Myth Hunters | Episode 5: The Missing 8th Wonder of the World | Free Documentary History

[Music] [Music] 1941 the Germans were marching through Russia they weren't just grabbing territory they were also stealing Priceless works of art one of them was the Amber Ru an extraordinary series of 18th century Amber screens worth millions of pounds it was regarded as an eighth wonder of the 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 had it been hidden it was the beginning of a treasure hunt that would draw in some of the most powerful secret police forces in Eastern Europe there would be searches official and unofficial sponsored by East Germany by the starzy by the KGB there would be false starts missing records and fabricated stories stazy spent more more money and more more time because they wanted the glory it would become one of the great treasure hunts of the 20th century a hunt that continues today we are very close of finding the Amber Room but we just need help the or mountains in southeast Germany an area of wooded hillsides and disused mines here for the last 20 years Henry hattenhauer has been searching for an extraordinary missing artifact it's a looted Russian treasure that disappeared at the end of World War II never to be seen again hattenhauer is convinced it's hidden in one of the Region's derel slate mines we went to practically every mine in this County no matter how old it was I I estimate that we have explored about 150 miles more or less hattenhauer has kept a meticulous record of the search it's so secretive members of the team don't want to be identified we even have our own surveyor team if you're going to call it like that drawing Maps measuring tunnels measuring HS everything for his small group of treasure Hunters it's been painstaking and risky work you cannot just walk in and and open the tunnel where it is collapsed because it's extremely dangerous and you need to secure yourself from falling Stones yet after years of disappointment hattenhauer believes he has finally traced the missing treasure to one particular mine if he's right he could be on the bridge think of a Monumental Discovery a 60-year search may be over hattenhauer may have found the legendary Amber Room it was one of the most extraordinary artifacts ever created the so-call Amber Room was a series of panels lining a palacial chamber the old Amber Room must have been absolutely glorious would have been a wondrous site nothing on that scale had been attempted before some of it was carved in three dimensions crowns and things what made it absolutely astonishing was the incredible quality of the workmanship this figure I'm I'm not sure whether he's carved in one piece or not one single piece because the arm is a different color to the rest of the body this extraordinary creation was built by 18th century German Craftsmen using millions of pieces of Amber and in the back here we have the Mosaic the background for the whole thing where they have taken slices of Amber and fitted them together so that they make this Mosaic with no gaps the whole thing is [Music] Amber Amber is a semi-precious substance only found in a few parts of the world [Music] one of the main sources is the Baltic coast of Poland it's formed from the resin of prehistoric trees that grew in the region 60 million years ago during the early 1700s the Amber Room became a symbol of German craftsmanship at its most [Music] magnificent it was regarded as an eighth wonder of the world and I think the reason for that is that no one had conceived of the idea of using Amber architecturally I mean the sheer audacity of taking something which we normally associate with ornamental jewelry and using it architecturally to to to effectively coat or laminate an entire room was uh was foolish incredible uh Folly in 1716 this extraordinary artifact was presented by the to one of the most powerful Emperors of Europe Peter the Great of Russia he took it to St Petersburg where it was installed in his Summer Palace on the city's outskirts there it remained on display for over 150 years until the summer of [Music] 1941 [Music] in June that year Hitler invaded [Music] Russia the German forces weren't just interested in seizing territory in a meticulously planned operation they took with them teams of Arctic experts intent on seizing anything that represented German craftsmanship Hitler himself was a fanatic fanatically searching for German artist of the 19th century 18th century [Music] artwork the Germans had a plan um this plan goes back many years prior to the invasion um when um curators and cultural bureaucrats uh were sent out with travel guides and they colle enormous lists of the treasures which would matter the most to the third [Music] R high on their Hit List was the Amber Room they figured that there was a tie-in on the Amber Room with the German Heritage they wanted the material back in Germany for Nazis the Amber Room represents German power a time machine that took them back to the idea of chonic knights these um these forebears of Nazism and national socialism it was in short symbolic of a long history of German superiority and Military might reaching back to the Middle Ages as the Germans now swept through Russia Soviet curators found themselves in a Race Against Time thousands of precious artworks had to be packed up and shipped East as fast as possible to Siberia but when they came to the Amber Room they hit a problem it seemed just too fragile to move when the Cur attempted to remove the Amber from the backing boards they discovered it would become completely brittle