24 August 1941 — The walls of the Catherine and Alexander Palaces are bare.
28 August 1941 — German Army units 10 km south of Leningrad.
1 September 1941 — Leningrad burns.
13 September 1941 — Pushkin under fire from German artillery.
17 September 1941 — Fighting between German and Soviet troops on grounds of Catherine and Alexander Palaces.
19 September 1941 — Soviet troops withdraw from Pushkin.
c.21 September 1941 — The Amber Room is located by German army units under the command of Colonel Count Solms-Laubach.
c.30 September 1941 — General Erich Koch orders the Amber Room to be dismantled and moved to the Prussian Fine Arts Museum in Konigsberg, where it is to be placed in the care of Dr Alfred Rohde, director of art collections in the Konigsberg Castle Museum.
c.10 November 1941 — The Amber Room, packed into crates, arrives in Konigsberg.
1942-44 — The Amber Room is put on public display in the Konigsberg Royal Castle Museum.
March 1944 — Pushkin retaken by Soviet Army.
1 April 1945 — The Amber Room is packed into crates in the Knights Hall of Konigsberg Castle. Plans have been made to transport the Amber Room to Saxony in central Germany, away from the Soviet advance, but by the time all arrangements have been made, no trains are available for transporting the crates.
9 April 1945 — Soviet troops (artillery regiment) occupy Konigsberg Castle.
10 April 1945 — General Otto Lasch surrenders the city of Konigsberg to Soviet Army.
11 April 1945 — Konigsberg Castle burns. Fires may have started as early as 9 April.
13 April 1945 — Despite extensive searches in Konigsberg, Soviet troops are unable to find the Amber Room.
1945-present — Numerous subsequent investigations, both unofficial and those sponsored by the Soviet and East German governments, have failed to locate the Amber Room.
Many theories exist as to the fate of the Amber Room:
— It was destroyed by Allied bombing of Konigsberg in April of 1945.
— It was destroyed when the castle burned, leaving behind only a fine residue of ash, since amber is a resin and combusts at a relatively low temperature. It has been suggested that Soviet authorities did not realise that ash found in the location where the amber was thought to be hidden was in fact the remains of the Amber Room.
— It was loaded on to a ship leaving the port of Gadynia in 1945, but the ship was sunk by Russian submarines patrolling the Baltic.
— It was loaded into watertight containers on board an unmanned submarine with a limited fuel supply and sent into the Baltic. When the submarine ran out of fuel, it came to rest on the seabed.
— The amber was brought to Wildtenkend salt mine in Volpriehausen, Germany, and was either buried in an explosion there or was discovered by American troops and looted.
— It is hidden in a silver mine 100 km south of Berlin.
— It is buried in a lagoon near the town of Neringa in Lithuania.
— It is hidden in the Orinoco river in Venezuela.
1983 — German cabinet maker Johann Enste discovers a chest which was once part of the Amber Room inventory.
1992 — German police detain Hans Achtermann, son of a former German officer, on suspicion of trying to sell, through an art dealer named Keiser, one of the Florentine mosaics which once decorated the Amber Room. The officer had been a member of the German army cadre responsible for moving the Amber Room from Pushkin to Konigsberg.
31 May 2003 — At a cost of $11,350,000, the New Amber Room, a twenty-year-long reconstruction of the original, involving over 500,000 pieces of amber weighing more than six tons, funded in part by a $3.5 million donation from the German company Ruhrgas, is unveiled as part of the 300th anniversary celebrations of St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). The Amber Room continues to receive thousands of visitors each year.