Part of the plot of Salt to the Sea revolves around the Amber Room, a collection of rare art stolen by the Nazis. The Amber Room really existed, and it has a fascinating history. Construction of the Amber Room began in 1701. It was originally installed at Charlottenburg Palace, home of Friedrich I, the first King of Prussia. The installation of the Amber Room involved international collaboration. German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter designed the room, while the Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram constructed it. During a visit, Peter the Great admired the room. In 1716, this led the Prussian King at the time, Frederick William I, to present the Amber Room to Peter as a gift. The goal was to help promote a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden.
The Prussians shipped the Amber Room to Russia in 18 large boxes. They installed the room at the Winter House in St. Petersburg as a part of a European art collection. In 1755, Czarina Elizabeth ordered the room to be moved to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, named Tsarskoye Selo, or "Czar's Village." Italian designer Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli redesigned the room to fit into its new, larger space using additional amber shipped from Berlin.
After other 18th-century renovations, the room covered about 180 square feet and glowed with six tons of amber and other semi-precious stones. The amber panels were backed with gold leaf, and historians estimate that, at the time, the room was worth over $140 million in today's dollars. Over time, the Amber Room was used as a private meditation chamber for Czarina Elizabeth, a gathering room for Catherine the Great and a trophy space for amber connoisseur Alexander II.
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler initiated Operation Barbarossa, which launched three million German soldiers into the Soviet Union. The invasion led to the looting of tens of thousands of art treasures, including the illustrious Amber Room, which the Nazis believed was made by Germans and, most certainly, made for Germans.
As the forces moved into Pushkin, officials and curators of the Catherine Palace attempted to disassemble and hide the Amber Room. When the dry amber began to crumble, the officials instead tried hiding the room behind thin wallpaper. But the ruse didn't fool the German soldiers, who tore down the Amber Room within 36 hours, packed it up in 27 crates and shipped it to Königsberg, Germany (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia). The Nazis reinstalled the room in Königsberg's castle museum on the Baltic Coast.
The museum's director, Alfred Rohde, was an amber aficionado and studied the room's panel history while it was on display for the next two years. In late 1943, with the end of the war in sight, Rohde was advised to dismantle the Amber Room and crate it away. In August of the following year, allied bombing raids destroyed the city and turned the castle museum into ruins. And with that, the trail of the Amber Room was lost.
This has helped to inspire many conspiracy theories about the whereabouts of the Amber Room, and many historians have tried to solve the mystery. The most basic theory is that the crates were destroyed by the bombings of 1944. Others believe that the amber is still in Kaliningrad, while some say it was loaded onto the Wilhelm Gustloff and can be found somewhere at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. One of the more extreme conspiracy theories is that Stalin actually had a second Amber Room, and the Germans stole a fake.
