The Hunt For The "8th Wonder Of The World" Stolen By The Nazis | Myth Hunters | Timeline

1941 the Germans were marching through Russia not only were they seizing territory but they were also stealing priceless works of art one of them was the Amber R an extraordinary series of 18th century Amber Scream worth millions of pounds was considered a eighth

wonder

of the 18th century.

world

, this fabulous artifact was taken to the German city of Kbur, but 4 years later, when the allies retook the city in 1945, the Amber Room had mysteriously disappeared, was it destroyed in the fighting or was it hidden? It was the beginning of a treasure.

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that would attract some of the most powerful secret police forces in Eastern Europe there would be official and unofficial searches sponsored by East Germany for KGB confusion there would be false starts missing records and made up stories the pigsty would spend more money and more more time because they wanted glory it would become one of the great treasure

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s of the 20th century a search that continues today we are very close to finding the Amber Room but we only need help the mountains or in the southeast of Germany an area of ​​forested slopes and disused mines here for the last 20 years R hattenhauer has been searching for an extraordinary lost artifact: it is a looted Russian treasure that disappeared at the end of the Second World War and was never seen again hattenhauer is convinced it is hidden in a From the abandoned slates of the mine region we went to practically every mine in this county, no matter how old they were.

I estimate we have explored about 150 miles or so. Hattenhauer has kept a meticulous record of the search; he is so secretive that team members don't want to be. identified, we even have our own team of surveyors, if you call it that, drawing maps, measuring tunnels, measuring HS, all for your little group of treasure

hunters

, it has been painstaking and risky work, you can't just go in and open the tunnel where is. It collapsed because it is extremely dangerous and would need protection from falling stones, but after years of disappointment, Hattenhauer believes he has finally traced the lost treasure to a particular mine.

If he is right, he could be on the verge of a monumental discovery in 60-year search may have ended Hattenhauer may have found the legendary Amber Room was one of the most extraordinary artifacts ever created the so-called Amber Room was a series of panels that covering a palatial chamber the ancient Amber Room must have been absolutely glorious it would have been a

wonder

ful site, nothing on that scale had been attempted before, part of it was carved into three dimensional crowns and what made it absolutely astonishing was the incredible quality of the workmanship of this figure. I'm not sure if it's carved in one piece or not in one piece because the arm is a different color than the rest of the body.

This extraordinary creation was built by an 18th century German craftsman using millions of pieces of amber and on the back we have the mosaic as the background to everything. where they took slices of amber and joined them to form this mosaic without spaces. Everything is amber. Amber is a semiprecious substance that is only found in a few parts of the

world

. One of the main sources is the Baltic. coast of Poland was formed from the resin of prehistoric trees that grew in the region 60 million years ago, in the early 18th century the Amber Room became a symbol of German craftsmanship in its most magnificent form, it was considered an eighth wonder of the world and I think the reason for this is that no one had conceived the idea of ​​using amber architecturally.

I mean the sheer audacity of taking something we normally associate with ornamental jewelry and using it architecturally to effectively cover or laminate an entire room was incredibly foolish. uh Folly in 176 16, this extraordinary artifact was presented by the Germans to one of the most powerful emperors in Europe, Peter the Great of Russia, he took it to St. Petersburg, where he installed it in his Summer Palace on the outskirts of the city , there it remained on display. For more than 150 years, until the summer of 1941, in June of that year, Hitler invaded Russia. Not only were German forces interested in seizing territory in a meticulously planned operation, they brought with them teams of art experts with the intention of seizing anything that represented German craftsmanship.

He himself was a fanatic who fanatically sought out German artists of the 19th century. Works of art from the 18th century. The Germans had a plan. This plan dates back many years before the invasion. When cultural curators and bureaucrats were sent with travel guides and collected enormous amounts. lists of treasures that would be most important to the third rice that was high on their hit list was the Amber Room, they thought there was a connection between the Amber Room and German heritage, they wanted the material returned to Germany for the Nazis, Amber. Room represents German power, a time machine that took them back to the idea of ​​chonic knights, these um, these ancestors of Nazism and National Socialism.

In short, it was a symbol of a long history of German superiority and military power dating back to the Middle Ages as the Germans. Now swept by Russia Soviet curators found themselves in a race against time. Thousands of precious works of art had to be packed and shipped east as quickly as possible to Siberia, but when they arrived at the Amber Room they ran into a problem: it seemed too fragile to move. When the curators attempted to remove the amber from the backing boards, they discovered that it would become completely brittle. It might have been possible to remove it without causing any damage, but it was a big risk, so they decided to disguise the room as another room.

