Amber Room Update

Regular readers of this blog will know that along with covering my primary interests of the American Revolution and U.S. Civil War, I like to occasionally post items that cover other periods of history in which I am also interested.

With an interest in World War II, I have long been fascinated by the story of the Amber Room. I posted a news story on it back in October, and it is still the MOST widely read post in the history of this blog.

Below is a second news article by the United Kingdom's Daily Mail on the Amber Room from January 2010 - absolutely fascinating stuff. In it, a historian claimed that he found the Amber Room somewhere in Kaliningrad, Russia, which used to be German East Prussia. I will see if I find an update on this article as well as more current news articles on the Amber Room. Stay tuned!

'Priceless' Amber Room of the Tsars, looted and hidden by the Nazis, is 'found' by Russian treasure hunter

By Allan Hall

The Amber Room of the Tsars - one of the greatest missing treasures of WW2 that was looted by the Nazis during their invasion of the Soviet Union - may have been found.A Russian treasure hunter is currently excavating in the enclave of Kaliningrad where he has discovered a World War II era bunker that the local German high command used in the battle for the city in 1945.If Sergei Trifonov is correct then he has solved one of the greatest riddles left over from the war - and will make himself into a multi-millionaire. He anticipates that he will break into the bunker by the end of the month to find the treasure.

Crafted entirely out of amber, gold and precious stones, the room made of numerous panels was a masterpiece of baroque art and widely regarded as the world's most important art treasure. When its 565 candles were lit the Amber Room was said to 'glow a fiery gold'. It is estimated to be worth around £150million, but many consider it priceless. It was presented to Peter the Great in 1716 by the King of Prussia. Later, Catherine the Great commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, outside the city.

The room was seized by the marauding Germans during their onslaught on Russia in 1941. Prussian count Sommes Laubach, the Germans' 'art protection officer' and holder of a degree in art history, supervised the room's transport to Koenigsberg Castle in what was then East Prussia.

In January 1945, after air raids and a savage ground assault on the city, the room was lost. Ever since the Amber Room has become the new El Dorado, a quest that enthralled the wealthy and the poor alike. The Maigret author Georges Simenon founded the Amber Room Club to track it down once and for all. Everyone had a different theory of what might have befallen the work. The German official in charge of the amber shipment said the crates were in a castle that burned down in an air raid.

Others think the room sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea in a torpedoed steamer used by the Nazis, or that it was hacked up by Red Army troops and sent home like sticks of rock as souvenirs of their conquest. Historian Trifonov, however, believes he has solved the riddle and that the treasure lies in the bunker 40 feet down in the soil of Koenigsberg. 'Believe me or not, it's there, 12 metres down in the sub-soil,' he said, pointing to the entrance of a bunker that sheltered the Nazi high command in the last hours of the Battle of Koenigsberg.

'This place was built in February 1945 with two aims: accommodating the headquarters of General Otto Lasch and storing the treasures of Konigsberg, a city under siege.'Königsberg, in what was then German East Prussia, is now Kaliningrad, the capital of Russia's westernmost region of the same name.

To test his theory, Trifonov has begun to probe the soil under the bunker using a ground-penetrating radar and has started to pump out water. He has already unearthed a brick-lined room. The bunker is 1,000 yards from the site of the castle that demolished in 1967. He says he has 'information' from archives that this is the repository of the fabled room, but he isn't saying where his sources are. The governor of Kaliningrad appears convinced and has provided financing for the dig. But many remain sceptical.

'He's a good storyteller but he can't prove anything,' said Vladimir Kulakov, an expert at Russia's Institute of Archaeology, who has also dug in the soil under the bunker in the search for the Amber Room. Anatoly Valuyev, deputy director of Kaliningrad's History and Art Museum, which takes in the bunker, was more hopeful. 'It's good that people think that the treasure is there. They have energy and the museum gains from this,' he said. 'We still hope that the Amber Room is somewhere in Kaliningrad,' he said. 'There are plenty of underground sites left to explore. If they don't find it here, they'll look elsewhere.'

Great Britain's Nazi King?

My wife and I recently saw the new film "The King's Speech," which is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. The acting was superb and the historical accuracy was fairly good (a few issues but nothing major) in my opinion. I have always enjoyed studying British history and took several courses on that topic in college. As such, the movie refreshed my interest in the nation's World War II-era history. It also increased my already immense respect for King George VI, his wife Queen Elizabeth, and the leadership they provided during the war.

