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Written
in Vienna prison, 2006. Posted here Friday, March
7, 2008
Finding
the Amber Room
From:
David Irving, BANGED UP (Focal Point Publications,
London, 2008), PAGES 92-94
Picture:
Handcuffs are removed from Mr Irving in the Court
of Appeal after 400 days solitary confinement in
Vienna. Bedlow: Replica of the Amber
Room
DOWN in the prison yard
there was a new face, a fresh young Italian-looking
man. Like the young Sinti whom we shall meet later,
he recognized me from press reports, he said, and
made a bee-line over to me. His name was Andrew von
W., he announced, citing the name of one of
Austria's most famous philosophers.
He offered congenial,
amusing company, and I often shared my morning
stroll with him.
After a day or two he
initiated a subtle campaign whose purpose I never
really fathomed. His grandfather von W. had been a
famous Luftwaffe ace, he confided, and had left
behind two cases filled with uniforms, a Luftwaffe
dagger, and three black leather-bound volumes which
contained the inventory and location one of the
most sought after treasures of World War Two, the
fabled Bernstein Zimmer, the Amber Room looted by
German troops from Leningrad during the war. The
loot was concealed, he said, in a former Luftwaffe
bunker in what had been the German Democratic
Republic, the DDR, near Halle.
This was precisely how I
had picked up so many precious documents during the
years of my research, an unexpected tip-off. To the
questions which immediately arose -- why me? And
why had he not himself profited from this immense
wealth? -- he had ready answers. So I pricked up my
ears; after all I had little else to do; he was
good company, as said, and a cut above the rest of
those in the prison yard.
He seemed to have free
access to our jailhouse wing's pay telephone, and
the officers allowed him to speak for hours at a
time. As for the black leather volumes, he
described that these contained in copperplate
Sütterlin handwriting the inventory of each
piece of the Bernstein Zimmer -- he professed that
he himself could not read such Old German
handwriting well -- and of the bunker room in which
it was stored; helpfully, a map of the location was
glued into the third volume.
The easy telephone access
did momentarily puzzle me. I recalled that when I
had first arrived, Inspector Böhm, an
elderly prison officer about to retire, snarled:
"Even though the judge has given his consent, Herr
Irving, that doesn't mean that we here will permit
it, not by a long chalk."
 From
Cell 19 of C Block I began Operation Leonard, to
research the real history of the Bernstein Zimmer
-- not easy when six weeks elapsed between every
letter and reply. I began to check the details
through my friends. One Australian historian whom I
knew was an expert on the whole Von W. family and
their ancestors. Another knew all about the
Luftwaffe aces.
By the time their replies
came in, this Italianate gentleman in the yard had
already begun to lose me; he was making the
familiar mistake of all tricksters. It reminded me
of the saga of one Klaus Benzing, who had
offered me the hidden wartime diaries of Hitler's
Intelligence chief Vice-Admiral Wilhelm
Canaris back in the 1970s.
"Von W." embroidered the
story with more and more detail, as I mildly asked
for further particulars, and eventually he tripped
himself up. The map gave the precise geographic
coordinates, he said. It was glued in, unusually,
with North at the bottom, he recalled. He even
sketched what it looked like. He and his brother
had visited the location in the closing years of
the DDR, he said, using GPS (satellite navigation)
to pinpoint the precise location: they had spoken
with the farmer on whose land the bunker ruins were
-- the bunker was still there, partly demolished,
and overgrown with weeds.
I pointed out in the nicest
possible way that the DDR breathed its last gasp in
1989, and that GPS was not publicly available by
then. Of course the next day he smoothly and
seamlessly enlarged his story to explain that
blemish too.
I never really fathomed
what he was after; true, he got free coffee
handouts and other groceries from me in the first
weeks of his imprisonment, but I would have given
him those even without the tall stories.
His face vanished from our
wing some weeks later; newspapers reported that the
court had sentenced him to seven years as a
confidence trickster, having deceived the noble
lady whose name he now bore (he had changed it by
deed poll).
He had also used his charms
on Inspector John, one of the senior Block Chiefs,
as I learned later from the trusty, Zoran.
We were swapping yarns about the trickster, to
general laughter in the prison yard. Each had his
own story. Learning that the jailer Herr
John [Bezirks-Inspektor] was a
passionate huntsman -- a member of what Adolf
Hitler referred to scathingly as "die
grüne Freimaurerei," the green Masonic lodge
-- Von W. had mentioned that he had had a bit of
luck: he had inherited a hunting preserve in the
Tyrol, and he hinted that he would be happy to
invite the Inspector as his guest when happier
times returned. That explained perhaps the liberal
use of the telephone that he was
allowed.
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