They got cigarette papers, which is pretty much all the curators had in their pockets, and glued them onto the amber with the idea that the cigarette papers would act as a Band-Aid to stop the brittle cracking on the top of the cigarette papers. . They put cotton. which was actually taken from Fushion, on top of that they then put sheeting on it and then wallpaper. It was the best they could do: discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and adree podcasts presented by world-renowned historians, all from historical hits, watch them on your smart TV. or on the go with your mobile device, download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of ancient Pompeii and the mystery of the princes in the tower to the life of Anne Belin and D-Day.

Register via the link on the description of September 1941, 2 months after the invasion of Russia, the Germans had surrounded Saint Petersburg. Here they made their way to the Summer Palace and its Amber Room despite Russian attempts to conceal it. The German looters knew exactly where to look. Consulting your accounting books and your plans. idea of ​​which room to go to they have an idea of ​​its dimensions and even bring packing boxes and are much more organized than the Russians who were called to evacuate it, the Germans did not share any of the Russian fears of damaging it.

I ripped out all that amber. I'm sure they numbered it correctly, put it in a big chest, and shipped it within a few days. The Amber Room was on its way from St. Petersburg to the German city of Kingburg, known today as automobile Leningrad. Here it was installed. in the city's Castle Museum this would be the last known resting place of the Amber Room what happened next would be murky and controversial in the winter of 1944 1945 the Germans were in retreat Allied planes bombed the German defenses in Kaliningrad the Red Army swept To the west, in April 1945, they had retaken the city when the Red Army arrived, the city is in flames, its people are intimidated and live in terror and every Red Army soldier who came to this Locust by Nazism wanted to destroy a bit of One of the first things the Russians did was look for the Amber Room, but as SC explored the city they couldn't find anywhere what had happened if it had been destroyed in the battle for the city, if it had been hidden somewhere or if the Russians had retreated.

The Germans took it with them and, if so, where had the mystery of the Amber Room begun in the spring of 1946 and the Soviet Union sent teams of art experts to comb the rubble of Europe in search of the looted treasures? from the country. The Soviets had trophy brigades that went through and looted everyone. every museum in every country they occupied a place they headed was Kaliningrad the last known resting place of the Amber Room the mission was led by one of the country's leading art experts anat kimoff had been the chief curator of the Room of Amber in the previous years After the war in Kaliningrad, he soon found a very significant clue: the Amber Room had contained four small stone mosaics.

Searching through the rubble of the castle he found fragments of three of them. All three were brittle and badly damaged and when you touched them they disintegrated again but the fourth was missing Kimoff couldn't even find fragments of the fourth mosaic, it must have been removed to eliminate it. This was very significant if one of these panels was missing what else was missing in the room. This is Kumo's logic, if the panel had been taken, the much more valuable Amber Walls must have been taken and in his opinion there is a clear case that the Amber Room survived the kckb siege, but if he had survived, where was he?

Cof's investigations took him to the final days of the war. Reports suggested that when the Allied bombs fell, the Amber Room was hidden underground. This was where he needed to look. Kimoff manages to get digging equipment and a team of volunteers and they begin. In his own excavation, he worked incredibly hard for a very short space of time. They had divers diving into booby traps and flooded tunnels, many of which would, as the Nazis electrified the tunnels before they left and left them with explosives. The Russians even blew up their Through collapsed tunnels he broke through the foundations of several buildings to discover underground bunkers that drained um flooded cells broke into um warehouses um several castles surrounding the city but could find nothing the search for the Amber Room would become In one of the great treasure hunts of the last half century, one of the first countries to join the search was the newly formed East German Republic (GDR).

This eastern part of Germany had been occupied by the Red Army in the final months of the war and was now part of the Soviet Eastern Bloc. It would become a key defender of communism in Europe and to ensure that there was no internal opposition, the authorities They created a highly efficient secret police, the so-called starzy. The starzi were housed in a large office block in Berlin. He collected information on millions of East German citizens in the late 1940s, when the Stars learned of the disappearance of the Amber Room, they embarked on their own search. The GDR was very interested in looking good in the eyes of Moscow.

