The Black Sun

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

In 1999 the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets finally admitted not only that the U.S. Army had been guilty of wrongly identifying the contents of the Hungarian Gold Train as enemy property after recovering it in 1945, but that several of its men had actively conspired in plundering it. Although the U.S. Department of Justice opposed all attempts at compensation, in 2005 the courts ruled in favor of a class-action suit brought by Holocaust survivors. A total of $25 million was ordered to be distributed to Hungarian survivors. A large number of paintings and other works of art taken from the Gold Train remain lost to this day.

Wewelsburg Castle, near Paderborn in northern Westphalia, Germany, was intended by Himmler to be the epicenter of the Aryan world. He had envisioned a vast complex radiating out from the castle's north tower, and over 1,250 concentration camp inmates died bringing the first phases of his plan to fruition. Today the castle operates as a museum and youth hostel. The crypt and the ceremonial chamber where twelve of his generals would meet around a round table, complete with the symbol of the Black Sun inlaid into the floor, are open to visitors.

The Nazis' nuclear research effort was centered at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under the physicist Werner Heisen-berg, although a military team under the scientific leadership of Professor Kurt Diebner was also in the chase. It is a matter of historical debate as to whether Heisenberg's team deliberately sabotaged their work or were simply lagging behind the Allies. Historians believe that Stalin deliberately ordered Marshals Zukhov and Konev to race each other to Berlin so as to secure the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute ahead of the Americans, sacrificing close to 70,000 men in the process. The special NKVD troops dispatched to the institute recovered over three tons of uranium oxide, a material the Russians were short of at the time, allowing them to kick-start Operation Borodino, their own nuclear program. The first Soviet nuclear test took place in August 1949, over four years after the first American explosion at the Trinity site in New Mexico in July 1945.

The Amber Room was commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701, and later presented to the Russian czar Peter the Great. It decorated the Catherine Palace, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, from 1770 until September 1941, when invading German troops carried it off to Konigsberg in East Prussia (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad). Fearing Allied bomb attacks, the room was again packed up in 1944 but then vanished. Opinions differ as to what happened to the room. Some believe that it was moved to an abandoned silver mine in Thuringia, others that it was buried in a lagoon in Lithuania. The latest theory suggests that the room was in fact burned by mistake by Soviet troops, with the Kremlin subsequently disguising their actions and propagating the myth of the Amber Room's survival as a negotiating ploy.

In 1997, the son of one of the German officers who had accompanied the wartime convoy from St. Petersburg to Konigsberg was arrested for trying to sell a small section of the room. Although it is not known how the officer got it, this fragment remains, along with an intricately inlaid chest, the only part of the original Amber Room known to have survived the war.