At the same time, I was both alarmed and intrigued by how the King's brother, the former King Edward VIII (later known as the Duke of Windsor) was depicted in the film. Not that I thought the depiction was wrong - I thought the actor who portrayed him did a fine job. I was just shocked to see how the Duke conducted himself during his tenure as king. While I have ready plenty about the Duke of Windsor, seeing a visual representation of him on film allowed me to see him in a whole new light - and it was not a good one. While it was not covered in the film, the aspect of the Duke's life that intrigues me most was his supposed relationship with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany. In the late 1930s, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were considered to be pro-Nazi in British political circles and were the cause of great concern for Winston Churchill. Supposedly, the Duchess of Windsor (Wallis Simpson) kept in regular touch with Nazi authorities during the early stages of World War II when she and the Duke were living in France. It is no wonder that he was later appointed Governor of the Bahamas in order to get him and the Duchess as far away as possible from Europe.

Anyway, I did a major research paper on the Duke of Windsor and his supposed pro-Nazi sympathies about ten years ago when I was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. After reading some of the major biographies on him and consulting other secondary sources (I did not get into studying primary sources extensively until graduate school), my conclusion was that while he may have displayed incredibly bad judgment during this period - especially during his 1937 trip to Germany with his wife - and while he may have been charmed by all of the lavish attention provided to him by the Nazis, he was in actuality not a full-blown Nazi himself.

However, after reading some more about him and hearing about the contents of recently declassified FBI documents on the Duke and Duchess, I am no longer so sure. He appeared to be very impressed with Adolf Hitler as well as the Nazi Party, and consistently urged reconciliation with that regime during the war. It also appears that the British Government had to suppress the release of interviews he gave during the war (at least on one occasion), because he sounded so defeatist (concerning the British war effort) and complimentary of Nazi Germany. There is also proof that his wife was a keen admirer of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany as a whole.

I look forward to reading more about the Duke of Windsor in the months ahead and want to learn more about his alleged Pro-Nazi sympathies. However, there seem to be a lot more questions than answers when it comes to this topic. In the end, at least it is clear that his December 1936 abdication (while very difficult for the British people at the time) was a blessing in disguise for that nation, as it brought onto the throne the type of authentic, inspirational leaders they needed for the coming war - King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

The Amber Room - World War II's Greatest Mystery

I recently watched a TV show that focused on the hunt for the Amber Room, an ornate masterpiece of Russian craftmanship that was lost during World War II. Worth upwards of a quarter billion dollars in today's money, the Amber Room was built in the 18th century and placed in an imperial palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

During the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the Amber Room was deconstructed by the Nazis, placed in 26 shipping crates, and taken to a castle in East Prussia (modern-day Poland). It was apparently moved again in 1944 right before the Soviets conquered East Prussia and was never seen again. The whereabouts of the Amber Room now constitutes one of the greatest unsolved mysteries from the Second World War. Here is a short article on it from U.S. News Online:

Not Forever Amber - Treasure Hunters Seek Missing Room

BY CHRISTIAN CARYL

It vanished in the wake of World War II–an 11-foot-square hall walled with amber and other semiprecious stones and worth $142 million in today's dollars. One of the only pieces to be found is a small mosaic of jasper and onyx.

In 1716, the king of Prussia presented the Amber Room, a masterpiece of Baroque art, to Russian Czar Peter the Great. Catherine the Great later commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, just outside the city. "When the work was finished, in 1770, the room was dazzling," wrote art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov. "It was illuminated by 565 candles whose light was reflected in the warm gold surface of the amber and sparkled in the mirrors, gilt, and mosaics."

This opulent gesture of friendship between Russians and Germans would come to serve as a potent symbol of their divisions. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, his troops overran Tsarskoye Selo, dismantled the panels of the oversized jewel box, packed them up in 27 crates, and shipped them to Königsberg, Germany (today's Kaliningrad). In January 1945, after air raids and a savage ground assault on the city, the room's trail was lost.

After the war, the German official in charge of the amber shipment said the crates were in a castle that burned down in an air raid. A Soviet investigator found a charred fragment from the room. Others think the palace sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea in a torpedoed steamer or was stashed in an abandoned mine in Thuringia. Serious historians of the subject have little hope that the room will ever be found. Nonetheless, the Internet bubbles with Amber Room-related theories. A German film company even made an Indiana Jones-style movie based on the story.