The communists in East Germany. They had a guilt complex about invading the first socialist country, the first communist country in the world, and many of them thought they should do something to alleviate that guilt, so when the Soviets wanted to find the Amber Room, it was natural that the GDR Say yes, we'll help you, but the Starzi weren't the only secret police force searching for the Amber Room in Moscow. The Russians turned to the KGB based in the infamous Lubyanka for help for the next 30 years, both the Russian and East German secret police. would carry out separate searches for the Amber Room, there are two secret investigations in parallel, one promoted by the KGB and another promoted in East Germany by their compatriots, the Starzi brothers, but the search was neither very fraternal nor cooperative if the KGB like this I would think about it. it was on the track uh of the Amber Room uh I wouldn't reveal that to the stari uh because they wanted the glory and in the course of stazy uh they wanted to be the first to find out uh where the amber was because they wanted the glory so therefore you had this relationship a bit strained the KGB would concentrate their search on the last known house of the Amber Room Kaliningrad the former German city of Konigsburg while the Germans began their search closer to home in Berlin the first clue to the star came from a former officer Nazi Gard Strauss had been assistant curator at Carin Andrad Castle, where the Amber Room was displayed, and explained that as the Allied bombs fell and the Red Army drew ever closer to the city, he picked up rumors that the Room Amber had been encouraged by security, Strausser obtained several documents and spoke with the curator of the Amber Room and in his mind there were several key places where the Amber Room could be one of which was Gits Gitz is a small German town that is making leaps and bounds.

Inthe border between Germany and Poland, for a brief moment it seemed as if they had made a breakthrough, but as they look further into Strauss's evidence, it was clearly based on little more than here, they say it is not enough to put a foot down above a city, what they needed was something much firmer. But since there were no more clues to move forward, it was time to try something new. In 1958, the Stazzis did something unprecedented in the heavily regimented East German Society. A regime known for its secrecy went public in an article in the East German newspaper.

Fry Velt. a public call for help goes out there are clues found in ordinary people and now is the time to gather those clues so that the search can reach critical mass if you know anything please contact your local council contact the newspapers contact the KGB contact starzy contact whoever they want but now they help us as loyal citizens to rejuvenate this surch the German investigation was now led by a starzy agent named Paul Anker Paul Anker was a Nazi member of the Hitler Youth captured by the Soviets and shipped him off for re-education, a re-education he embraced wholeheartedly and then, as surely as he had been a member of the Hitler Youth, he became a colonel in the star, a fully paid member of the secret police within.

Weeks since the article appeared, Anko received a letter that came from a man with a remarkable story to tell. The man known by the code name Rudy Ringle told Enker that he had been digging through the rubble in the basement of the family home where he had found his dead father's identity documents together. with a bundle of documents, Ringle had read them and was terrified that his father had been a member of Hitler's elite personal SS military force in East Germany in the 1950s. Such connections could spell serious trouble. . Young Ringle had burned the documents and tried to forget the entire incident.

Now, 10 years later, the frv article made Rew work on his memory. Ringle told Anker that the now-destroyed documents included a receipt confirming delivery of 42 boxes and an order to take them to a secret location. The most important thing is that he remembered the transcription of a radio. message action Amber grp concluded storage technological access blown up casualties through enemy action Anor could hardly believe that his luck here was the first positive confirmation that someone had ordered the evacuation of the Amber Room and that the job had been completed Anker now had solid evidence that the Amber still had room, it had to be possible to find it by digging deeper into the Nazi archives.

Ena found documents that suggested the radio message had been sent from a small mining town in the Erab Burer mountains. The town was called Langfeld. There were now three possible hiding places for The Russians still believed that the Amber Room was hidden somewhere in Kalingrad. German investigations had initially identified it somewhere near the Polish border town of Idiots, now suggesting it might actually be near the German town of Langenfeld, but Lengfeld is surrounded by hills and valleys. There were hundreds. As for possible hiding places, the evidence was too vague. Anor needed something more concrete, but in the 1960s there seemed to be another breakthrough.

It came from a parallel investigation in Russia. For some time the KGB had been interrogating a man named Eric Cotch Cotch. He had been an important Nazi official throughout the war. He had been the gigher or head of Kaliningrad. He had been the man responsible for installing the Amber Room in the Castle Museum. Now in 1967 he finally admitted to the Russian KGB that during the last days of the war he had ordered it dismantled and finally admits that the morning room was part of a list of treasures that had to be packed up and evacuated and, in fact, due to that the evacuation could not have been successful, he claims that he was instead placed in boxes and buried In a secret bunker beneath a church in Kaliningrad there was compelling new evidence supporting Russian curator Anatoli Kimo's theory that the Amber Room was not was in the German urer, was still in Kenrad.