it might have been possible to take it down without doing any damage but it was a big risk so instead they decided dis skis the room as another room um they got cigarette papers which is pretty much all curators had in their pockets and they stuck it over the Amber the idea being that the cigarette papers would act as a Band-Aid to stop the fragile Amber cracking on top of the cigarette papers they put cotton w wo which actually pulled from fish on top of that they then put um sheeting and then wallpaper it was the best they could [Music] do by September 1941 2 months after the invasion of Russia the Germans had surrounded St Petersburg here they headed for the Summer Palace and its Amber Room despite Russian attempts to hide it German looters knew exactly where to look Consulting their um ledgers and their plans they have uh an idea of which room to go to they have an idea of its dimensions and they even bring packing cases and were far more organized than the Russians who were called upon to [Music] evacuated the Germans sh none of the Russian fears about damaging it they ripped all that Amber out I'm sure they numbered it properly and put it in big chest and shipped it out within days the Amber Room was on its way from St Petersburg to the German city of kingburg known today as car Leningrad here it was in installed in the city's Castle Museum this would be the last known resting place of the Amber Room what happened to it next would be murky and [Music] controversial by the winter of 1944 1945 the Germans were in [Music] Retreat Allied planes bomb the German defenses at kalingrad the Red Army swept West by April 1945 they'd retaken the city by the time the Red Army arrived the the city is on fire um it's people people are cowed and living in Terror and every Red Army soldier who arrived at this Locust for Nazism wanted to destroy a bit of it one of the first things the Russians did was search for the Amber Room but as they scoured the city it was nowhere to be found what had happened had it been destroyed in the battle for the city had it been hidden somewhere or had the retreating Germans taken it with them and if so where the mystery of the Amber Room had begun [Music] spring 1946 and the Soviet Union sent teams of art experts to comb the rubble of Europe for the country's looted Treasures the Soviets had trophy brigades that went through and stripped every Museum of every country they occupied one place they headed for 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 Amber Room in the years before the war in kaliningrad he soon found a highly significant clue the Amber Room had contained four small Stone mosaics sifting among the debris of the castle he found fragments from three of [Music] them the three is it happen were brittle far damaged and when you touch them they're disintegrated but the fourth was missing kimoff couldn't even find fragments from the fourth Mosaic it must have been removed to cooch off this was highly significant if one of these panels could be missing what else from the room was missing this is the logic of kuchumov if the panel had been taken the far more valuable Amber walls the Amber facings must have been taken to and in his opinion there is a clear case to be made that the Amber Room survived the siege of kernik B but if it had survived where was [Music] it cof's inquiries took him back to the closing days of the war reports suggested that as Allied bombs fell the Amber Room was hidden below low [Music] ground was this where he needed to look kimou manages to get some digging equipment and and a team of volunteers and they begin their own excavation he worked incredibly hard over a very short space of time they had divers diving into booby trapped and flooded tunnels many of whom would died as the tunnels were electrified by the Nazis before they left and left with explosives in them the Russians even blasted their way through collapsed tunnels he broke through the foundations of various buildings to discover underground bunkers he drained um flooded cellers he broke into um Stores um in various castles that ringed the city [Music] but he could find nothing the search for the Amber Room would become one of the great treasure hunts of the last half [Music] century one of the first countries to join the hunt was the newly formed Republic of East Germany the gdr this eastern part of Germany had been occupied by the Red Army in the closing months of the war and was now part of the Soviet Eastern block it would become a key defender of Communism in Europe and to make sure there was no internal opposition the authorities created a highly efficient secret police the so-call [Music] starzy the starzi were housed in a large office Block in Berlin here they gathered information on millions of East German citizens in the late 1940s as the Stars e got wind of the missing Amber Room they embarked on their own search for it the gdr was very very keen uh to look good in the eyes of Moscow the Communist in East Germany 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 uh which would assuage that guilt so therefore when the Soviets wanted to find the Amber Room it was natural for the gdr to say yes we will help you yet the starzi weren't the only secret police force looking for the Amber Room in Moscow the Russians turned for help to the KGB based at the infamous lubyanka for the next 30 Years both the Russian and East German secret police would run separate searches for the Amber Room there's two secret investigations running in parallel one being driven by the KGB and one being driven in East