War trophy. Reality caught up with the fantasies in 1997, when a group of German art detectives, including a former Stasi agent, heard talk that someone was trying to hawk a piece of the Amber Room. Police raided the office of a lawyer in Bremen who was trying to sell the work for a client–the son of a German officer who had accompanied the wartime convoy to Königsberg. The son said he had no idea how his father got the mosaic. One theory is that the crates of amber were bombed on the road and the father swiped a chunk of the room as a war trophy, figuring no one would be the wiser. In April, officials from Berlin presented the recovered mosaic to Russian President Vladimir Putin–along with an intricately inlaid chest from the Amber Room that had also turned up–in a goodwill ceremony faintly and oddly reminiscent of that first kingly gift just under 300 years ago.

Nathan Bedford Forrest in World War II?

As some of you may know, I have long been interested in studying the direct descendants of prominent Civil War commanders. In many cases, I have found that they led lives just as fascinating as their illustrious ancestors. While many are familiar with Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, few may realize that his great-grandson and namesake served as a brigadier general in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Here is some information about him below (via Wikipedia). In the future, I will post information about descendants of other Civil War leaders.

"Nathan Bedford Forrest III (April 7, 1905 - June 13, 1943) was a Brigadier General of the United States Army Air Forces, and a great-grandson of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Nathan Bedford Forrest II and Mattie Patterson (Patton). On November 22, 1930 he married Frances Brassler and according to the Arlington National Cemetery website, he had no children, making him the final male Forrest in his great-grandfather's direct line.

Forrest graduated from West Point in 1928 and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the cavalry. In 1929 he transferred to the Air Corps and subsequently gained rank rapidly.

Promoted to Brigadier General in 1942, Forrest was serving as chief of staff of the Second Air Force when he flew missions as an observer with the Eighth Air Force in England. He was reported missing in action when the B-17 Flying Fortress he was in, leading a bombing raid on the German submarine yards at Kiel, went down on June 13, 1943. The other members of the squadron reported seeing parachutes, and hoped that the General had survived. However, Forrest was found dead on September 23, 1943 when his body washed up near a seaplane base at Ruegen Island in Germany. He was buried on September 28, 1943 in a small cemetery near Wiek, Rügen.

His family was awarded his Distinguished Flying Cross for staying with the controls of his B-17 bomber while his crew bailed out. The plane exploded before Forrest could bail out. Tragically, by the time German air-sea rescue could arrive, only one of the crew was still alive in the freezing water.

In 1947, two years after the war ended, his widow requested that he be returned to the United States and buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was exhumed and reburied in Section 11 at Arlington - coincidentally, on grounds once owned by Robert E. Lee, his great-grandfather's commanding officer - on November 15, 1949.

Forrest was the first American general to be killed in action during the war in Europe."

Surviving Nazi-occupied Holland During WWII

My parents recently shared with me a fascinating photo of my Grandpa Heuvel (shown standing third from left) taken during World War II. A native of Rotterdam, Holland, Grandpa (1914-2003) served in the Dutch Air Force before and during the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Growing up, he told me about his and my grandmother's challenging experiences during this period. For instance, during the initial invasion, Grandpa was reassigned to the Dutch infantry forces (since the Air Force was quickly decimated by the Luftwaffe) and ordered to defend a bridge. However, after seeing a Nazi panzer division on the horizon coming toward him across the river, he decided that the bridge was not worth dying for and quickly left the scene!

To avoid being shipped to labor camps in Germany, Grandpa later joined the Rotterdam Fire Department (he is shown in dress uniform with his firefighter colleagues in this photo). He therefore, spent the bulk of the war fighting fires created by Allied and German bombing.

At one point, he was rounded up with other Dutch civilians and ordered to board a train for Germany (to undoubtedly end up in a labor camp). However, a sympathetic German guard allowed him to return home to presumably get a sandwich. Grandpa then went into hiding until things cooled down. The war was brutal for my grandparents and other Dutch civilians. With little food available, they faced starvation as they struggled to find food for their young children (my aunts and uncles). For the rest of their lives, my grandparents could not stand eating sweet potatoes because it reminded them of the rotten potatoes they were forced to eat in wartime Holland.

I was also told growing up that my Grandma Heuvel helped a downed British fighter pilot escape Nazi capture by dressing him up in women's clothes and smuggling him the the Allied underground. Fortunately, my grandparents survived the war and lived to immigrate to the United States and start a new life. In the future, I look forward to hearing more family stories about their wartime experiences.