The Amber Room was a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors, located in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg. It was constructed in the eighteenth century in Prussia, dismantled and eventually lost during the Second World War, and before its loss it was considered an Eighth Wonder of the World. A reconstruction was made, starting in 1979, and completed and installed in the Catherine Palace in 2003.
The original room is gone. What survives is a reconstruction, a set of black-and-white photographs, and a mystery that has lasted for more than eighty years: was the Amber Room destroyed by bombing and fire, or was it hidden, and does it still exist somewhere, waiting to be found?
A Room Made of Light
The Amber Room was intended in 1701 for Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, Prussia, for King Frederick I of Prussia and his second wife Sophie Charlotte. The sculptor Andreas Schlüter was commissioned to redesign the interior, and the amber panels were made in Danzig, modern Gdansk in Poland, between 1701 and 1714. Amber was a Prussian treasure, washed up on Baltic shores, and the idea of covering an entire room in it was a display of wealth and craftsmanship without precedent.
The room was eventually installed at the Berlin City Palace, but it did not stay in Prussia. In 1716 the amber panels were presented to Tsar Peter I of Russia, and they were eventually installed in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the summer residence of the Russian imperial family near Saint Petersburg, in the town now called Pushkin. There the room remained, through the reigns of the Russian rulers who followed Peter, as the jewel of the palace.
The room was decorated throughout with ornate sheets of amber and gold leaf, with gemstones and mirrors, all highlighted by candlelight. It contained about 450 kilograms of amber panels, and its total weight was about six tonnes. Modern estimates of the room’s value range from 142 million dollars in 2007 to over 500 million dollars in 2016. Those figures are estimates, not a price the room ever carried, and they vary widely because there is nothing else like the room to compare it with. What visitors remembered was not a number. It was the light: amber glowing gold and honey-coloured in candlelight, reflected in mirrors, in a room that seemed to be made of the sun itself. The room remained in the Catherine Palace relatively unchanged, except for restorations in 1833, 1865 and 1890.
The Looting
In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Soviet officials began evacuating palace treasures east, towards Siberia. The furniture and ornaments of the Catherine Palace could be packed up, but the Amber Room could not. Over the years the amber had dried out and become brittle, and the curators found that it was impossible to move the room without the amber crumbling. They abandoned the attempt to dismantle it, and instead hid the room behind mundane wallpaper, in an attempt to keep German forces from seizing it.
The attempt failed. German soldiers of Army Group North, who knew of the room, disassembled it within 36 hours under the supervision of two experts. The panels were boxed up — one account says into 27 crates — and on 14 October 1941 the room reached Königsberg in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, for storage and display in the town’s castle. For the first time in more than two centuries, the Catherine Palace’s Amber Room stood bare. The palace itself was later largely destroyed during the German siege of Leningrad.
The Nazis claimed the room was German by right. A German designer had crafted it for a German king, they argued, and it should not remain in Russia. The claim was a justification for looting, not a legal argument, and it was applied to many works of art taken from occupied territory during the war. The Amber Room was the most famous of them. In Königsberg, the panels were reassembled and displayed in a room in the castle. That was the last place they were ever exhibited. There they remained until the war turned against Germany.
The Disappearance
Some time in early 1944, with Allied forces closing in, the room was disassembled again and crated for storage in the castle basement. Königsberg was heavily fire-bombed by the Royal Air Force in August 1944, and the castle was damaged. On 21 and 24 January 1945, Hitler ordered the movement of looted possessions from Königsberg. Soviet troops arrived in the city in 1945, and searched the rubble for the treasure. No trace of the Amber Room remained.
After the war, the Amber Room was never seen in public again, though reports have occasionally surfaced stating that pieces of it survived. Its eventual fate and current whereabouts, if it survived, remain a mystery. Documentation of the room’s location ends in Königsberg in 1944.
Two broad theories have been proposed. The first is that the room was destroyed in the bombing of Königsberg in August 1944, or in the fire that followed, and that the amber, which is flammable and brittle, was consumed. Soviet officials concluded after the war that the room was lost in this way. The second is that the room was hidden — in a secret bunker, under a lake, in a silver mine, or in some other hiding place — and that it survives, or survived for a time after the war, undiscovered. That theory has inspired many searches, including searches by the Soviet Union itself, and many claims of discovery. None has been verified.
