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Oh, hi, everyone.
It's Mick Sullivan, which means this is The Past and the Curious.
And I'm getting ready.
I'm getting excited to go up to Boston on Sunday, April 26th.
I'm going to be on the same day as National Geographic.
Greeking out.
Good friends of mine.
Love them.
And also Grim Grimmer and Grimmest is going to be after me.
So hey, if you're anywhere near Boston at that point in time or you're thinking about making a trip, I can't wait to see you.
So this episode that you are about to listen to is in response to some requests.
I get a lot of requests for things that have to do with the era around World War Two.
These are not stories about like battles and all that sort of stuff.
They're about two really fascinating things.
One.
The Amber Room, a very historic, very important, very artistically beautiful room that disappeared.
No one knows where it is.
Have you seen it?
You can't miss it if you do.
Also, we're docking secret codes, which means we're going to talk Alan Turing.
We're going to talk about the Enigma machine.
And you might learn a couple tips to do some codes yourself.
The eighth wonder of the world is missing.
And it has been missing since 1945.
Well, actually, one of the many so-called eighth wonders of the world is missing.
See, it's kind of complicated.
Most people are in agreement about the first seven wonders of the ancient world, your lighthouse of Alexandria and the Great Pyramid type of stuff.
Then there's the seven wonders of the modern world, your Great Wall of China and Leaning Tower of Pisa, type of stuff.
It's all relatively informal and something people just kind of say, which is why no one seems to actually agree on the eighth wonder of the world.
It's just become a name used to describe impressive stuff, like Machu Picchu, the Grand Canyon.
Oh, yeah, even, yeah, even the Erie Canal.
Enough of that.
But in addition to those, many consider the famous Amber Room as a great choice for number eight.
And with good reason.
It is, or rather, was, incredible.
The Amber Room was just that.
A room.
Ornate.
Exquisite. eye-poppingly artistically carved and crafted from amber.
The sheer amount of amber and the incredible detail work is hard to comprehend.
It's hard to imagine.
Picture what you think is a lot of amber and then picture more and then some more.
And that's still probably not enough amber.
It was an entire huge opulent room fit for the most preposterously phenomenal palace.
Which is why it's alarming to so many people that the entire room is just lost.
All we know for sure is that it disappeared at the end of World War II.
All right, first, let's talk about amber.
It's a hard yellowish goldish, even reddish-orange hard, stone-like substance that has been coveted for much of our time here on Earth.
If you've seen the movie Jurassic Park, you might recall that amber is fossilized tree resin.
Sort of like the sap that fills up a cut in an evergreen tree.
When fossilized, that stuff is very hard.
But amber also floats in salt water, which means the Baltic Sea region, where it is commonly found.
Amber can sometimes come loose from where it was deposited on the sea floor and float up to the surface.
It's also always been very valuable.
At some points in history, amber has been much more valuable than gold.
As much as 12 times more valuable than gold at some points in the past.
So this is precisely why a European king in the 1600s decided he wanted an entire room made of this stuff.
King Frederick I of Prussia hired a few of the world's greatest amber experts and artists and then spent an absolutely obscene amount of money on a very special, one-of-a-kind room made of amber to be installed in Charlottenburg Castle.
Oh, you know what I say.
Nothing says glamour like amber.
Is that what you say?
Well, yeah, it just did.
Didn't you hear me?
Can't you think of anything else to spend this money on?
What?
No, I want an amber room.
When the project kicked off in 1701, glamour and glitz was the goal.
Nothing like it had ever been created and it was supposed to impress.
Up until this point in time, rooms had only been made with boring stuff like wood, plaster, bricks.
What a snooze!
But this wasn't going to do for the King of Prussia.
By the way, Prussia is not me mispronouncing Russia.
Prussia was a German kingdom of its own for centuries, but today is mostly part of Germany.
So the first home for the Amber Room was in present-day Berlin, a German city today that was once part of the Prussian Empire.
But the Amber Room eventually left Prussia for Russia, thanks to our tall old pal Peter the Great and a visit he made in 1716 to Frederick I's son, who had taken over Prussia, King Frederick William.
Frederick William, what an amazing room.
You know, I've always said nothing says glamour like Amber.
Yeah, my dad said that too.
Before he died, of course.
Say, Mr. The Great, you're tall.
How tall are you?
