Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And one thing
Speaker 1: you should know about us is that we have a
Speaker 1: deep and abiding love for American girl dolls. I had
Speaker 1: Kirsten and Sarah had Felicity. And the only non felicity
Speaker 1: accessory that I think Sarah wanted was Kirsten's amber necklace. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also liked ADDIE's Coweri shell necklace, but I really
Speaker 1: loved Kirsten's little heart shaped amber necklace, as did I. UM.
Speaker 1: You might also know amber because of Jurassic Park, probably
Speaker 1: also around the same time here, the early mid nineties. Um,
Speaker 1: a glob of it contains a mosquito when they take
Speaker 1: the DNA from it and recreate the dinosaurs. But we
Speaker 1: are not going to be talking about Amber in either
Speaker 1: of those senses today. No no American girl dolls and
Speaker 1: no dinosaurs. Instead, we're going to talk about something more
Speaker 1: impressive and less fictional. It's the Amber Room of Russia,
Speaker 1: called by some the eighth wonder of the world. There
Speaker 1: are lots of many things, lots of eighth wonders. Nothing
Speaker 1: is ever the eleventh wonder of the world. So it's
Speaker 1: this magnificent room, though made out of precious amber and gold.
Speaker 1: It's an ornate Baroque masterpiece, and being inside of it
Speaker 1: is often described as being like being inside of a
Speaker 1: jewelry box. But I kind of imagine it like Scrooge
Speaker 1: mcdock wallowing in his chamber of golden treasure. But the
Speaker 1: other cool thing about the Amber Room is that it's missing.
Speaker 1: So what happened to it? And that's what we're going
Speaker 1: to answer today. But before we get to that, we're
Speaker 1: going to go back to the history of the Amber Room.
Speaker 1: It's not actually from Russia. It's from Prussia and construction
Speaker 1: began in seventeen o one. It was originally installed at
Speaker 1: the Charlottenburg Palace, which was the home of Frederick the First,
Speaker 1: who was the King of Prussia. It was designed by
Speaker 1: a German Baroque sculptor, Andreas Schluter, and constructed by a
Speaker 1: Danish amber craftsman, Gotfrid Wolfram. So it's truly this international effort.
Speaker 1: From the start. Peter the Great of Russia managed to
Speaker 1: come around see the Amber Room, and he liked what
Speaker 1: he saw and by this point Frederick William the First
Speaker 1: had inherited the throne from his father, and he was
Speaker 1: much more interested in his army than an art, especially
Speaker 1: in completing the Amber Room, which wasn't quite finished yet.
Speaker 1: So he saw a good opportunity for diplomacy and gave
Speaker 1: the Amber Room to Peter as a gift in seventeen sixteen.
Speaker 1: And this cements the Russian Prussian alliance against Sweden, and
Speaker 1: I think Russian Prussian alliances my new favorite hyphenated combo.
Speaker 1: The Amber Room is shipped off to Russia in eighteen boxes,
Speaker 1: where Russian craftsmen finish it along with German supervisors, and
Speaker 1: it's installed in the winter House in St. Peter's Burg
Speaker 1: as part of a European art collection. And the room
Speaker 1: isn't really a room. It's a series of wall panels
Speaker 1: inlaid with carved amber wall mirrors and four Florentine mosaics
Speaker 1: with onyx courts and jade, and the mosaics were allegories
Speaker 1: of the senses and their parquet floors as well and
Speaker 1: Baroque gilded wood carvings, and the amber itself is carved
Speaker 1: into garlands and cherubs, and it's all extremely intricate, and
Speaker 1: a lot of it is backed in gold leaf so
Speaker 1: that it sparkles if you if you see a picture
Speaker 1: of the amber room, it's just this golden hued um
Speaker 1: Baroque masterpiece, I guess you'd call it. In seventeen fifty five,
Speaker 1: Zarina Elizabeth said, let's move it to the Catherine Palace
Speaker 1: and pushkins ours village. But this is a bigger room.
Speaker 1: So an Italian named Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli redesigns it to
Speaker 1: fit and add some new amber from Berlin, and according
Speaker 1: to the Smithsonian, Zarina Elizabeth used the amber room as
Speaker 1: her private meditation chamber, which I just I think that's
Speaker 1: so funny, imagining trying to get all zen in the amber.
