German troops packed the Amber Room into 27 crates in 1941, and it has been missing since 1945

The Amber Room was a set of amber wall panels made in Prussia. In 1716 King Frederick William I of Prussia gave it to Peter the Great. Empress Elizabeth had it installed at the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the Romanovs' summer residence^†. After the 1917 revolution the palace and its rooms became Soviet state property. In 1941 German troops took the panels apart, packed them into 27 crates and shipped them to Königsberg in East Prussia. A Red Army veteran later said he saw amber fragments on the walls of Königsberg Castle's Knights' Hall in April 1945. The trail ends there. A Soviet report dated the room's destruction to 9 to 11 April 1945, when Königsberg fell^†. In 2004 British journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark wrote that Red Army troops burned it; Russian officials denied this. In 1997 German detectives found one of the room's four Florentine stone mosaics in Potsdam, where a lawyer was trying to sell it for $2.5 million for a client whose father, a German soldier, had sent it home from the Russian front. Russia began a replica in 1979^†. It cost about $8 million, partly paid by the German gas company Ruhrgas, and Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder opened it at the Catherine Palace on 31 May 2003. In 2020 Polish divers found a German wreck reported to possibly hold treasures looted from the palace. In 2026 the original panels are still missing.