Six seven oh oh, we're still doing that.
What?
What do you mean?
It's only the 1700s.
We're centuries away from rapidly changing meme culture, you know.
If you prefer, instead of peter the great, you can't call me mimer the great.
No oh anyway, what were we talking about?
Oh yes, this amber room.
It is so much.
Really over the top.
I love it.
Well, personally, I think it's a bit too much.
I never really saw the need for a room made of amber like my father did.
But hey, if you like it so much, how about we forge a little Prussian-Russian alliance?
We can be rhyming, besties.
If you say yes, I'll let you have the room.
Oh, that sounds like a good deal.
But how do I take a room from your palace?
Peter had a good question.
But there was an equally good answer.
All the amber wasn't really the walls, it was just attached to the walls.
The fancy fossilized sap was actually mounted to panels, many of which were backed with sheets of bronze and gold foil to add extra shimmer to the translucent amber.
Big pieces of amber, little pieces were arranged perfectly, with ornate carvings and rich details, all made to attach to the walls of the palace.
So really, the walls were pretty typical.
It's just that they were entirely covered with these removable sections that fastened to every surface and covered everything in yeah, amber.
But with a little care, they could be taken off the walls.
They were fragile, of course, but then they could be reinstalled somewhere else, converting the new room from a boring old wooden paint room to an exciting and very yellow amber room.
Peter couldn't pass up the deal, so he had the room carefully taken apart and sent to Russia.
But he never really did anything with them.
He must have gotten busy or realized he didn't look that good in yellow because the Amber Room just kind of sat around in pieces until his daughter, Empress Elizabeth, decided to install them in Catherine Palace near St.
Petersburg.
She even hired more amber artists to add more lavish panels.
And with each new Russian ruler, the amber room was a bit like a snowball rolling down a mountain.
Catherine the Great later added even more amber and extravagant art to the room.
And in the end, the amber installed in Russia weighed nothing.
Six tons.
That's over 13,000 pounds.
And it is said to have covered 590 square feet of palace walls and ceiling.
And for hundreds of years, it hung in Russia.
The Amber Room even survived the Russian Revolution, when people toppled the government and angry mobs destroyed symbols of kings and queens or czars and czarinas.
The Amber Room was definitely a symbol of royal extravagance, so it's a wonder the revolutionaries didn't destroy it.
Amazingly, the Amber Room was kept safe.
It was so remarkable that it was opened as a museum so that people could see the incredible creation.
But then came World War II.
The Nazi party that had taken control of Germany was not just driven by racism.
They also wanted to dominate lands and control people in a growing empire.
And they also had an obsession with art.
Some of the art, the stuff they didn't like, they wanted to destroy.
But the stuff that they did like, they wanted to steal.
Especially if they thought, in any twisted way, that it should be theirs.
And since the Amber Room was originally made and displayed in the German city of Berlin, they felt like it was theirs to take.
Never mind the fact that it was given as a gift.
Right before the Nazi army arrived in Russia in 1941, Russian officials tried to remove the Amber Room.
They wanted to keep it safe. and they figured the Nazis would steal it.
But it was so fragile, and they had so little time, that they found the job to be impossible.
So, in a panicked last-ditch effort, they well, they covered it in fabric and just hid it behind woven tapestries, hoping it wouldn't be noticed.
No dice!
When the German soldiers arrived, it only took them a few minutes to uncover the target of their desires.
A few short days later they had the room completely disassembled, carefully packed up and on a train bound for Germany.
Their final destination and, as far as we know, the final place that anyone ever saw the Amber Room was Kernensburg Castle.
It was here that the room was reassembled and on display until 1945 and the end of World War II.
Around this time, the end of the war, Kernensburg was the target of Great Britain's Royal Air Force.
So bombs were dropped in the area before soldiers on the ground were able to overtake the city and force out the Nazi army.
When they arrived, the invaluable and one-of-a-kind Amber Room was gone.
No one knows where it went.
An entire room, missing.
There were reports that it had been damaged in bombings, but many believe that it was snuck out of the city before the bombs fell and the troops stormed in.
But maybe not because later, when the angry Russian soldiers burned down the castle, there were reports that the Amber Room was consumed in that fire.
However, neither of those scenarios left much evidence.
Bombs would have left tiny pieces of amber, and a fire hot enough to melt amber would have left residue.