Germany by its fraternal uh compatriots of the starzi but the search was neither very fraternal nor Cooperative if the KGB thought that it was on the track uh of the uh Amber Room uh it would not reveal that to the stari uh because they wanted the glory and the course of the star uh they wanted to be the first to discover uh where the Amber Room was because they wanted the glory so therefore you had this uh slightly strained relationship the KGB would concentrate its search at the last known home of the Amber Room kaliningrad the former German city of konigsburg meanwhile the Germans began their search closer to home in Berlin the star's first clue came from a former Nazi officer Gard Strauss had been an assistant curator at Carin andrad castle where the Amber Room was on display he explained that as Allied bombs fell and the Red Army edged ever closer to the city he'd picked up rumors the Amber Room had been spirited to safety strausser got hold of various papers and talked to the curator of the Amber Room and in his mind there had been several key locations for where the Amber Room may be one of which was gits gitz is a small German Town which sits as stride to the German Polish border for a brief moment it looked as though the Germans had made a breakthrough but as they look further at strauss's evidence it was clearly based on little more than hearsay not enough to turn a city upside [Music] down what they needed was something much firmer but with no more clues to go on it was time to try something new [Music] in 1958 the starzi did something unprecedented in the tightly regimented Society of East Germany a regime notorious for its secrecy went public in an article in the East German newspaper fry velt it made a public appeal for help an appeal goes out there are clues that lie with ordinary everyday people and that now is the time for those Clues to be gathered together in order that the search can reach critical mass if you know anything contact your local city council contact the newspapers contact the KGB contact the starzy contact whoever you want but now you help us as loyal citizens to re at this [Music] search the German investigation was now led by a stazzy agent called Paul Anker Paul Anker was a uh Nazi a member of the Hitler Youth captured by the Soviets and shipped off for re-education um re-education which he embraced wholeheartedly and then um assuredly as he' been a member of the Hitler Youth he became a colonel in the Stars he a fully paid up member of the secret [Music] police within weeks of the article appearing anko received a letter it came from a man with a remarkable story to tell the man known by the code name Rudy Ringle told enker he'd been digging through Rubble in the basement of the family home here he'd found his dead father's identity papers together with a package of documents Ringle had read them and been terrified his father had been a member of the SS Hitler's personal Elite military force in 1950s East Germany such connections could mean serious [Music] trouble the young wringle had burnt the documents and tried to forget the whole incident now 10 years later the article in Fry velt had Rew worken the memory Ringle told Anker the now destroyed documents had included a receipt confirming the handing over of 42 crates and an order to take them to a secret location most importantly he remembered the transcript of a radio message action Amber Room concluded storage thech access blown up casualties through enemy action anchor could hardly believe his luck here was the first positive confirmation that somebody had ordered the evacuation of the Amber Room and that the job had been completed Anker now had solid evidence the Amber Room still existed it had to be possible to find it digging further through Nazi files Anker found documents suggesting the radio message had been sent from a small mining town in the erar burger mountains the town was called langfeld there were now three potential hiding places for the Amber Room the Russians still believed it was hidden somewhere in kalingrad German investigations had initially identified somewhere near the Polish border town of gits now they suggested it might actually be near the German Town of [Music] langfeld but lengfeld is surrounded by Hills and Valleys there were hundreds of potential hiding places the evidence was much too vague Anor needed something more concrete then in the 1960s there appeared to be another breakthrough it came from the parallel investigation in Russia for some time the KGB had been interrogating a man called Eric kotch cotch had been an important Nazi official throughout the war he'd been the galigher or boss of kaliningrad he'd 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 closing days of the war he'd ordered it taken down he at last concedes that the Amber Room was part of a list of treasures that was to be packed up and evacuated and in fact because the evacuation couldn't succeed he claims instead it was placed in crates and buried in a secret bunker beneath a church in kinr here was new hard evidence to back up the Russian curator Anatoli Kimo's theory that the Amber Room was not in the German esur it was still in Colin gr this evidence um is leapt upon by um the Soviets who immediately requisition heavy digging equipment and volunteers and they set out to turn the entire city upside down again once again the Russians scoured kaliningrad but once again they found [Music] nothing if the Amber Room really was in the city its Hiding Place remained a [Music] mystery meanwhile back in East Germany Paul Ena was