One of the greatest mysteries of history is connected with the name of the Nazi scientist Alfred Rode - the disappearance of the famous Amber Room. In the 30-40s of the last century, this man was quite famous in Germany. Alfred Rohde, being a scientist and curator of art collections at the Royal Castle of Königsberg, has collected a unique collection of amber works. It included jewelry, paintings, crucifixes, sculptural portraits. It was Rode who insisted that during the war years the Amber Room be removed from the territory of the USSR.
When the Soviet troops entered Konigsberg, all the halls of the museum in the castle were empty - all the exhibits, so guarded by Alfred Rohde, disappeared. For more than 70 years, the mystery of the disappearance of the largest collection of amber has been stirring the minds of all researchers and scientists of the world.
Alfred Rode served at the Königsberg Royal Castle for many years. He became famous as the keeper of an unprecedented collection of amber, and the disappearance of him and the entire collection immortalized his name.
German scientist and art critic A. Rode, wrote books about artists, described the exhibits of the Royal Museum, and was the creator of an unprecedented museum of world art. According to Hitler's idea, the exhibits of the museum were to be confiscated and exported from the occupied countries works of art. The cities of Krakow and Königsberg became the transshipment points for the temporary storage of valuables. A. Rode was in charge of the reception, labeling, distribution of the received values. The vaults of the Koenigsberg castle housed valuables exported from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
Rode used all his influence to bring the Amber Room to his museum in December 1941. The amber room was assembled in one of the halls of the Royal Castle, but not completely; the room allocated for this was smaller in size than the St. Petersburg palace, and some of the panels were kept in storerooms. The Royal Castle was bombed several times by British aircraft, and in 1944 it survived a great fire. Rode reported to the command that the Amber Room was partially damaged in the fire. In order not to endanger the valuable exhibit, the Amber Room was urgently dismantled, put into boxes and placed in different parts of the large castle. There is a version that the boxes with the Amber Room were lowered into the Anna mine, the entrance to which was closed by an explosion. Until now, the adits of this mine have not been examined.
Mystical coincidences and mysteries associated with the unique collection of amber items began in April 1945. It turned out that not a single archive contains documents related to plans to move these valuables. And although reports on numerous business trips of Alfred Rode have survived, none of the documents mentions the search for a place to hide valuables in the event of the fall of the city. Perhaps due to the rapid advance of the Soviet troops, the export of the collections became impossible. Rode himself did not leave Konigsberg after the arrival of Soviet troops, he sent his family to Germany in advance, and he himself stayed. Perhaps something held him back, or maybe he stayed to look after the hidden valuables?
Nobody showed interest in Rode himself. Immediately after the capture of the city, the Royal Castle was examined. In the first days after the surrender of Konigsberg by the Germans, the destroyed city was plundered. According to the participants in those events, not museum experts participated in the examination of the Royal Castle, but trophy teams who took out all the valuables found: from tools, machine tools to art objects - they didn't care. Alfred Rohde continued to keep the secrets of the hidden collections. Time passed. Mysterious deaths began to carry away people related to the missing objects of art from the Königsberg Palace.
In December 1945, the Smersh investigation department received a message about the disappearance of the Rode spouses. A neighbor claimed that three people came to them, who took Rode, presumably, to the hospital. The hospital had already prepared a death certificate and even an extract, which indicated where in the cemetery "Louise" the burial was located. For several hours, ten German prisoners of war pounded the frozen ground of Rode's grave, but it turned out that the grave was fake. Thus, someone very hastily removed a dangerous bystander who knew where the Royal Castle collections were kept.
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It is known that several years after the liberation of Konigsberg from the Nazis, a conspiratorial organization "Werewolf" operated in the city. One of its main tasks is to continue the operation to remove the valuables stolen in many European countries. There is information that the scientist was destroyed by the Werewolf soldiers, and the SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Gustav Georg Wist was in charge of this operation. It was he who was instructed to remove the Amber Room from the territory occupied by Soviet troops. Many years later, they found the son of this officer living in West Germany. According to him, his father died suddenly under strange circumstances immediately after completing a mission in East Prussia.
The mysterious death of the manager and housekeeper of the estate of the former East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch is also associated with the missing values of Koenigsberg. They knew that at the end of 1944, underground work was being carried out on the estate and that perhaps great values were hidden there. The prisoners of war who took part in the construction were shot. The entrance to the dungeons was subsequently found. It turned out that the underground passages from the estate were connected with the dungeons of Konigsberg.
According to a specialist submariner, there is an entire city under Konigsberg. There is even an aircraft plant mothballed by the Nazis. Several times they tried to pump out water from the city underground, but to no avail. Research has shown that the Konigsberg underground passages are connected to the Baltic Sea. Several years ago, two amateur search engines managed to find an artificial grotto on the coast. The entrance to it was mined. The guys tried to find a specialist who could clear the entrance. But soon both guys died: one fell from the balcony of the fifth floor, and the second went missing.
The chain of mysterious deaths associated with the search for the Amber Room continued. In November 1988, German scientist Georg Stein, an active investigator of the mystery of the disappearance of the Amber Room, wrote to his friend that he was on the trail of the Amber Room. Soon the body of a scientist with knife wounds was found near Hamburg in the ruins of an ancient castle. The mystery of the Amber Room was never solved, but the scientist's archive has survived. And it mentions the landfill "Olga" and "the values of Erich Koch", among which, most likely, was the Amber Room. The documents indicate that all these treasures departed from East Prussia in January 1945 on the warship Emden.
Georg Stein traced the path of values to Weimar. Georg Stein had documents confirming the numerous trips of the Swiss Red Cross trucks between Weimar and the Olga training ground after the capture of the city by Soviet troops. There were witnesses who saw huge boxes in the backs of trucks. In this operation, the participation of not only the Werewolf employees, but also the Western allies, as well as the brother of the President of Switzerland, Benoit Muzy, who died shortly after the operation under unknown circumstances is traced.
Another mysterious moment related to the Olga training ground. On April 19, 1945, Eisenhower inspects the Olga test site. He visited the POW camp and the art repository located there. It is not known whether the valuables were there at that time or not. When the Americans left the Olga polygon, they did not leave a single scrap of documents. At one time, the Soviet government turned to the American side with a request to publish the documents of the division that was liberating the training ground from the Nazis. But there was no answer.
The secret of the missing valuables, including the Amber Room, is still strictly preserved and everyone who tried to get closer to the solution died under strange circumstances. Due to numerous deaths, the problem of finding the Amber Room and other valuables exported by the Germans from Europe has acquired a mystical character.
It can be assumed that there are powerful forces that carefully guard this secret, because the cost of the stolen values is fabulous. Perhaps the treasure, over time, will appear somewhere at foreign auctions. Wait and see.