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Another attempt to find Amber Room fails in Poland

The earth-penetrating detectors, which had previously shown huge hollow spaces in an underground concrete layer, turned out to be ineffective

Visitors looking at pictures of the lost Amber Room at the Amber Museum in Ribnitz-Damgarten (archive) EPA/BERND WUESTNECK

Visitors looking at pictures of the lost Amber Room at the Amber Museum in Ribnitz-Damgarten (archive)

© EPA/BERND WUESTNECK

WARSAW, July 12 /TASS/. A search for the missing Amber Room near the former German bunkers in Mamerki village, Poland, has so far been unsuccessful, Bartlomiej Plebanczyk, the head of the Mamerki Museum, told TASS on Tuesday after another failed attempt to reach a presumable hiding place.

"We failed to do that this time. We drilled two wells at a depth of 4 meters but we could not reach the immured place we needed," Plebanczyk said.

He added that the earth-penetrating detectors, which had previously shown huge hollow spaces in an underground concrete layer, turned out to be ineffective. A more accurate and expensive seismic exploration is being planned for autumn to check the hypothesis.

Previous tests by earth-penetrating radars suggested there were hollows in the soil of one of the bunker’s tunnels. It turned out to be an immured place located underground. Explorers drilled two deep wells in the foundation of one of the former German bunkers in Mamerki in mid-June but failed to find the secret place.

The bunkers are located about 62 miles from Russia’s Kaliningrad region, which was the German region of Koenigsberg before and during the war, where the Nazis brought the precious Amber Room from Russia’s Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg in 1941.

The Amber Room is a gift of King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia to Russian Emperor Peter the Great. The room was brought to St. Petersburg in 1717 and was fitted into Russia’s Catherine Palace in the Tsarskoye Selo imperial residence. Architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli added gilded carving, mirrors and mosaic panels made of agate and jasper to the room’s interior decoration under the rule of Empress Elizabeth of Russia (born 1709-died 1761), the daughter of Emperor Peter the Great. The Amber Room remained intact for about 200 years. It was stolen by German fascists who occupied Tsarskoye Selo during WWII.

A group of field engineers who arrived in Mamerki back in the 1950s-1960s brought a witness with them who claimed that the Germans had unloaded treasures there in 1945. They assumed it could be the famous Amber Room. The field engineers tried to find the hidden treasure for several days. They exploded all the passageways leading to that concrete facility. They halted the search after it had not crowned with success.

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