
The former STASI of East Germany with
Paul Enke had gotten an exact hint leading to a brewery in Ponarth,
South of K�nigsberg. The boxes with the artwork were said to be in one
of the cellar floors of the brewery. However, there were two breweries
in Ponarth:
The "Actien-Gesellschaft Brauerei
Ponarth" located in the Tuchmacherstra�e 20-22 and the "Actien-Brauerei
Sch�nbusch", located in the Sch�nbuscher Stra�e 1-5.
The English newspaper �The Sunday Times"
writes on August 24, 1969 that the brewery Sch�nbusch was ment. The
former director,
Mr. Franz Pohlenz, had left the secret to his neffew, who than told it
to the English newspaper.
The brewery Sch�nbusch was located
west of the railroad K�nigsberg-Berlin and had a direct connection to
it, which made it suitable as deposit and transfer place for all kind
of material. The reader of the report we published about the Amber
Room told us he lived in Ponarth and was just 12 years old in 1945
when he witnessed people burrying things near the brewery.
The
STASI had investigated much about Ponarth, so it was not hard to
determine the role of the brewery Sch�nbusch. In 1944, the cellars and
storage rooms had been used to store giant amounts of material which
had been brought from the occupied regions of Russia.
The
deposit in the brewery belonged to a special task of the
"Reichsministers for the occupied East territories". This "special
task" of the East Ministry was reason to beleive that it has not been
used for the Amber Room. There were deep personal differences between
the Ostminister Rosenberg and the Reichskommissar Koch. The STASI
found out that typewriters had been burried...
Something else is contrary to a use of
the brewery as a hiding place. The front lines from January to April 1945.
The sovjet troups were just south of K�nigsberg
and the Nazis knew that Russians would enfource these troups any
moment.
Yet
another trace of the Amber Room was leading to Ponarth. In February 1967
the Polish newspaper �Dzennik Ljudowy" reported about the
conversation of their corespondent with Gauleiter Erich Koch in jail.
Koch would have said that �the Amber Room is hidden in Kaliningrad in
a bunker under the old Polish Roman Catholic church of Ponarth".
The church and bunker than was destroyed.
However, several things were wrong in
this message. The church in Ponarth was evangelist and in 1945, it had
never been destroyed.
Until 1948, it remained the central evangelist church for the German
population. The �Old Polish Roman Catholic Church"
can only be the Steindammer church in the center of K�nigsberg.
Eyewitnesses reported that the church was destroyed by an
unexplainable huge blast in the first days of April, 1945.
The STASI soon checked the object and
really found a statue of "god Amor" in the cellars of the ruin besides
some other things. They carried small metal plates saying �Puschkin-Museum".
The bunker under the Steindamm had probably been under or directly
next to the church and was used as a deposit.
As long as the mystery about the Amber
Room is not cleared, people will still follow all serious traces in
K�nigsberg. The STASI found several artwork during their year long
searching but never any trace of the Amber Room...