The Amber Room
Sometimes referred to as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”, Russia’s Amber Room seemingly disappeared without a trace during WWII, and people have been trying to find it since.
The Construction
In 1701, the ruler of Prussia, King Frederich I, wanted to challenge the opulence, splendour, and beauty of Versailles at his Charlottenburg palace in Berlin. So he commissioned craftspeople in favour with the court to begin work on a room lined completely with amber. But, after over two decades of work and the craftspeople constantly falling in and out of favour with the court, Friedrich I died in 1713 with his Amber Room unfinished.
His successor, King Friedrich Wilhelm I, resented the whole Amber Room project and thought it was garish, so he had the completed wall panels sent to the Berlin armoury for storage. Then, in 1716, Peter the Great visited the Prussian court, and Friedrich Wilhelm I offered him the panels as a gift to solidify their diplomatic alliance.
Peter took the panels back to Russia where they became part of the Catherine Palace, located in the Imperial Village outside of St. Petersburg. The entire room wasn’t completed fully until 1745, 20 years after Peter’s death, and following its completion, it bopped around to a few different palaces in Russia in search of a permanent home before settling at the Catherine Palace for good.
Before we move on I have to describe the room to you, it’s so crazy it’s hard to believe this was an actual thing. “Twelve amber panels lined the high walls, creating a golden glow as if emanating from within. Eighteen rectangular mirrored columns separated these panels, and intricate gilded cornices decorated with carved wreaths, coated in gold foil, hung above each one. Faux amber mosaics were painted above the true amber, and decor like mounted gilded figurines, carved reliefs and candelabras covered the imitations” (Spivack, 2025). Doesn’t that sound incredible??!
WWII
In 1941, when the Second World War broke out, the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, asked German art historian Otto Kümmel to create a list of all German-created artworks currently outside of Germany for the army to bring back. This is just a way of justifying looting, which Nazis loved, but whatever.
By the summer of 1941, 3 million Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and by September, the troops reached the Catherine Palace. The army was ordered to dismantle the Amber Room, and they did so, packing all the amber panelling and decorations into 27 crates within 36 hours. The crates were then shipped to Königsberg, the capital city of the Kingdom of Prussia, where the room was then reassembled and put on display at the city’s castle.
However, the tides turned for the Nazis in 1943 when the Americans and British forces began heavily bombing the country. The Amber Room was once again disassembled and placed in storage to keep it safe. The panels and decorations that made up the room were last seen on January 12, 1945, by a German museum director. After that, nothing.
So, What Happened?
Of course, theories abound about where the Amber Room might be and what happened to it. I’ll start with one of the most widely accepted: that the room and all decorations were destroyed in the bombing. William Brumfield, a professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University, said “amber “has a relatively low melting point. Fires or any sort of heat…could simply destroy it” (Spivack, 2025).
After the Red Army seized Königsberg in 1945, and it became part of the Soviet Union, called Kaliningrad, two major investigations were undertaken by the Soviets to try to find the treasured room, but with no success. Soviet specialists continued to hunt all around the city and in the ruins of the castle where it was last seen.
In the 2000s, teams with more advanced equipment and technology came in and joined the search and though they found some artwork and jewellery in a hidden part of the castle’s basement, still no sign of the Amber Room.
Undeterred by all of this, some people still search for this mysterious and beautiful room, or some fragment of it. In October 2020, Polish divers found remnants of a steamship named S.S. Karlsruhe. It was a German cargo ship that they believed may have been carrying pieces of the Amber Room, but they found nothing.
Even if the Amber Room were found today, it would be nothing like it once was. “Amber is a complex material; it is quite fragile, and it changes over time. If the chamber was to be rediscovered, this would be the greatest happiness, [but] it would be a fact of history not a work of art. Because such artworks made of a fragile material require very delicate handling – they require a museum environment” (Sedunova, 2021).
Fear not, in 1979 the USSR began reconstructing a replica of the Amber Room guided by two remaining relics of the original room: a box of small items from the room and two black-and-white photographs taken just before WWII. The reconstruction took 23 years to complete, but now the Amber Room can be experienced at the Catherine Palace at the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum and Heritage Site in St. Petersburg.
Works Cited
Sedunova, Irina. “Russia’s “Eighth Wonder of the World””. BBC. 2021. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210506-russias-eighth-wonder-of-the-world
Spivack, Elana. “WWII Mystery: What Happened to Russia’s Amber Room?” History. 2025. https://www.history.com/articles/amber-room-mystery