The Amber Room Mystery Continues

MSNBC 2006 - 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. (This was to cement an alliance. The chamber was actually mosaic panels backed by gold leaf and renowned for their luminescence). Looted by the Nazis in 1941 (used wallpaper to coat it over) from a former imperial palace, the Amber Room epitomized Russia’s losses in the war and inspired a series of treasure hunts.
Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP file
This is a reconstruction of the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, completed in 2003 at a cost of $8 million.
An $8 million reconstruction of the chamber, partly funded by German gas giant Ruhrgas, was unveiled in St. Petersburg a year ago.

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Chess, Goddess and Everything ~ Construction of the Amber Room began in 1701. It was originally installed at Charlottenburg Palace, home of Friedrich I, the first King of Prussia. Truly an international collaboration, the room was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and constructed by the Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Peter the Great admired the room on a visit, and in 1716 the King of Prussia—then Frederick William I—presented it to the Peter as a gift, cementing a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden.
The Amber Room was shipped to Russia in 18 large boxes and installed in the Winter House in St. Petersburg as a part of a European art collection. In 1755, Czarina Elizabeth ordered the room to be moved to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, named Tsarskoye Selo, or "Czar's Village." Italian designer Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli redesigned the room to fit into its new, larger space using additional amber shipped from Berlin.
After other 18th-century renovations, the room covered about 180 square feet and glowed with six tons of amber and other semi-precious stones. The amber panels were backed with gold leaf, and historians estimate that, at the time, the room was worth $142 million in today's dollars. Over time, the Amber Room was used as a private meditation chamber for Czarina Elizabeth, a gathering room for Catherine the Great and a trophy space for amber connoisseur Alexander II...

As the forces moved into Pushkin, officials and curators of the Catherine Palace attempted to disassemble and hide the Amber Room. When the dry amber began to crumble, the officials instead tried hiding the room behind thin wallpaper. But the ruse didn't fool the German soldiers, who tore down the Amber Room within 36 hours, packed it up in 27 crates and shipped it to Königsberg, Germany (present-day Kaliningrad). The room was reinstalled in Königsberg's castle museum on the Baltic Coast...

Another bizarre aspect of this story is the "Amber Room Curse." Many people connected to the room have met untimely ends. Take Rohde and his wife, for example, who died of typhus while the KGB was investigating the room. Or General Gusev, a Russian intelligence officer who died in a car crash after he talked to a journalist about the Amber Room. Or, most disturbing of all, Amber Room hunter and former German soldier Georg Stein, who in 1987 was murdered in a Bavarian forest.

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But the wildest theory has to be that upon Hitler's death, his body was never burnt, but was buried with the Amber Room.

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ABC News - This lavish chamber, estimated to be worth $150 million today, was born from the hedonistic desire of Prussian King Frederic the First, for a room made completely of amber. In the 300 years since Frederic built the Amber Room for his home at Charlottenburg Palace, it has dazzled kings and queens, trading hands between Russian and Prussian rulers...Never fully completed, the room's honeyed panels were sent to Russian Czar Peter the Great as a gift in 1716. The Amber Room soon became a gem inside the Catherine Palace, that rivaled Versailles.
The gesture sealed the Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden, and over the centuries, it continued to be transferred back and forth, as a symbol of friendship between the two empires...Many, who believe that amber heals, describe a feeling of light and heat coming from the walls. In fact, the tsars and tsarinas, and their guests who spent time in the Amber Room, all swore they felt an energy field.

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Russia Today - February 20, 2008, 10:56
Mystery of Amber Room finally solved? It's been lost for more than half a century, but German magazine 'Spiegel' says the long-lost Amber Room may finally have been recovered. Treasure hunters in Germany claim they've found an underground cavern, (near the German village of Deutschneudorf, on Germany's border near the Czech Republic; the area is home to a maze of Nazi underground storage rooms), containing nearly two tonnes of precious metals.
They say it will take several weeks to recover the treasure as the cavern may be booby-trapped...Its last known location was Kaliningrad, where it was reported lost following an allied bombing raid in 1945.

