The Amber Room
Subtitle: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure
By: [by] Catherine Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy
Publisher: Viking Canada
Published: May 21, 2004
Place of publication: Toronto, Canada
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780670044320
Copyright date: 2004
Description: The Amber Room was one of mankind's greatest treasures, a masterpiece of staggering ambition and value. Commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701, its vast and intricately worked amber panels- many times more valuable than gold- were sent in 1717 as a gift to Peter the Great of Russia. A symbol of Russia's glory, the Amber Room remained in the village of Tsarskoye Selo for almost two hundred years. When the Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet curators evacuated millions of precious objects; however, the Amber Room was too fragile to dismantle, so they were forced to hide it. But it was found: its panels were wrenched from the walls, packed into crates, and taken to Königsberg on the Baltic coast, where they remained until the Nazi surrender in April 1945. The Amber Room has never been seen since. Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy have gone along the trail of this great lost treasure and have at last unraveled the jumble of evidence surrounding its fate. Their search catapulted them across eastern Europe and into the menacing world of espionage and counterespionage that still exists in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. In a gripping climax, the Amber Room shows incontrovertibly what happened to the most valuable lost treasure in the world and why the truth has been withheld for so long. Its conclusions recolor our understanding of the Cold War and its aftermath.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 372-376) and index.
Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.