave
the Amber Room to Peter as a gift in seventeen sixteen.
And this cements the Russian Prussian alliance against Sweden, and
I think Russian Prussian alliances my new favorite hyphenated combo.
The Amber Room is shipped off to Russia in eighteen boxes,

(02:52):
where Russian craftsmen finish it along with German supervisors, and
it's installed in the winter House in St. Peter's Burg
as part of a European art collection. And the room
isn't really a room. It's a series of wall panels
inlaid with carved amber wall mirrors and four Florentine mosaics
with onyx courts and jade, and the mosaics were allegories

(03:16):
of the senses and their parquet floors as well and
Baroque gilded wood carvings, and the amber itself is carved
into garlands and cherubs, and it's all extremely intricate, and
a lot of it is backed in gold leaf so
that it sparkles if you if you see a picture
of the amber room, it's just this golden hued um

(03:39):
Baroque masterpiece, I guess you'd call it. In seventeen fifty five,
Zarina Elizabeth said, let's move it to the Catherine Palace
and pushkins ours village. But this is a bigger room.
So an Italian named Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli redesigns it to
fit and add some new amber from Berlin, and according

(04:00):
to the Smithsonian, Zarina Elizabeth used the amber room as
her private meditation chamber, which I just I think that's
so funny, imagining trying to get all zen in the amber.
Scrooge McDuck's dig. Catherine the Great used it as a
gathering space, show it off to all your friends, and
Alexander the Second used it as a trophy space. He

(04:22):
was really into collecting amber and filled it with a
lot of interesting amber objects. But after plenty of eighteenth
century Russian renovations, the room eventually is a hundred and
eighties square feet with six tons of amber and semi
precious stones. It was worth one hundred and forty two

(04:42):
million dollars in today's US dollars. So this is quite
a room. It's certainly nothing like my apartment and the
amber rooms value was sure to get it some attention
during World War Two from guess who? The Nazis. So
we know all about the nazis genocidal ambition, but it's
coupled with something else, and that's looting, looting from nations

(05:05):
and individuals, looting money and cultural artifacts. And the Germans
were majorly underfinanced at the start of the war, so
to make up for that they had to steal and
UM The U. S State Department estimates that they stole
four hundred million dollars in gold from the occupied nations
and one hundred and forty million in gold from individuals,

(05:27):
and this is mostly from individuals who are sent to
concentration camps. The UM Nazis would steal not only their
personal wealth, but their jewelry, even go gold fillings. And
along with this, Hitler wanted to build the best museum
that ever existed in his hometown. That way, Germany would
also be the center of world art and he had

(05:48):
a wish list of works that he desired to have
and managed to seize quite a bit of it. So
skipping ahead just a tiny bit again, on June twenty two,
ninety one, Operation bar Barrosa begins and that's when three
million German soldiers are sent to the Soviet Union. And okay,
so it goes without saying that your art and treasure

(06:09):
obsessed Nazis are gonna know about the Amber Room and
they're gonna know where it is, and it's the perfect
treasure for them. It's worth a ton of money, and
it's representative of another goal, which is to bring German
works of art back to Germany. Um So the curators
that Katherine Palace try to hide the Amber Room, knowing
that the Nazis will likely take it if they find it.

(06:32):
And uh. They try to take down the paneling, but
because it's dried out and in need of restoration, it
starts to crumble, so instead they paper it over, hoping
that the Nazis won't notice. But that doesn't fool the
German soldiers. They find it, disassemble the paneling and pack
it in twenty seven crates to ship to Kunangsberg, Germany,

(06:52):
which today is clean and Grad Russia and interestingly enough,
this happens to be the center of the amber industry
for the past three hundred years. So the Amber Room
is reassembled in the castle museum at Kunnigsberg, and Alfred
Rhoda is in charge of the museum and he is
really interested in amber, and he studies the panels that

(07:14):
make up the room and he puts it on display,
and it's on display there for two years. In nineteen
forty three, the Germans are in the same position Russia
had been in two years earlier. Someone is coming, in
this case the Allies, who might want the Amber Room.
So what are they going to do with it? Can
they hide it? And Rhoda is told to pack it up.