still trying to firm up the evidence he had gathered for eight years he'd drawn a blank then in 1976 in the city of viar Anker Found Records of kot's personal horde of looted [Music] art kotch had been a major looter of Soviet artworks the record suggested The Horde included 132 silver candelabra the number was highly significant it was exactly the same number of candelabra as had been in the Amber Room were they one and the same Anor interviewed local people in viar he gradually uncovered a new trail that suggested kotch had been lying to the KB one of the compelling stories that he reports on is uh an ambulance in which crates were loaded and that certain uh unknown but mysterious and Incredibly valuable Treasures under the aaces of the Red Cross I.E a neutral vehicle a vehicle that wouldn't be attacked either by air or on the ground fled viar carrying these Treasures the record showed they had taken the treasure South to the erab burer mountains if Anor was right the Amber Room wasn't in cullin in conrat at all the bits of the jigsaw were coming together Rudy ringle's evidence had also pointed to the urger enor was now convinced he finally knew just where to look for the Amber Room that year Anker started searching disused mines in the region they begin zeroing in a series of Mines they brought in heavy digging equipment and they dig and they spend considerable amounts of of money on this operation it's a vast operation involving huge numbers of volunteers Anker narrowed The Surge to one M but the shaft was blocked by Rock [Music] Falls the Germans dug hard they blasted through blockages but Anker was in for a nasty surprise when they break through eventually to um the areas they had mapped out as the key locations what they discover rather than treasure is rolled up and burnt pieces of Pravda Pravda was the Russian Communist Party newspaper the burnt Pages were dated July [Music] 1945 they'd been used by the Red Army to roll cigarettes the Soviet forces had already explored the mine 31 years earlier and they'd clearly not found the Amber Room but nobody had bothered to tell Anker or his German colleagues the operation had cost the stazzi some half a million dollars it had been an expensive and embarrassing [Music] failure back at headquarters Anor bosses ordered an investigation into what had gone wrong the stari 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 that pow ler had built his entire case on was in fact a wounded Postman who had no connection to the Amber Room story a fantasist with Forge documents the German connection to the Amber Room was fallacious and a [Music] fantasy yet incredibly despite even this setback the starzi spent the next 10 years continuing to look for the Amber Room once a stazia has started an the operation they didn't give up there was no concept of cost Effectiveness it was the objective which was important and therefore they would spend more and more money and more and more time even though the end result may have been very very meager even though the the chances of finding the Amber Room were very very small that didn't matter in a communist system you just kept on looking in fact the sech would only end when something much bigger changed the entire en [Applause] [Music] [Applause] World 1989 the wall dividing East and West Germany came down communism in Eastern Europe collapsed East and West Germany were reunited [Music] [Applause] [Music] waed in the following Euphoria a German Energy company agreed to sponsor the construction of a brand new Amber Room and give it to the [Applause] Russians it would be a massive undertaking for a start the art of Amber carving had been virtually lost they had Craftsmen but not the Craftsman that they had had in times past people hadn't been carving Amber in that way for so long the Workman had almost nothing to go on they didn't know exactly how the room had been made they had no color photographs of [Music] it they had to work out how thick the mosaics were they had to work out how big the carvings were they tried making panels and discarded them some of them they decided were simply wrong and of course the big problem was the color this was a problem nobody had anticipated New Amber tends to be sort of bright if they just put boled Amber untreated 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 caskets that they had from that time that would have aged in the same way and they photographed them in black and white then they compare those black and white photographs with the black and white photographs they already had of the Old Amber Room and from that they worked out this gray is that tone on the casket so a matching one would be that on the wall and that's how they reconstructed it whether or not it's completely correct of course we don't know the work took several years finally in 2002 amongst much Pomp and Circumstance it was erected at its former home in the Summer Palace outside St [Applause] Petersburg it may not have been the original but it was still a spectacular sight but despite this success it left a big outstanding question what had happened to the original Amber Room in 2004 Adrien Levy was one of two investigative journalists to publish the results of a 4-year troll through reports letters and documents in Berlin Moscow and St Petersburg B the investigation had taken him back to 1945 and the months just after the war here he'd found a new clue that summer the Russians had dispatched a high powerered artart expert to kingburg to look for the Amber Room yet the visit had gone almost unrecorded his name was Alexander brushoff