Not to mention an unmistakable smell that no one really reported smelling.
There were some surviving fragments and a few melted lumps, according to witnesses, but nowhere near 13000 pounds worth.
Some said it was hidden in a bunker underneath the castle.
Others say it was loaded onto a ship and sailed to sea.
Did a boat carrying the Amber Room safely reach a port somewhere?
Or was it sunk by a torpedo?
No one knows. but people have spent nearly a century looking for it.
If the Amber Room were to turn up, it would be one of the most amazing lost treasures imaginable.
The general agreement is that it was in fact destroyed in the bombings.
But German soldiers were well known to evacuate art and valuables and hide them in safe hidden places, often deep in salt mines or specially dug tunnels.
Sometimes things were even waterproofed and concealed at the bottom of lagoons.
If that's the case with the Amber Room, the maps or keys to find it are unknown. today.
But that doesn't stop treasure hunters.
People still continue searching high and low.
One bit of good news is that the Amber Room survived long enough to be well photographed and documented.
So as a result, Russia was actually able to recreate it with incredible accuracy.
A new amber room was begun in the 1970s and completed in the early 2000s.
The hardest part was finding artists, because carving amber is a very specific craft and the knowledge and ability which is passed down and must be practiced was nearly lost to people of this generation.
Will the so-called eighth wonder of the world ever be found?
Will we ever agree on what the eighth wonder of the world is?
Well, we don't know.
Anything could happen.
Or it could just be another fascinating mystery to think about.
With no definitive answer.
Okay, for this month's You Have 30 Seconds, we have Fletcher talking about something pretty much in his own backyard in Florida.
And this is a place that I have seen with my own two eyeballs.
Fletcher, take it away.
Hi, my name is Fletcher and I am from Palm Beach, Florida.
My three segments will be about Castillo de San Marcos.
In the 1500s, European powers were fighting to control the New World.
Spain built a foreign state in Augustine to safeguard its trade and shipping routes and furthest presence in La Florida.
By the late 1600s, British colonies moved to the north end of the thriving city.
The Spanish realized they needed better defenses relative to the completion of Castillo de San Marcos in 1670.
St.
Augustine is a very cool place.
Fletcher, thank you so much.
Great work.
I love it when people talk about things in in the places where they're from.
So great job.
If anyone else out there has a you have a you you you have a you have a 30 seconds.
You know what it is.
If you have one, you got a story to tell.
You have 30 seconds to tell it to me.
You just record it and send it to me at hello at the past in the curious dot com.
Like I said, with the animal community stories, episodes that i'm doing, i'm gonna use them then too, so i'm really gonna be tearing through them, send them on everybody.
It's quiz time, it's quiz time.
It's quiz time time time.
Oh yeah, it's a missing art quiz, And each one of these pieces of missing art has been featured in an episode of The Past and the Curious.
Question number one.
There is a lot of valuable art that has been lost, and one missing painting is Rembrandt's Storm in the Sea of Galilee.
It has not been seen since 1990, when it was stolen from a museum in Boston that we have featured on the show.
Do you know or remember the name of the museum from the famous art heist?
The painting was stolen in a heist. at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
It was mysteriously taken with several other works of art the day after St.
Patrick's Day in 1990.
Now, Isabella Stewart Gardner was a real person, a very colorful person and a fascinating art lover who left her collection to the community.
You can listen to episode 34, Museum Tales, to learn more about her.
She's one of my favorites.
Okay, question number two.
The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world, but it was stolen.
Did you know that?
In 1911.
Now, if you listen to our Underwear Chronicle series, you might remember how it reappeared.
Do you know how we got the Mona Lisa back?
Two years after first stealing it, the thief tried to sell it to an art dealer who knew it was stolen and had alerted the authorities before they met.
That thief, Vincenzo Perugia, only spent seven months in jail for stealing the Mona Lisa.
Okay, third and final question.
Sometimes, lost art shows up again.
In 2014, someone purchased an egg at a flea market in Midwest America.
We're not totally sure where.
They're keeping that secret.
Anyway, that egg was special.
What kind of egg was it?
Well, it wasn't a real egg.
It was a Fabergé egg, an ornate golden bejeweled egg crafted by Russian jewelers over a century ago and worth a fortune.
I mean, not amber room fortune, but worth a fortune.
Many Fabergé eggs survive today, but many have been lost.
