WWII wasn’t kind to the art world. Countless works of art were looted, went missing, or were destroyed. Among them: an entire room. The so-called Amber Room, an 18th-century room that was installed in Russia’s Catherine Palace, hasn’t been seen since the war. Heralded as an 18th century “wonder of the world,” the room was decked out with amber and gold leaf.
Shortly before Germany’s siege of Leningrad in WWII, Catherine Palace curators attempted to hide the room by covering up the walls with ordinary wallpaper. The ruse didn’t work though. Nazis looted the room, disassembled it, and reinstalled it in Königsberg Castle, which was then bombed in 1944.
That’s the end of the line for the Amber Room, right? Well, maybe not. Some claim that the Amber Room may have survived the flames – or at least its furnishings did. After all, when the Soviets surveyed the castle’s ruins in 1945, they couldn’t find any remains of the room.
If the room and/or its furnishings did survive, what happened to them? Nobody knows for sure. Some claim that Stalin had a second amber room, and the room the Germans looted in Leningrad wasn’t the real thing. Others say that it was hastily taken out of Königsberg Castle before the bombings, where it was possibly loaded onto a ship and ended up at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. In 1997, German art detectives heard a tip that someone was trying to sell a piece of the Amber Room. They tracked down the seller, and a mosaic panel from the room, but he was the son of a deceased soldier and didn’t know where the panel had originated.
In 2020, researchers were hopeful about finding pieces of the Amber Room after the discovery of the wreck of the Karlsruhe – a German ship that sank in 1945. But in 2021, divers announced they’d found nothing related to the room, though portions of the wreck are too deep to salvage.
