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Divers hunting for lost artwork from the legendary Amber Room looted by the Nazis are to begin searching a WWII shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea after photos revealed unidentified paintings and possible artefacts. The 12-man team from the Baltictech diving group will spend 10 days off the coast of Gdansk, Poland, at the end of May at the site where the German steamer Karlsruhe was sank by a Royal Navy submarine in 1945. Tomasz Stachura from Baltictech told MailOnline that initial observations of the wreck had revealed several 'non-military crates' as well as what appears to be...

In 1941, it was looted by Nazi Germany's Army Group North and transported to the former German city of Konigsberg, present-day Kaliningrad, and erected in Konigsberg Castle, where it remained on display until 1944. “Konigsberg was a transfer base for looted cultural objects, which would be stored in the city for further transportation to other parts of Germany,” says Anatoly Valuev, a researcher from the Kaliningrad History and Arts Museum. But as the city was engulfed by fire at the end of World War 2, the room mysteriously vanished. ***** After 23 years of scrupulous work, architects and historians were...

Human fossils, an amber room and a Raphael masterpiece all went missing during WWII.War has always brought chaos, and with it an opportunity for pillage and plunder. This was especially true during World War II, when countless pieces of priceless art, artifacts and other treasure were destroyed and spirited away from both Europe and the Asia Pacific. Nazis, in particular, systematically looted cultural property from museums, private homes and royal palaces, some of it to help Adolf Hitler build his proposed Führermuseum, but other armies carried away their own spoils as well. When the war ended, tales of real and...

A trio of aging sleuths - homeopath Leonhard Blume, 73, scientist Günter Eckardt, 67, and georadar specialist Peter Lohr, 71 - are convinced the missing Amber Room of the Russian Tsars lies in the Prince's Cave in the Hartenstein hills near Dresden. Third Reich scientists used the cave complex during the war - but all records of what went on there have mysteriously vanished from local archives. Lohr used radar imaging to detect underground booby traps and what appear to be bunkers under the soil.  He scanned the hill in September after claiming that a 'reliable source' told him of...

There is perhaps no lost-treasure mystery more seductive than that of the priceless Amber Room of Peter the Great, which disappeared in the chaotic closing hours of World War II. Now Bartlomiej Plebanczyk, an unassuming historian and museum director in northeastern Poland, believes he has found it. Elderly villagers told Mr. Plebanczyk that they had seen a German convoy unloading big crates into a secret chamber in a stark, moss-covered Nazi bunker near the Russian border in early 1945. So the Mamerki Museum, whichhe leads, recently completed a ground-penetrating radar scan of the derelict bunker that he said confirmed the...

Russia Returns Christian War Booty To Hungary Sunday, 26 February 2006 By BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest   BUDAPEST, HUNGARY (BosNewsLife)-- Priceless Christian books seized from Hungary by Russian troops as a Second World War trophy, were in the country Sunday, February 26, after Moscow returned them.   On Wednesday, March 1, visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin was to inaugurate the exhibition of the 136 mostly Protestant theological works, some dating back to the 15th century, which are considered as a "national treasury" here.       

MOSCOW (AP) - A legendary collection of gold objects from ancient Troy seized by Soviet troops in Berlin in 1945 should become Russian government property, a top Russian cultural official said in remarks published Saturday. But Anatoly Vilkov, deputy chief of the Russian agency that preserves the nation's cultural legacy, stopped short of ruling out the objects' return, as quoted by the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. The gold collection - excavated by amateur German archaeologist Hermann Schliemann - will be made federal property after it is inventoried, he said. It could be exhibited in Germany but only if its return is...

A century after it was first discovered in the Syrian desert and nearly 70 years after its bombed and broken shards were dumped into crates and buried anew in the cellars of Berlin's Pergamon Museum, the story of its salvation is itself an unlikely tale. "We have reconstructed more than 90 percent of the artifacts from the Tell Halaf museum," said German archaeologist and restoration manager Lutz Martin, 56. "Of the 27,000 pieces, there are only 2,000 left over" that could not be fitted back, he added... "The whole museum reached temperatures of over 1,000 degrees (centigrade) and then...

In the old times there were two suns above the Earth. Unfortunately one got broken to pieces; the pieces dropped into the ocean that now casts bits of "the solar stone" ashore. People call these pieces amber. It is a nice legend about amber; it slightly reminds of the story of creation, loss and restoration of the famous amber chamber in Tsarskoye Selo. One woman from the Russian city of Rostov was one of the first people who believed that the amber chamber could be restored. What is more, she made first considerable contribution into the reconstruction process. In 1976,...

Fate of Russia's lost art treasure revealed after 60-year cover-up John Ezard, arts correspondent Saturday May 22, 2004 The Guardian (UK) 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 Guardian Weekend, the truth is more squalid. Peter the Great's 18th century Amber Room, rated as the world's prime missing art treasure, valued at £150m, perished in the chaos of...

Image: via Food Court LunchAmong the chaos of the collapse of Hitler’s empire in April 1945 the biggest heist in history took place. Gold bars, jewels and stolen foreign currency with an estimated worth of $3.34 billion vanished from the Reichsbank vaults, in Germany.Reichsbank, Berlin 1933Image: German Federal Archive In the ensuing decades small quantities of this bounty have turned up in Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Sweden but the majority remains missing. Across the world search teams look for this missing treasure and the supreme prize of the legendary Amber Room, an acquisition from St. Petersburg during WWII,...

<p>Hidden for now behind a white screen from the prying eyes of visitors to Catherine Palace, the painstakingly re-created Amber Room glows with the yellows, oranges, reds of the late-afternoon sun. Intricately carved frames of amber showcase four elaborate mosaic pictures made of semiprecious stones. Amber roses and amber people and amber landscapes festoon the walls.</p> <p>It is, as museum official Yuri Dumashin put it today while marveling once again at its baroque extravagance, "the world's biggest jewelry box."</p>

Stolen Nazi gold may be in German cavern Last Updated: 3:11am GMT 20/02/2008 Treasure hunters claim they have may have found a haul of looted Nazi gold said to be part of a Russian collection that was dubbed the "eighth wonder of the world" before it was stolen. The resting place of the Amber Room treasures was reportedly made at the weekend near the German village of Deutschneudorf. Tests showed a man-made cavern 20 metres below ground that contained a large amount of precious metals. Treasure hunter Christian Hanisch [left] and Heinz-Peter Haustein at the site where the gold is...

CRAFTED entirely out of amber, gold and precious stones, it was a masterpiece of baroque art and widely regarded as the world?s most important art treasure. When its 565 candles were lit, the famous Amber Room was said to glow a fiery gold. Looted by the Nazis , its whereabouts have been a mystery since the dying days of the Second World War. But now a new German investigation believes it has found where the treasure, worth £120 million today, lies - in abandoned mine workings in the former East Germany. One of the few facts all historians seem to...

The hunt for the missing Amber Room of the Czars has taken a new twist with treasure hunters in a small town in east Germany about to break into a bunker they believe may hold one of the lost wonders of the modern world. The priceless room which once belonged the the King of Prussia Peter the Great was looted by Nazis during WWII and the original walls have been missing ever since.