This one surprised everyone.
So if you want to hear that story of recovered lost treasure, just listen to episode 74, Eggs.
Communication is the key to many things.
Information is important, and many times sharing that info is crucial.
But of course, there are times you can't just broadcast a message to everyone within earshot.
You've got to play it cool.
Use a little sneakiness to say what you've got to say.
Sometimes, when you've got something to communicate, you want some people to get the message, but you want others to not get the message.
Get it?
And when we're talking about political and military conflicts, this is usually where secret codes come in.
At many points in history, people have had to figure out how to tell people something without that information being intercepted, interpreted and understood.
So a lot of different ways were developed to communicate in secret.
Maybe in your life you've sent a message in invisible ink.
You ever tried the old lemon juice and candle trick?
Well, that's one way to send secret info.
Throughout history, many others have used a cipher.
Like Weirdmageddon?
No, not that kind of cipher.
Sorry, Bill.
I'm talking about an algorithm for encryption.
Excuse me?
I know it sounds confusing.
Algorithm for encryption.
Believe me, I get it.
Basically, it's a secret communication pattern that one person knows how to read but is hard for other people to figure out.
There have been all kinds of ciphers over lots of histories.
Case in point, the Caesar cipher.
This method for secret messages is not based on a recipe for anchovy-heavy salad dressing.
Instead, it is named after Julius Caesar.
And as far as we know, Roman dictator Julius Caesar never ate a Caesar salad.
It was invented in Mexico in 1924, but it does sound like he used the Caesar cipher.
Basically, this cipher matched two offset alphabets.
The Caesar cipher shifted letters by a chosen number.
1, 2, 3, 18, whatever.
Let's use 3 for this example.
So, you write a message with one alphabet, and the reader knows to match it with the other one.
When you shift back three, the letter D becomes A, the letter E, three back becomes B, the letter F, three back becomes C, and so on.
In this arrangement, the word rope would become olmb O-L-M-B, because 3 back from R is O, 3 back from O is L, 3 back from P is M and 3 back from E is B.
If it's confusing, that's the point.
But when you see it visually, I promise, it's much easier to understand.
There are plenty of other codes like this, but eventually people trying to figure them out can do just that.
Codebreakers are everywhere.
So when Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis out west to explore, they came up with a cipher of their own.
Theirs required a table of letters.
It looks sort of like a multiplication table, only with what appears to be random letters.
In order for messages sent with this table to make sense, someone had to know the keyword that helped to organize everything.
This made it harder to crack, because the only people who knew the keyword were the people communicating with one another.
So it was very hard to decipher, which is a word you've probably said or read and maybe now makes even more sense.
Anyway, I happen to know the Jefferson Lewis keyword.
Shh, don't tell anyone, but it's artichoke.
If you knew that, you could read everything they had to say.
Delicious.
But if we're talking about secret codes, you can bet.
We're going to talk about World War II.
Perhaps the most famous secret code ever was a German code that was created and sent from the mysterious Enigma machine.
The word Enigma itself means puzzle.
And this cipher certainly puzzled German adversaries for years.
The need for things like the Enigma machine during World War II was great.
Thanks to new technology, you could send messages wirelessly.
This was really great because it meant you could share information with people far away.
But it was not so great, because it also meant that other people could easily intercept and hear your messages as well.
And that kind of defeats the purpose of secret messages.
So your best plan is to make it impossible to figure out what your message means.
And that's just what the Enigma machine was good at.
And listen, it is very complicated.
It took Codebreakers years and years to figure it out.
So I'm not going to try to explain it to you in detail.
Mostly because that seems really, really hard for me.
And probably really boring for you.
But basically, the Enigma machine used a letter substitution just like the Caesar cipher.
These are very basic.
But the Enigma machine made it really complicated.
The machine itself was a device that kind of looked like a cash register.
And as you typed the message on the keyboard, it assigned a new letter to your original.
But here's the kicker. the cipher code changed with every letter you typed.
Because of this, some Enigma machines had 159 quintillion different possible settings.
Good luck cracking that.
To further complicate things, the settings were changed every day.
Of course, plenty of people were able to get the messages.
It's just that no one was able to figure out what the messages meant.
In order to do that, you have to have a machine of your own, set it to the day's correct settings and then type in the weird, nonsensical letters so it could spit out the real message that was hidden from the eyes of everyone else.