Speaker 1: Scrooge McDuck's dig. Catherine the Great used it as a
Speaker 1: gathering space, show it off to all your friends, and
Speaker 1: Alexander the Second used it as a trophy space. He
Speaker 1: was really into collecting amber and filled it with a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting amber objects. But after plenty of eighteenth
Speaker 1: century Russian renovations, the room eventually is a hundred and
Speaker 1: eighties square feet with six tons of amber and semi
Speaker 1: precious stones. It was worth one hundred and forty two
Speaker 1: million dollars in today's US dollars. So this is quite
Speaker 1: a room. It's certainly nothing like my apartment and the
Speaker 1: amber rooms value was sure to get it some attention
Speaker 1: during World War Two from guess who? The Nazis. So
Speaker 1: we know all about the nazis genocidal ambition, but it's
Speaker 1: coupled with something else, and that's looting, looting from nations
Speaker 1: and individuals, looting money and cultural artifacts. And the Germans
Speaker 1: were majorly underfinanced at the start of the war, so
Speaker 1: to make up for that they had to steal and
Speaker 1: UM The U. S State Department estimates that they stole
Speaker 1: four hundred million dollars in gold from the occupied nations
Speaker 1: and one hundred and forty million in gold from individuals,
Speaker 1: and this is mostly from individuals who are sent to
Speaker 1: concentration camps. The UM Nazis would steal not only their
Speaker 1: personal wealth, but their jewelry, even go gold fillings. And
Speaker 1: along with this, Hitler wanted to build the best museum
Speaker 1: that ever existed in his hometown. That way, Germany would
Speaker 1: also be the center of world art and he had
Speaker 1: a wish list of works that he desired to have
Speaker 1: and managed to seize quite a bit of it. So
Speaker 1: skipping ahead just a tiny bit again, on June twenty two,
Speaker 1: ninety one, Operation bar Barrosa begins and that's when three
Speaker 1: million German soldiers are sent to the Soviet Union. And okay,
Speaker 1: so it goes without saying that your art and treasure
Speaker 1: obsessed Nazis are gonna know about the Amber Room and
Speaker 1: they're gonna know where it is, and it's the perfect
Speaker 1: treasure for them. It's worth a ton of money, and
Speaker 1: it's representative of another goal, which is to bring German
Speaker 1: works of art back to Germany. Um So the curators
Speaker 1: that Katherine Palace try to hide the Amber Room, knowing
Speaker 1: that the Nazis will likely take it if they find it.
Speaker 1: And uh. They try to take down the paneling, but
Speaker 1: because it's dried out and in need of restoration, it
Speaker 1: starts to crumble, so instead they paper it over, hoping
Speaker 1: that the Nazis won't notice. But that doesn't fool the
Speaker 1: German soldiers. They find it, disassemble the paneling and pack
Speaker 1: it in twenty seven crates to ship to Kunangsberg, Germany,
Speaker 1: which today is clean and Grad Russia and interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: this happens to be the center of the amber industry
Speaker 1: for the past three hundred years. So the Amber Room
Speaker 1: is reassembled in the castle museum at Kunnigsberg, and Alfred
Speaker 1: Rhoda is in charge of the museum and he is
Speaker 1: really interested in amber, and he studies the panels that
Speaker 1: make up the room and he puts it on display,
Speaker 1: and it's on display there for two years. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three, the Germans are in the same position Russia
Speaker 1: had been in two years earlier. Someone is coming, in
Speaker 1: this case the Allies, who might want the Amber Room.
Speaker 1: So what are they going to do with it? Can
Speaker 1: they hide it? And Rhoda is told to pack it up.
Speaker 1: This is where it's last scene in Crates. So August four,
Speaker 1: the Allies bomb the city and the museum castle and
Speaker 1: uh it's destroyed. About a year later, April nine, Stalin's
Speaker 1: Red Army enters the city, burns everything and annex as
Speaker 1: Kunnigsberg as Klein and Grod. So here's our question, what
Speaker 1: happened into the Amber Room? Where did it go? Does
Speaker 1: it still exist? In what condition would it be in?
Speaker 1: Since then, the majority of the Amber Room has been
Speaker 1: missing and everyone from the KGB two amateur amber room
Speaker 1: hunters have tried to find it, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of theories about what happened to it. They get
Speaker 1: weirder and weirder, so Sarah and I are going to
Speaker 1: name a few. One the crates were destroyed when the
Speaker 1: Allied bombs hit the building. Another is that the crates
Speaker 1: survived the bombing but were destroyed in the Red Army fire.