In 1997, a genuine piece of the room did resurface. A stone mosaic known as “Touch and Smell”, once embedded in an amber panel and part of a cycle illustrating the five senses, presented by Maria Theresa of Austria, was discovered in the belongings of a German family who had inherited it from a soldier known to send goods home from the Russian front. A lacquered chest was found with it. Experts who examined the relics concluded that they were likely stolen before the amber panels reached Königsberg. The mosaic and the chest now take pride of place in the reconstruction of the Amber Room. Their discovery proves that at least some pieces of the original room were taken by individual soldiers. It does not prove that the room as a whole survived.
Other claimed discoveries have followed, including a claim in 2017 by three amateur searchers who believed they had found the room with ground-penetrating radar. No verified discovery has resulted from any of them. The search was complicated by the fact that the man who ordered the removal of the panels, Erich Koch, the SS commander in East Prussia, reportedly led a group of Russian officials on a search during the 1950s and failed to find them. Whether Koch knew where the room was, and whether he told the truth about it, is unknown.
The Reconstruction
In 1979, the Soviet government decided to create a reconstructed Amber Room at the Catherine Palace in Pushkin. Russian craftsmen began the long process of recreating the room, based on 86 black-and-white photographs taken of the original work, together with surviving descriptions and a small number of original pieces. The work took twenty-four years, with donations from Germany helping to fund it.
The reconstructed Amber Room was completed and inaugurated in 2003, opening on 31 May 2003 for the 300th anniversary of the founding of Saint Petersburg. It stands in the Catherine Palace, in the place where the original stood, and it is what visitors see today. It is a remarkable achievement of craftsmanship, and it is also a reminder of what was lost. The reconstruction is a copy, made from photographs, of a room that was itself a unique work of art. The original amber, the original gold leaf, and the original mirrors are gone.
The reconstruction also raises a question that the original never had to answer: is a perfect copy of a lost treasure a treasure in itself, or is it a memorial? The craftsmen who made it would say it is both. It restores a room to a palace, and it preserves the skill that made the room possible. But it cannot restore the history that was in the original panels — the hands that made them in Danzig in the early eighteenth century, the tsars who walked past them, and the war that took them away.
The Amber Room matters because it is a genuine historical mystery, with a clear beginning and a clear end, and nothing in between that can be proved. We know where it was made, when it was given to Russia, where it stood, who took it, where it was taken to, and when the record stops. We do not know what happened next. It has also become a symbol of a larger loss. The Second World War destroyed or displaced an immense amount of art and cultural heritage across Europe. The Amber Room is the most famous single loss, because it was so distinctive, so valuable, and so completely gone. If the original still exists, hidden in a bunker or a mine or a cellar, it is now more than eighty years old, and the amber that was already brittle in 1941 will be more brittle still. If it was destroyed in Königsberg in 1944, then the search is over, and has been over for a long time. Either way, the room that visitors see in Pushkin today is the only Amber Room that can be visited, and it is worth visiting for what it is: a room made of light, rebuilt from photographs, in memory of a room that was lost to war.
What Is Documented and What Is Not
Documented: The Amber Room was made in Prussia between 1701 and 1714, intended for Charlottenburg Palace, designed in part by Andreas Schlüter, and presented to Tsar Peter I in 1716. It was installed in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, and remained there, with restorations in 1833, 1865 and 1890, until the Second World War. In 1941, Soviet curators tried to dismantle it, found the amber too brittle, and hid it behind wallpaper. German soldiers of Army Group North disassembled it within 36 hours and sent it to Königsberg, where it arrived on 14 October 1941 and was displayed in the castle. In early 1944 it was crated for storage in the castle basement. Königsberg was bombed in August 1944. Soviet troops arrived in 1945 and found no trace of the room. In 1997 the “Touch and Smell” mosaic and a lacquered chest from the original room were found in the belongings of a German family. A reconstruction, begun in 1979 and based on 86 black-and-white photographs, was completed and opened on 31 May 2003.
Unverified or disputed: Whether the Amber Room was destroyed by bombing and fire in Königsberg in 1944, or hidden and preserved; all claimed locations for the hidden room, including bunkers, lakes and mines; all claimed discoveries since the war, none of which has been verified; and the exact value of the original room, with modern estimates ranging from 142 million dollars to over 500 million dollars. The number of crates used to transport the room is given as 27 in one account and is not confirmed in all sources.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Room
- https://www.gia.edu/gems-gemology/winter-2018-history-and-reconstruction-of-amber-room
- https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-hunt-amber-room-2556378
- https://allthatsinteresting.com/amber-room