A Russian veteran says he saw fragments of the legendary Amber Room in the closing days of World War II, reviving a decades-long debate over its fate.
Leonid Arinshtein, a Russian war veteran, recalls seeing what could have been fragments of the legendary Amber Room in the closing days of World War II.Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP
A Russian veteran said Wednesday that he saw fragments of the legendary Amber Room in the closing days of World War II, suggesting one of the world’s greatest missing art treasures burned at a German castle after it was seized by the victorious Red Army.
Russian officials denied the allegations, saying the fate of the jewel-encrusted masterpiece carved in amber remains a mystery after Nazi troops looted it from a Russian imperial palace.
The assertions by Leonid Arinshtein, a literature expert with the nongovernmental Russian Culture Foundation, echo a recently published book that claims the fabled chamber vanished in a fire after the German city of Königsburg fell to the Soviets.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Arinshtein, 79, recalled seeing fragments of amber decoration in the Königsburg Castle but said he realized it was part of the lost treasure only years later.
“I probably was one of the last people who saw the Amber Room,” said Arinshtein, who was a Red Army lieutenant in charge of a rifle platoon when he knocked on the castle door in April 1945. “But I was a 19-year old boy, and I didn’t understand what I saw.”
Arinshtein described how he entered Koenigsburg Castle, accompanied by his sergeant, as battles raged on the streets. He said he noticed fragments of a wall panel and a mirror frame in amber on the walls of the Knight’s Hall and asked the castle’s custodian about them.
The man nervously told him the rest of the amber paneling was kept in cases in the basement and offered to show Arinshtein around, but the young Russian declined.
“It didn’t occur to me that it was the Amber Room,” Arinshtein said. “I thought it was just some ordinary amber decoration, and it left me indifferent.”
When Arinshtein tried to tour the castle a couple of days later, he couldn’t reach it: The entire city was engulfed in flames, and plumes of black smoke filled the skies.
Only years later, when he saw articles about the Amber Room hidden in Königsburg, did he make the connection between the fragments he saw and the missing treasure, Arinshtein said. Königsburg was annexed by the Soviets and renamed Kaliningrad.
The elaborately carved chamber, made of nearly 1,000 pounds of amber, was a 1716 Prussian gift to St. Petersburg’s founder, Czar Peter the Great. Looted by the Nazis in 1941 from a former imperial palace, the Amber Room epitomized Russia’s losses in the war and inspired a series of treasure hunts.
An $8 million reconstruction of the chamber, partly funded by German gas giant Ruhrgas, was unveiled in St. Petersburg a year ago.
It says Soviet authorities knew the Amber Room vanished at the hands of its Red Army soldiers, but continued to claim it was missing as a convenient symbol of Nazi looting and destruction of Russia’s cultural treasures.
Russian officials hotly deny the book’s allegations.
“Such statements are aimed at rewriting history and discrediting Russia and the role played by its Red Army in World War II,” Mikhail Shvydkoi, the head of the government culture agency, was quoted as saying by Russian media.
Retired Gen. Valentin Varennikov, a World War II veteran who is now a lawmaker, denounced the book’s allegations as “invention.”
“It’s done by those who once again want to cast a shadow over the Soviet Union and its army,” Varennikov said in an interview Wednesday.