It was considered the eighth wonder of the world, and its fate is still one of the greatest mysteries of World War II. What do you know about the luxurious amber room that was part of one of the palaces of the Russian Empire near St. Petersburg before it was seized by Hitler's forces and disappeared at the end of the war in 1945?
The American National Interest magazine published a report highlighting the "treasure room" made of several tons of amber and precious stones and plated with gold.
The Amber Room, which is closely associated with the Russian Empire, dates back to the early 18th century. It was designed by German sculptor Andreas Schlütter and built by a Danish amber craftsman named Gottfried Wolfram as part of the palace of King Friedrich I of Prussia.
According to reports, the King of Prussia gave it in 1716 to the Russian Tsar Peter the Great, in order to strengthen the alliance of the two countries against Sweden at the time.
The precious room was transferred to Russia at the time in 18 huge boxes and installed in one of the Tsar's palaces in St. Petersburg, and then transferred again in 1755 to the famous Catherine Palace in the Russian city of Pushkin, also near St. Petersburg, which was known at that time as "Tsarskoye Selo." It means "Caesar's Village".
When transferred to Pushkin, a famous Italian designer was invited to remodel the palatial room to match the grand new space in which it had settled, and the new design called for the installation of an additional dormitory shipped from Berlin.
When the expansion was over, the room had a total area of about 180 square feet, and contained 6 tons of precious gem- and gold-plated amber slabs, valued at about $176 million in today's money.
unknown fate!
During the Second World War and with the approach of the German army to Pushkin, the administrators of the Catherine Palace tried to dismantle and hide the dormitory room, but the dry dormitory was very fragile and began to crumble, so they contented themselves with trying to hide the room behind thin wallpaper, but Hitler's forces quickly discovered it.
After Hitler's forces took over Saint Petersburg and its environs, which was called Leningrad during the war, the opulent "amber room" disappeared, was dismantled and moved, and was last seen in the port city of Königsberg.
Its fate is still a mystery since that date, but some reports indicate that divers off the coast of Poland believe that they have found what may indicate the location of the lost treasure of the Tsar, according to the National Interest magazine.
The magazine report notes that one of the many hypotheses circulating at the time of the treasure's disappearance is that the Germans may have dismantled the hold room and carried it on board a ship during their escape from the cities where the armies of the Soviet Union were advancing towards.
Divers now believe it may have been on the German steamer Karlsruhe, which set sail from Königsberg in early 1945 with cargo and people and sank after being attacked by Soviet planes.
Divers from the Polish company "Baltictech" discovered the wreck of the aforementioned ship late last year 2020, after more than a year of painstaking search.
modern model
The National Interest reports that Russian authorities created a modern version of the Amber Room based on several black and white photos taken of different angles of the original room.
The construction process began in 1979 and ended in 2003 and cost about 11 million dollars. Russian President Vladimir Putin and then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder celebrated the 300th anniversary of the establishment of St. Petersburg in the new amber room in a unified ceremony that recalls the peaceful feelings that were behind the gift of the original dorm room to Russia .