(07:35):
This is where it's last scene in Crates. So August four,
the Allies bomb the city and the museum castle and
uh it's destroyed. About a year later, April nine, Stalin's
Red Army enters the city, burns everything and annex as
Kunnigsberg as Klein and Grod. So here's our question, what

(07:59):
happened into the Amber Room? Where did it go? Does
it still exist? In what condition would it be in?
Since then, the majority of the Amber Room has been
missing and everyone from the KGB two amateur amber room
hunters have tried to find it, and there are a
lot of theories about what happened to it. They get
weirder and weirder, so Sarah and I are going to
name a few. One the crates were destroyed when the

(08:22):
Allied bombs hit the building. Another is that the crates
survived the bombing but were destroyed in the Red Army fire.
Dissenters about this theory say that if the amber had
been burned, the whole city would have smelled of it,
because after all, it is tree resin. And interestingly, the
way you test the authenticity of amber is by warming

(08:43):
a pin, and if you can smell the scent, it's real,
although I think counterfeiters can get around that by coding
it in a real in a real layer. Another idea
is that the amber is still in cullin and grads
still hidden in. Another is that the room was spirit
it away and hidden somewhere else in Europe. Um ferries

(09:04):
range from the Czech Republic to Germany, or perhaps it
wound up on a ship and is now sunken in
the Baltic And then here some are of our kind
of strange theories. Stalin had a second amber room and
the Germans actually stole a decoy or Hitler's body wasn't burned,
it was actually buried with the amber, which doesn't really

(09:25):
explain where the amber room is. But we're going to
go into a little more detail on some of the
recent theories about the amber room. In two thousand four,
British investigative journalists concluded that it had probably been destroyed
in the Koenigsberg Castle fire. Um Stalin, however, wouldn't have
bought this idea. He believed that the amber was shipped

(09:48):
out before the bombings, and consequently in forty seven ordered
that the castle ruins be searched for any trace of amber.
None was found, and so the KGB and the ASSIE,
the German secret police tried to find it. Instead, they
gotta go at it. The search actually became important to
the Soviets as cold war propaganda. It's still a patriotic

(10:11):
point for many Russians, but there's more to it than that.
In two thousand eight, two men Heinz, Peter Haustein and
Christian Hannish insisted that Nazi gold and maybe even the
amber room were in Deutsche Kata Randenburg, Germany, and it
was slow going because they believed there might be booby
traps guarding it. But Holstein later redacted his claim that

(10:32):
they may have found the amber room and said it
was just going to be gold. And we actually have
a great um Julia Layton article on this, which is
could treasure hunters have discovered Nazi gold? And I think
there's an earlier podcast on it too, and in breaking news,
this story is happening right now, um Fairgate Trofonov thinks

(10:52):
that he's found the amber room under a bunker, or
thinks that it might be located under a bunker in
Kalin and Gras add and even if this hunt comes
to nothing, the museum in Kleinograd is benefiting because, um,
this guy's actually pumping out water from the old bunker,
so you know, any maintenance is good, I guess. But

(11:13):
they're they're looking right now. So maybe by the time
we publish will have another thing to add to them,
and if not, maybe we'll be able to put it
on our Twitter, where we put some really cool history stories.
You should find us right missed in history, so huge
discoveries of Nazi gold and other artworks and loot have
been made, though, and probably the biggest one was right

(11:37):
in nineteen forty five when Patton's army discovered the Murkers mine.
The Nazi gold we were talking about earlier was largely
kept in the Reich's bank, but after nineteen five much
of it was transferred to minds that were far outside
of Berlin because it would be safer there. When the
Allies get wind of the mine, they check it out

(12:00):
and find an enormous room stacked high with gold and
off of silver and cash and masterpieces of art from
Rembrandt and Renoir and raphael Um. But if the Amber
room is buried in some deep mind like this, would
it even be okay? Amber is not like gold or silver,

(12:20):
and the answer is probably not, according to amber expert
Alexander Shadrinsky, if it's hidden in a mine, it's probably
ruined and it needed to be restored even before it
was stolen, so it would only have deteriorated more. Yeah.
I mean, we mentioned that the Russians were unable to
take it down because it was crumbling, so you can
only imagine what a state it was in after being

(12:41):
packed and created all these times, and potentially buried somewhere.
By the late nineteen seventies, the Russians gave up on
seriously searching for the original amber room and instead commissioned
a replica. Work began in nineteen eighty two, and it
was a really daunting task. The craftsman working on it
had to learn the skills of the amber guilds, like cutting, carving,

