The Ember Chamber

During the 2nd World War, the Nazis had taken a ember room, piece by piece, literally. To this day, the Ember Chamber has been desperately searched for.

The Ember Chamber: Sacred Room from World War II

Nathaniel Rego

Built in 1701, the Ember Chamber was a sacred room  installed inside the Charlotte Palace, home to Friedich I, the first King of Prussia. All the room's walls, doors, windows, and so on were all engraved and built in pure ember, precisely what the king wanted. In 1716, King Fredric William II of Prussia presented the fully constructed Ember Chamber to Peter the Great as a gift. He admired it, following an alliance with Sweden. Eventually, the room was literally shipped off to Russia in eighteen large wooden crates even after originally shipped off to the Catherine Palace in 1755. 

After other 18th century renovations, the room was covered in 180 square feet of glowing ember and other semi-sacred stones, most often as it was since its establishment in 1701. It was worth $142 million. Over time, the Ember Chamber was a meditation room for Catherine the Great and a treasure room for Alexander II. 

This was all about to change because decades later, on June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler insisted that his evil forces, The Nazi Empire, searched for and recovered him the one and only Ember Chamber. This was during the Second World War (1939-1945). Operation Barbarossa launched three million Nazi soldiers in the Soviet Union. There, the Nazis invaded Russia in order to extract the Ember Chamber through force. The Nazis looted most of Russia but as for the Ember Chamber, officials and curators attempted to disassemble and secretly relocate the room. As the walls of the Ember Chamber began crumbling, they hid the room behind wallpaper, literal wallpaper. This ruse failed to deceive the Nazis and they barged into the room within 36 hours. Afterwards, the Nazis packed up the room, literally brick by brick, in wooded crates, 27 of them, and shipped it off to Konigsberg, Germany. The room from there was reinstalled in the castle museum on The Baltic Coast. 

The museum's director, Alfred Rhode, studied the room thru its historical panel, when World War II ended in 1945. In late 1943, Rhode was advised to dismantle the room and it crate it away. In August 1945, Allied forces bombed the city and turned the castle and its museum into ruins. At first, it was thought the ember room crates were destroyed during the fall of Nazi Germany. But, in 1997, German art detectives raided the office of a lawyer and found one of the Ember Chamber's mosaic panels. The lawyer was the son of a dead soldier from WWII but had no idea of the history behind the panel. 

The room turned out to be cursed as well because for example, Rhode and his wife, upon being in contact the room, died of typhus, while the KGB was examining the room. A replica of the Ember Chamber remains on display today at the Selo State Museum outside St Petersberg, Russia. The real Ember Chamber is today nowhere to be found, so far. Whatever happened to the room and wherever it currently is, we shall find it, once and for all.