Speaker 1: Dissenters about this theory say that if the amber had
Speaker 1: been burned, the whole city would have smelled of it,
Speaker 1: because after all, it is tree resin. And interestingly, the
Speaker 1: way you test the authenticity of amber is by warming
Speaker 1: a pin, and if you can smell the scent, it's real,
Speaker 1: although I think counterfeiters can get around that by coding
Speaker 1: it in a real in a real layer. Another idea
Speaker 1: is that the amber is still in cullin and grads
Speaker 1: still hidden in. Another is that the room was spirit
Speaker 1: it away and hidden somewhere else in Europe. Um ferries
Speaker 1: range from the Czech Republic to Germany, or perhaps it
Speaker 1: wound up on a ship and is now sunken in
Speaker 1: the Baltic And then here some are of our kind
Speaker 1: of strange theories. Stalin had a second amber room and
Speaker 1: the Germans actually stole a decoy or Hitler's body wasn't burned,
Speaker 1: it was actually buried with the amber, which doesn't really
Speaker 1: explain where the amber room is. But we're going to
Speaker 1: go into a little more detail on some of the
Speaker 1: recent theories about the amber room. In two thousand four,
Speaker 1: British investigative journalists concluded that it had probably been destroyed
Speaker 1: in the Koenigsberg Castle fire. Um Stalin, however, wouldn't have
Speaker 1: bought this idea. He believed that the amber was shipped
Speaker 1: out before the bombings, and consequently in forty seven ordered
Speaker 1: that the castle ruins be searched for any trace of amber.
Speaker 1: None was found, and so the KGB and the ASSIE,
Speaker 1: the German secret police tried to find it. Instead, they
Speaker 1: gotta go at it. The search actually became important to
Speaker 1: the Soviets as cold war propaganda. It's still a patriotic
Speaker 1: point for many Russians, but there's more to it than that.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eight, two men Heinz, Peter Haustein and
Speaker 1: Christian Hannish insisted that Nazi gold and maybe even the
Speaker 1: amber room were in Deutsche Kata Randenburg, Germany, and it
Speaker 1: was slow going because they believed there might be booby
Speaker 1: traps guarding it. But Holstein later redacted his claim that
Speaker 1: they may have found the amber room and said it
Speaker 1: was just going to be gold. And we actually have
Speaker 1: a great um Julia Layton article on this, which is
Speaker 1: could treasure hunters have discovered Nazi gold? And I think
Speaker 1: there's an earlier podcast on it too, and in breaking news,
Speaker 1: this story is happening right now, um Fairgate Trofonov thinks
Speaker 1: that he's found the amber room under a bunker, or
Speaker 1: thinks that it might be located under a bunker in
Speaker 1: Kalin and Gras add and even if this hunt comes
Speaker 1: to nothing, the museum in Kleinograd is benefiting because, um,
Speaker 1: this guy's actually pumping out water from the old bunker,
Speaker 1: so you know, any maintenance is good, I guess. But
Speaker 1: they're they're looking right now. So maybe by the time
Speaker 1: we publish will have another thing to add to them,
Speaker 1: and if not, maybe we'll be able to put it
Speaker 1: on our Twitter, where we put some really cool history stories.
Speaker 1: You should find us right missed in history, so huge
Speaker 1: discoveries of Nazi gold and other artworks and loot have
Speaker 1: been made, though, and probably the biggest one was right
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty five when Patton's army discovered the Murkers mine.
Speaker 1: The Nazi gold we were talking about earlier was largely
Speaker 1: kept in the Reich's bank, but after nineteen five much
Speaker 1: of it was transferred to minds that were far outside
Speaker 1: of Berlin because it would be safer there. When the
Speaker 1: Allies get wind of the mine, they check it out
Speaker 1: and find an enormous room stacked high with gold and
Speaker 1: off of silver and cash and masterpieces of art from
Speaker 1: Rembrandt and Renoir and raphael Um. But if the Amber
Speaker 1: room is buried in some deep mind like this, would
Speaker 1: it even be okay? Amber is not like gold or silver,
Speaker 1: and the answer is probably not, according to amber expert
Speaker 1: Alexander Shadrinsky, if it's hidden in a mine, it's probably
Speaker 1: ruined and it needed to be restored even before it
Speaker 1: was stolen, so it would only have deteriorated more. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, we mentioned that the Russians were unable to
Speaker 1: take it down because it was crumbling, so you can
Speaker 1: only imagine what a state it was in after being
Speaker 1: packed and created all these times, and potentially buried somewhere.
Speaker 1: By the late nineteen seventies, the Russians gave up on
Speaker 1: seriously searching for the original amber room and instead commissioned
Speaker 1: a replica. Work began in nineteen eighty two, and it
Speaker 1: was a really daunting task. The craftsman working on it
Speaker 1: had to learn the skills of the amber guilds, like cutting, carving,
Speaker 1: and dying amber, which isn't something we really do anymore.
