Steven Spielberg would have called it Indiana Jones and the Eighth Wonder, and supplied a happy ending. In a damp cellar, guarded by deadly snakes and senile but savage SS men, the holy grail of Russian art treasures would triumphantly have been liberated.
According to evidence disclosed today in the Weekend Magazine supplement of the London-based Guardian newspaper, the truth is more squalid. Peter the Great's 18th-century Amber Room, rated as the world's prime missing art treasure, valued at US$269 million, perished in the chaos of the wartime collapse of Nazi Germany.
Sixty years of looking for it have been futile. And it was not destroyed or hidden as loot by the Germans who had stolen it, as often assumed. It was lost in a fire while in the hands of occupying Red Army troops in a castle they captured in Konigsberg on the Baltic coast, then part of Germany, now renamed Kaliningrad and part of the Russian Federation.
Russia -- according to the Weekend article -- inadvertently destroyed one of its finest artifacts and officials have been trying to conceal the fact ever since.
The room, fully panelled and ornamented in amber, then 12 times more precious than gold, was built by German craftsmen as a present for Peter the Great in 1717.
When Germany invaded Russia, craftsmen at the Catherine Palace tried to mask the amber with gauze and fake wallpaper. But when enemy troops captured the palace -- just outside what was then Leningrad, now St Petersburg -- they penetrated the disguise and dismantled it.
It was known to have been stored at Konigsberg. But there, after the war, its trail vanished.
The mystery of the disappearance of what was once called the eighth wonder of the world produced a welter of searches, books, conspiracy theories and, in Germany, an Indiana Jones-style film.
Last year the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, attended an unveiling of a replica of the room at the Catherine Palace, named after Catherine the Great.
Guests were given a brochure expressing confidence that the original amber room "has not perished and will be found as a result of properly organized searches."
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