This evidence was taken advantage of by the Soviets, who immediately requested heavy excavation equipment and volunteers and set about turning the entire city over again. Once again the Russians searched Kaliningrad, but once again found nothing, if the Amber Room really was in the city, its hiding place remained a mystery in the meantime in East Germany. Paul Lker was still trying to confirm the evidence that he had gathered for eight years and that he had not gotten until then, in 1976, in the town of Viar Enker, records of Kot's personal horde of looted art were found. Cotch had been a major looter of Soviet works of art.

The record suggested that The Horde included 132 silver candelabras, the number was very significant, it was exactly the same number of candelabras as were in the Amber Room, they were one and Anker himself interviewed local people in Viar and gradually discovered a new trail that suggested that the coach had been lying to the KGB, one of the convincing stories he reports is that of an ambulance in which boxes and certain unknown but mysterious and incredibly valuable treasures were loaded under the aces of the Red Cross, it is That is, a neutral vehicle, a vehicle that was not attacked by air or ground, fled carrying these treasures, the record showed that they had taken the treasure south to the Erab Burer Mountains.

If Anor was right, the Amber Room was not in Kaliningrad at all. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together. Rudy Ringle's evidence had also pointed to the driver. Enko was now convinced that he finally knew where to look for the Amber Room that year Anker began searching for disused mines in the region, they began to zero out a number of mines and brought in heavy excavation equipment. and they dig and spend considerable amounts of money on this operation it is a huge operation involving a large number of volunteers Anker reduced The Surge to a m but the shaft was blocked by rockfalls the Germans dug hard they blew through the blockages but Anor was on the spot An unpleasant surprise when they finally manage to reach the areas they have mapped out as key locations.

What they discover, instead of treasure, are rolled up and burned pieces of Pravda. Pravda was the newspaper of the Russian Communist Party. The burned pages were dated July 1945. It had been used by the Red Army to roll cigarettes, Soviet forces had already explored the mine 31 years earlier and clearly had not found the Amber Room, but no one had bothered to tell Anker or his German colleagues that the operation had cost the Stazzis approximately half the money. million dollars had been a costly and embarrassing failure at headquarters Anker's bosses ordered an investigation into what had gone wrong the starzys were not used to failure they also made a second alarming discovery Rudy Ringle's story that his father had been a major in the SS was a complete fabrication the man PO Aner had built his entire case on was actually an injured postman who had no connection to the Amber Room story a fantasist with forged documents the German connection to the Amber Room It was fallacious and a fantasy but incredibly despite Even with this setback, the Starzi spent the next 10 years searching for the Amber.

Once a Stazi started the operation, they would not give up, there was no concept of profitability, it was all about the goal and therefore they would spend more. and more money and more and more time, although the end result may have been very, very slim, although the chances of finding the Amber Room were very, very small, that didn't matter in a communist system, you just kept looking, in fact, the search would only end when something much bigger changed the entire world 1989 the wall dividing East and West Germany collapsed communism in Eastern Europe collapsed East and West Germany met in the next Euphoria a German energy company agreed to sponsor the construction of a new Amber Room and giving it to the Russians would be a huge task to begin with, the art of carving amber had practically been lost.

They had a craftsman, but not the craftsman they had had in times past. People hadn't been carving amber that way. For so long the Worker had almost nothing to go on. They didn't know exactly how the room had been made. They did not have color photographs. They had to calculate the thickness of the mosaics. They had to calculate the size of the sizes. They tried to make panels and discarded them. Some of them decided they were just wrong, and of course the big problem was the color. This was a problem that no one had anticipated. New amber tends to be somewhat shiny if they just put untreated Baltic amber on the walls. the whole room would have looked lemon yellow, it would have been completely wrong, so they took one or two of the old coffins they had from that era that would have aged the same way and photographed them in black and white and then compared those blacks. and black and white photographs with the black and white photographs they already had of the Old Amber Room and from there they deduced that this gray is that tone on the coffin, so a matching one would be the one on the wall and so on.

It is how they rebuilt it whether or not it is completely correct, of course we do not know that the work took several years, finally in 2002, among much pomp and circumstance, it was erected in its former home at the Summer Palace on the outskirts of St. Petersburg . It may not have been the original, but it was still a spectacular sight, but despite this success it left one big question hanging: what had happened to the original Amber Room in 2004. Adrien Levy was one of two investigative journalists who They published the results of a 4-year troll through reports, letters and documents in Berlin, Moscow and St.

Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, the investigation had taken him back to 1945 and in the months immediately after the war he had found a new lead. That summer, the Russians had sent a high-powered art expert to Kingburg to search for the Amber Room, but the visit was almost over. His unrecorded name was Alexander Brushoff, professor at the Moscow State Historical Museum. What surprised him when he appeared in Kingsburg was that he had not attempted to protect the ruins of Kingsburg Castle to surround it and place a perimeter around it to protect the treasures. that were being stored in it, slowly the brush had pieced together a chronology of events up to the surrender of Kingsburg, the castle was intact and yet, between the surrender in mid-April and the occupation in late May, when it arrives, the castle was burned.

The question was whether the Amber Room had been built with the castle and, if so, who had been responsible. He came to an uncomfortable conclusion: he noted in his report and in his private diary that the fire was the responsibility of the Red Army, which saw the castle as the epitome. of Nazism, of everything they despised without thinking about what could be stored in the basements, one of which was the most precious treasure in the entire Amber Room, for which the Russians themselves had destroyed the Amber Room, there had It was a spectacular and embarrassing own goal.

He had solved the mystery in 1945, so why was the truth kept secret? Why did the Russians claim it still existed? For Levy, the answer was simple, the idea that the Red Army had carelessly destroyed one of the country's most important works of art was not a notion. The Soviet authorities could accept this, so instead they had invented a new truth: the

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was born that the Amber Room had been saved but was hidden. Furthermore, Levy discovered that by sending Anatoli Kuchumov to Kaliningrad the Russians had found just the man to spin the story since the German invasion Kimoff had been a troubled man in 1941, he had been personally responsible for the works of art in the Palace of Summer, including the Amber Room, it was he who decided that it was too fragile to move, it had been his decision to leave it where it was and paper on it, but the Germans had proven him completely wrong and had taken it away in a matter of days and Tumo returned after the war haunted by this decision wracked with guilt, so here we have a young curator, an ambitious young man who made a faithful decision that turned out to be a wrong decision: he did not fill the Amber Room, but the Nazis stripped it. in 36 hours in the postwar political climate.

Responsibility for such a disaster could mean arrest and even death. Politicized environment at the beginning of a cold war where the KGB dominates and distributes the blame. Colleagues are disappearing as a result of those decisions. The man responsible for the disappearance of the Amber Room will return saying that he found nothing. That wasn't going to happen,So Kimoff had found a new answer, one more favorable to Russia and himself. He had probably saved her life. Kos's verdict when he was sent there in the year 46 was that there was enough evidence to suggest that the Amber Room survived, which meant. who therefore could also provide evidence that he himself was not guilty of anything no crime had been committed the amam had not been lost Levy had finally gotten to the bottom of the mystery the search for the Amber Room had gone nowhere because It had been destroyed, but that hasn't stopped some people from continuing to search for it in the early 2000s.

Treasure hunter Gensel's helmet led a search for the Amber Chamber in the Czech Republic, near the German border, and claimed to have detected rumors that heavy trucks had transported the Amber Room to a disused silver mine when the war was ending just in the last days of the war all these trucks would come here there must be a reason meanwhile on the other side From the border in Germany where the mine has a second entrance the local mayor also began to dig, the measuring instruments showed a hollow space and metal objects. We want to check it now by drilling.

None of the Hunts have found anything, but one man still has hope deep in the mountains. Henry Hattenhauer continues to pursue his dream of discovering the Amber Room. He found a mine that he believes may contain important new evidence. We found traces of SS boots. Many footprints, all pointing to this place in the mine. We found a lampshade with five bulbs, which is very unusual. Electrical accessories are never found in these mines. They were closed in the 19th century before Hattenhauer used electric lighting, suggesting that the mine was used much more recently. It was definitely not used like an ordinary mine.

Personally, I am convinced that the umum is here. I'm absolutely convinced that I mean no, I know there are a lot of people who claim to know where the Amber Room is and people laugh at it, but we really have a lot of interesting clues that make us think that the Amber Room is here, beyond of the footprints and the Mysterious lights the M sha is blocked by a rockfall it would cost thousands of pounds to clean it money that hattenhauer and his group don't have we are very close to finding the room but we just need help we can't do it ourselves so far Hattenhauer He has not been able to find a sponsor, but he does not lose hope: such is the value and

myth

ical status of the Amber Room that it will continue to exert a magnetic attraction on treasure

hunters

despite all the evidence suggesting that it was destroyed more ago. 60 years old.