Speaker 1: These were long dead skills, at least on this scale,
Speaker 1: and funding for the project stopped in the mid nineties,
Speaker 1: but it was saved by a three point five million
Speaker 1: dollar donation from ror Gas, which is a German natural
Speaker 1: gas company. So it was this rekindling of a of
Speaker 1: the old alliance from the German Russian point of view. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Russian pression um and another special ten thousand dollars
Speaker 1: came from a woman in Manhattan to purchase great pieces
Speaker 1: of amber that had just come on the market. And
Speaker 1: this is according to the New York Times, And that
Speaker 1: was significant, not so much because of um the amount
Speaker 1: obviously ten thousand versus three point five million, but because
Speaker 1: these pieces of amber had been held in private collections
Speaker 1: for so long. They had to be bought as soon
Speaker 1: as they appeared, and the recreation of the Amber Room
Speaker 1: was entirely based on old black and white photos and
Speaker 1: the memories of museum curators. But then in craftsmen finally
Speaker 1: got to compare their work to the original when German
Speaker 1: art detectives heard someone was trying to sell part of
Speaker 1: the Amber Room. So they go to the sellar's lawyer's
Speaker 1: office and um, they end up finding an original mosaic
Speaker 1: panel in Bremen, which I think a uh, German art
Speaker 1: detective sounds like a pretty fun job. Our next job.
Speaker 1: So objects from the Amber Room had managed to survive, though,
Speaker 1: and we we knew where they were. Russians were able
Speaker 1: to hide things like tables and jewelry boxes and chest
Speaker 1: that's made up amber in Siberia. Um And in two
Speaker 1: thousand three the new eleven million dollar Amber Room opened.
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder dedicated it at the three
Speaker 1: hundred year anniversary of St. Petersburg. But there's still the
Speaker 1: question if the original Amber Room does show up, somebody
Speaker 1: manages to find it, who owns it? And towards the
Speaker 1: end of the twentieth century, countries got a little more
Speaker 1: serious about making efforts to return stolen Nazi gold and
Speaker 1: Nazi items to individuals in two countries, and if the
Speaker 1: individuals weren't around to receive them, um to donate them
Speaker 1: to humanitarian groups, especially those that benefit Holocaust survivors. But
Speaker 1: the Geneva Conventions dictate that items of cultural significance, so
Speaker 1: like your Rembrandt or your amber room, be returned to
Speaker 1: the country that they came from. So if you're an
Speaker 1: amber room hunter, it's not like you're going to be
Speaker 1: able to keep it for yourself. It's it assuredly would
Speaker 1: go back to Russia. And another note for would be
Speaker 1: amber room hunters, there is a so called amber room curse.
Speaker 1: Alfred Rhoda, the director at the Koenigsberg Castle Museum and
Speaker 1: his wife died of typhus while the KGB was investigating
Speaker 1: the room, and George Stein, an amber room hunter and
Speaker 1: former German soldier, was murdered in nine the Forest in
Speaker 1: your Munich. So maybe not quite the King Tut's Tomb curse,
Speaker 1: but still something to think about. And we'd like to
Speaker 1: mention that this was also a listener request from Gavin,
Speaker 1: and Gavin actually got to visit the recreated Amber Room
Speaker 1: and noted that you're not allowed to take photographs in it,
Speaker 1: which I think is interesting. I wonder if the flash
Speaker 1: would just bounce everywhere and blind everyone. And some people
Speaker 1: say that in the Amber Room you can feel heat
Speaker 1: rising off the walls like there's some sort of bizarre
Speaker 1: energy field, which you know, is something that the czars
Speaker 1: would report to that there was an energy field. But
Speaker 1: the heat in the Amber Room might just be because
Speaker 1: there are five hundred candles to make it extra glittery.
Speaker 1: So if you've had an experience at the Amber Room,
Speaker 1: send us an email and let us know History podcast
Speaker 1: at how staff works dot com. And that brings us
Speaker 1: to listener Mail. Today's listener mail is actual mail, which
Speaker 1: is our favorite kind of mail, and we got a
Speaker 1: postcard of the Devil's Postpile National Monument from a listener
Speaker 1: who said, Happy New Year's ladies. I really enjoy the
Speaker 1: show and I heard you ask for postcards, so here's
Speaker 1: another one to add to your hopefully growing collection. Keep
Speaker 1: up your wonderful work, So thank you, t KA. And
Speaker 1: we also got a really fabulous card from a listener
Speaker 1: named Rachel that she designed herself. Car Yes, it's really
Speaker 1: gorgeous um, she said, love your podcast. I'm a freelance
Speaker 1: illustrator and listen a lot while working. I was putting
Speaker 1: Valentine's together over the weekend and your podcast on great
Speaker 1: battle Horses came on while I was drawing the horse
Speaker 1: on this card. I don't know how well he would
Speaker 1: do in battle though, looks a bit skittish and it's
Speaker 1: really gorgeous and it has morrissy lyrics on the front.
Speaker 1: And if you'd like to check out her website, it's
Speaker 1: Rachel dash Harris dot com. But back to the Nazi gold,
Speaker 1: We've got a great article on it. It's called could
Speaker 1: Treasure Hunters have Discovered Nazi Gold? Mentioned it earlier? You'll
Speaker 1: find it on our website at www dot how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be
Speaker 1: sure to check out the stuff you missed in History
Speaker 1: Class blog on the how staff works dot com home page.