By Tim Binnall
An exhaustive search of a sunken Nazi steamer ship suspected of possibly containing the Amber Room came up short with divers finding no sign of the legendary lost treasure. Discovered off the coast of Poland last autumn, the vessel known as Karlsruhe emerged as an intriguing albeit unexpected candidate for the final resting place of the ornate gold and wooden paneling that was pilfered from a Russian palace by the Nazis during WII and then lost during the chaos of the war's end. However, the nearly year-long saga has seemingly come to a close with the sunken ship being yet another dead end in the decades-long search for the Amber Room.
Baltictech, the organization that discovered and subsequently explored the sunken ship earlier this month, posted a final update from the search to their Facebook page on Wednesday. According to the group, their divers were able to inventory the entire vessel as well as the area surrounding the Karlsruhe over the course of the eleven-day-long underwater expedition. "We checked all tampered and opened crates. We saw personal belongings, spare parts, porcelain, tools, and military equipment in all of them. All the artifacts found were at the bottom, on the wreck.," they wrote, before lamenting that "we didn't find the treasure."
Intriguingly, however, the group indicated that there remains a faint glimmer of hope in the form of "crates at the bottom of the hold, under a two-meter layer of silt" that they were unable to reach. Baltictech went on to observe that "getting to them will be extremely complicated" as it would require disturbing "the structure of the wreck and the cargo," which is an endeavor that underwater archaeologists are unwilling to pursue. As such, it would appear that the case of the Karlsruhe will wind up being merely the latest in a long line of possible locations for the Amber Room that began with considerable promise, but ultimately failed to yield the treasure.