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CNN ~ Deutschneudorf is in Germany's Ore Mountains, and the mountain where the treasure hunters were looking was a copper mine until the 19th century. Though the mine was shut down in 1882, geologists have found evidence that soldiers from Hitler's Wehrmacht -- the German armed forces -- had been there: machine guns, parts of uniforms and explosives that are on display at the town's museum.

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Los Angeles Times - February 26, 2008 ~ By now, the Amber Room must count as the most thoroughly searched-for artwork in history. It has been sought on both sides of what was the Iron Curtain, from the Baltic coast to the Thuringian Hills, in caves, churches, salt mines, tunnels, bunkers, ice cellars and shipwrecks. In its day, the East German secret police systematically explored 150 possible hiding places, at one point spending $1 million to excavate a clay pit south of Leipzig. Almost no clue has been considered too trivial to pursue. In 1998, a German radio station, acting on a tip from an 80-year-old resident of Preila, Lithuania, dredged a lagoon in the town. In 2000, two teams, both using information allegedly provided by former SS men, excavated a defunct silver mine spanning the German-Czech border. A German journalist I know who worked for the magazine Der Spiegel was once sent to look for the Amber Room in Russia, based on information provided by his cleaning lady's boyfriend.

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Geography of Amber

Emporia ~ The Baltic Sea region has been the original source for amber since Prehistoric times. Although it is not known exactly when Baltic amber was first used, it can be linked to the Stone Age populations. Amber of Baltic origin was found in Egyptian tombs that date back to 3200 B.C., establishing the archeological barter and trade routes. Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have some 100 Neolithic burial sites in which amber is included. European sea trade was dominated by the Vikings from 800-1000 A.D., with the "gold from the north", and Scandinavia continues to be a major exporter of amber today.

It is also found in some states of east coast U.S., Greenland, Canada, Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Romania, Tanzania, Mexico, Japan, Sicily, Myanmar and New Zealand.

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The Powers of Amber ~ (Excerpts from The Amber Room .org ~ brilliantly detailed!)

1. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Germans, Baltics and Slavic peoples considered amber to be "tears of the sun" or "urin of the gods". Later, it was thought to be petrified honey or hardened oil.

2. Parts of trees, feathers, leaves, flowers, insects or lizards have been covered and conserved by the resin.

3. Amber developed more than 50 million years ago from the resin of giant needle forests, which were flooded later on by the Baltic Sea. The resin of the Amber Pine flowed for thousands of generations into the ground forming a layer together with other dead plants, which has been conserved for millions of years. Storms recover these layers and bring the Amber to shore.

4. There is white, yellow, red and brown Amber and more seldom even black, green and blue Amber. There are also differences in transparency reaching from clear to dim.

5. Amber has been used as artistic material, as money and as exchange material and until the 18th century even as medicine. One mixed it with oil and creme or wore a piece as a necklace protecting one against bad spirits and illness. Amber was said to heal because of a physical condition. Amber becomes magnetic, if one rubs it against the clothes, which was considered to be "supernatural".

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Amber has healing and spiritual power for memory loss; eccentric behavior; anxiety; inability to make decisions; thyroid, inner ear & neuro-tissue strengthener; activates altruistic nature; realization of the spiritual intellect. It symbolises power, command and authority; allows the body to heal itself; heightens creativity. Many ancient traditions associate amber with the universal life force; it helps discovery of ancient wisdom and knowledge. Amber is usually associated with forms of the colour yellow, the colour of optimism.

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So is it possible that the room in its entirety may be found? The answer is, (after all this time, when those who knew its secrets have moved on from this life), a resounding NO. A genuine panel was found in 1997, suggesting that at least a few other pieces may still be around. But where?