a professor at the State Historical Museum in Moscow what staggered brof um when he turned up in kingburg was that there had been no attempt to secure the ruins of Kingsburg Castle to ring it place a perimeter around it to protect Treasures that were being stored in it slowly Bruce had pieced together a chronology of events up until um the surrender of kingburg the castle was intact and yet between the surrender in mid April the occupation by the end of May when he arrives the castle was torched the big question was had the Amber Room gone up with the castle and if so who had been responsible brof reached an uncomfortable conclusion he noted on his report and in his private diary that the torching was the responsibility of the Red Army who saw the castle as the epitome of Nazism of everything that they despised without thinking of what might be stored in the cellers one item of which was the most precious Treasure of all the Amber Room so the Russians themselves had destroyed the Amber Room it had been a spectacular and embarrassing own goal brushoff had solved the mystery in 1945 so so why have the truth been kept a secret why have the Russians claimed it still existed for Levy the answer was simple the thought that the Red Army had carelessly destroyed one of the country's most important artworks was not a notion the Soviet authorities could accept so instead they'd fabricated a new truth the myth that the Amber room had been saved but hidden was [Music] born moreover Levy discovered that in sending Anatoli kuchumov to kaliningrad the Russians had found just the man to spin the yarn ever since the German invasion kimoff had been a troubled man in 1941 he'd been personally responsible for the artworks at the Summer Palace including the Amber Room it was he who decided it was too brittle to move it had been his decision to leave it where it was and paper over it but the Germans had shown that he was completely wrong and had carried it away in a matter of days anat assum of he came back after the war racked by this decision racked by guilt so here we have a young curator an ambitious young man who's made a faithful decision that turned out to be the wrong decision he didn't pack the Amber Room but the Nazis stripped it in 36 hours in the post-war political climate responsibility for such a disaster could mean arrest and even death he's come back into a heavily politicized environment at the beginnings of aold War where the KGB Dominate and guilt is being apportioned other colleagues are disappearing as a result of those decisions is the man who is responsible for the vanishing of the Amber Room going to come back saying he found nothing that's not going to happen so instead kimoff had come up with a new answer one more favorable to Russia and himself it had probably saved his life Kimo's verdict when he was sent there in 46 was there was enough evidence to suggest the Amber Room survived which meant that he could also therefore provide the evidence that he himself was not guilty of anything no crime had been committed the Amber had not been [Music] lost Levy had finally got 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 continuing to look for it in the early 2000s Treasure Hunter helmet gensel led a search for the Amber Room in the Czech Republic close to the German border he claimed to have picked up rumors that heavy lorries had transported the Amber Room to a disused silver mine as the war was ending why at the last days of the war all these trucks would come here there must be a reason meanwhile across the border in Germany where the mine has a second entrance the local mayor also began digging the measuring instruments showed some hollow space and metal objects we want to check it now by drilling neither hunt has ever found anything but one man is still [Music] hopeful deep in the O mountains Henry hattenhauer is still chasing his dream of discovering the Amber Room he's found a mine he believes may contain important new evidence we found Footprints from SS boots a lot of footprints all pointing to this one place in the mine we found a lampshade with five light bolts which is very unusual electrical fittings are never found in these mines they were closed in the 19th century before the use of elect lighting to hattenhauer it suggests the mine has been used much more recently okay it was definitely not just used as an ordinary mind personally I'm convinced that the EM is here I'm absolutely convinced I mean I'm not I know that there are many people claiming to know where the Amber Room is and people laugh about it but we really have a lot of interesting hints that make us think that the Amber Room is here just beyond the footprints and the Mysterious lights the mine shaft is blocked by a [Music] rockfall it would cost thousands of pounds to clear it money hattenhauer and his group don't have kind we are very close of finding the Amber Room but we just need help we can't do it ourselves so far hattenhauer has failed to find a backa but he's not giving up hope such is the value and Mythic status of the Amber Room it will continue to exert a magnetic pull over treasure hunters even though all the evidence suggest it was destroyed more than 60 years ago [Music] [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 61,468

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, free documentary history, myth hunters, history documentary, myths, mythical history, historical myth, religious artefacts, bbc history, strange history, alternate history

Id: 1KjHIAjQpK8

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024