(13:03):
and dying amber, which isn't something we really do anymore.
These were long dead skills, at least on this scale,
and funding for the project stopped in the mid nineties,
but it was saved by a three point five million
dollar donation from ror Gas, which is a German natural
gas company. So it was this rekindling of a of

(13:23):
the old alliance from the German Russian point of view. Yeah,
the Russian pression um and another special ten thousand dollars
came from a woman in Manhattan to purchase great pieces
of amber that had just come on the market. And
this is according to the New York Times, And that
was significant, not so much because of um the amount
obviously ten thousand versus three point five million, but because

(13:45):
these pieces of amber had been held in private collections
for so long. They had to be bought as soon
as they appeared, and the recreation of the Amber Room
was entirely based on old black and white photos and
the memories of museum curators. But then in craftsmen finally
got to compare their work to the original when German

(14:06):
art detectives heard someone was trying to sell part of
the Amber Room. So they go to the sellar's lawyer's
office and um, they end up finding an original mosaic
panel in Bremen, which I think a uh, German art
detective sounds like a pretty fun job. Our next job.
So objects from the Amber Room had managed to survive, though,

(14:28):
and we we knew where they were. Russians were able
to hide things like tables and jewelry boxes and chest
that's made up amber in Siberia. Um And in two
thousand three the new eleven million dollar Amber Room opened.
Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder dedicated it at the three

(14:48):
hundred year anniversary of St. Petersburg. But there's still the
question if the original Amber Room does show up, somebody
manages to find it, who owns it? And towards the
end of the twentieth century, countries got a little more
serious about making efforts to return stolen Nazi gold and
Nazi items to individuals in two countries, and if the

(15:11):
individuals weren't around to receive them, um to donate them
to humanitarian groups, especially those that benefit Holocaust survivors. But
the Geneva Conventions dictate that items of cultural significance, so
like your Rembrandt or your amber room, be returned to
the country that they came from. So if you're an

(15:32):
amber room hunter, it's not like you're going to be
able to keep it for yourself. It's it assuredly would
go back to Russia. And another note for would be
amber room hunters, there is a so called amber room curse.
Alfred Rhoda, the director at the Koenigsberg Castle Museum and
his wife died of typhus while the KGB was investigating

(15:53):
the room, and George Stein, an amber room hunter and
former German soldier, was murdered in nine the Forest in
your Munich. So maybe not quite the King Tut's Tomb curse,
but still something to think about. And we'd like to
mention that this was also a listener request from Gavin,
and Gavin actually got to visit the recreated Amber Room

(16:14):
and noted that you're not allowed to take photographs in it,
which I think is interesting. I wonder if the flash
would just bounce everywhere and blind everyone. And some people
say that in the Amber Room you can feel heat
rising off the walls like there's some sort of bizarre
energy field, which you know, is something that the czars
would report to that there was an energy field. But

(16:35):
the heat in the Amber Room might just be because
there are five hundred candles to make it extra glittery.
So if you've had an experience at the Amber Room,
send us an email and let us know History podcast
at how staff works dot com. And that brings us
to listener Mail. Today's listener mail is actual mail, which
is our favorite kind of mail, and we got a

(16:57):
postcard of the Devil's Postpile National Monument from a listener
who said, Happy New Year's ladies. I really enjoy the
show and I heard you ask for postcards, so here's
another one to add to your hopefully growing collection. Keep
up your wonderful work, So thank you, t KA. And
we also got a really fabulous card from a listener
named Rachel that she designed herself. Car Yes, it's really

(17:20):
gorgeous um, she said, love your podcast. I'm a freelance
illustrator and listen a lot while working. I was putting
Valentine's together over the weekend and your podcast on great
battle Horses came on while I was drawing the horse
on this card. I don't know how well he would
do in battle though, looks a bit skittish and it's
really gorgeous and it has morrissy lyrics on the front.
And if you'd like to check out her website, it's

(17:42):
Rachel dash Harris dot com. But back to the Nazi gold,
We've got a great article on it. It's called could
Treasure Hunters have Discovered Nazi Gold? Mentioned it earlier? You'll
find it on our website at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be

(18:03):
sure to check out the stuff you missed in History
Class blog on the how staff works dot com home page.