But it's not like anyone just has an Enigma machine lying around.
And even if you did...
Good luck guessing the constantly changing settings.
So as World War II started raging across Europe in the 1930s, Germany's Nazi army was having great luck with the Enigma machine.
They could say whatever they wanted and no one could understand.
However, there was one team in Poland who began to catch on.
And amazingly, one member of the Poland Cipher Bureau, a man named Marian Radzuski, was able to recreate an Enigma machine without ever actually seeing one.
He just used descriptions from French spies.
But when Germany invaded Poland, they all had to flee and they were forced to destroy all of the work that they had done.
But they carried what they could in their brains.
Sometimes great achievements come from the work of individuals and then grow when that knowledge is shared and then bloom when people work together as a team.
And that's just what happened.
The Polish codebreakers shared what they had learned with French and British codebreakers.
This gave a team of cryptologists in England a big boost.
Led by a man named Alan Turing, They developed their own decryption machine and eventually discovered that most messages began and ended with the same words, which were the keys to help set their settings to match whatever settings the Nazi army happened to be using that day.
Once they figured that out, though, they had to play it cool.
If the Germans knew they had cracked the code, They'd stop using it, and the Allied powers would be without any information at all.
Once again,
The war was not over, so they needed all of the information that they could gather.
In any case, historians believe that cracking the Enigma machine's cipher helped end the war years faster than it would have ended otherwise.
And the work was done by smart, methodical and analytical people from England France, Poland and others.
But the Nazi army wasn't the only army using secret codes at that time.
The American army needed to communicate in secret as well.
And one way they did this was by simply using languages that had been spoken on American soil before.
For centuries.
Native American languages like Navajo, Comanche and Hopi have no similarities to Germanic languages like English, Dutch or German, all of which are related.
Nor do they have anything in common with what we call the Romance languages, like Spanish, French and others.
And these Native American languages are not developmentally connected to any Asian languages, nor African languages either.
They developed on their own, so they're totally unique and a relatively small number of people in the 1930s used them.
So this made the indigenous American languages a perfect starting place for a secret code.
Now known as the Code Talkers of the American Army.
Several men of the Navajo Nation in the southwestern United States enlisted and became invaluable to communication by using a secret code developed around their native language.
It was so unfamiliar and impossible to crack that the men were able to just use their voices and talk over phone lines and radio waves.
There was absolutely no need to obscure what they were saying because no one could understand it.
Only the code talkers themselves had any clue what things meant.
Because their language was so unique, Literally no one could figure it out.
Now we're planning a full story in a later episode on a very specific code talker, a very interesting man, and we'll get further into the details then.
But you should know this.
People figured out nearly every other code in military history, too.
However, no one cracked the Navajo code talker's secret code.
Well, thanks for listening to episode 116 of The Past and the Curious.
I hope by now you've had a chance to listen to the first episode of Important Animals in History.
That was really fun.
I'm going to be releasing another one of those in just a couple weeks, so the output's kind of picking up.
Who doesn't love stories about animals, right?
They're going to be great.
You're going to meet a lot of people.
You might remember some, not people though, animals.
And some of them you may have met on previous episodes.
But we're going to take a different angle, go in a different look at many of them.
And, of course, that's leading up to a book which I'm going to be announcing officially and fundraising officially soon.
So keep your ear out, but in the meantime, enjoy that and uh, thank you for listening and thank you to some patreon sponsors who really help keep this going and as patreon sponsors they get an ad free feed either on patreon or also through spotify.
Um, But I have some people to thank for that.
So, Bailey and Mara in Colorado?
Bailey and Mara?
Hello!
Thank you for listening.
I'm so glad that you like the show.
Hello to you where you are at this very moment.
I send my hellos to you.
And...
Colleen Beck Kaplan as well.
Colleen, thank you for your support.
I really, really, really appreciate it.
And I'm glad to know that the show means something to you and maybe to other people in your life and for everyone out there.
Thank you.
And if you want to help, please tell somebody that you enjoy the show.
Maybe pass along your favorite episode.
Maybe that's video games.
Maybe that's the animal episode.
Maybe that's the one about walking.
Or two episodes about walking.
That was a big one for me.
I really liked that one.
I don't know.
Just spread the word.
I hope everybody has a good early spring.
And I'll talk to you soon.
Adios, my friends.
