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Tonight, one of World War II's most enduring mysteries.

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A stunning treasure worth half a billion dollars.

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Lost without a trace.

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It might be the most expensive and beautiful work of art ever made.

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It's like it's just vanished.

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Now we uncover the top theories surrounding the disappearance of a work of art so remarkable

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that it's known as the age of the world.

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The castle suffers tremendous damage.

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We have to wonder if the amber room destroyed as well.

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Stinson Mettawer are convinced that the amber room is hidden behind the castle's walls.

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Just waiting to be explored and waiting to produce discoveries.

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Can a new expedition finally reveal its location?

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It's a treasure trove of material.

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It's a treasure trove of material.

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Will we ever be able to find the incomparable amber room?

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It's September.

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It's September 1941.

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Leningrad, USSR.

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Nazi forces invade Russia, moving relentlessly east in a vicious sweep of destruction.

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As his troops advance, Hitler gives one important order.

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Preserve the priceless works of art in Leningrad's Catherine Palace at all costs.

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Hitler wants to gut Russia, and he wants to steal every work of art he can

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and route to conquering the entire country.

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The Catherine Palace supposedly houses the most valuable work of art in the world.

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The artwork in question is known as the Amber Room.

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It's exactly what it sounds like.

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It's a room covered in beautiful amber panels.

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Some people estimate it to be worth over half a billion dollars,

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making it one of the most expensive and beautiful rooms ever created.

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During World War II, the German military stole over 600,000 pieces of art from across Europe,

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ransacking billions of dollars worth of priceless cultural artifacts.

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And some say Hitler wants the Amber Room above all else.

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Not only does Hitler love art, but he's also a nationalist,

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and it infuriates him that there are works of German art outside of German territory.

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And the Amber Room is a German work of art that he desperately wants back.

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Work began on the room in 1701 in Berlin, which then was part of Prussia.

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Frederick I, who rules over the powerful empire in what's now Germany,

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originally commissions the Amber Room.

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Designed by a sculptor named Andreas Schluter,

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and it's lavish and it's resplendent and it's expensive and it's valuable.

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Andreas Schluter starts by melting the amber to the point where it is a thick kind of liquid.

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At the time, amber wasn't really used like this, so in addition to being a beautiful work of art,

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it's also enormously innovative.

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As if that isn't impressive enough, then these 18th century craftspeople encrust in the jewels

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and then cover it with gold and silver leaf.

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It's also adorned with these four Italian mosaics, making them works of art within a work of art.

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King Frederick wants a palace that will outshine Francis Versailles,

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and he decides that this is going to be the centerpiece.

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In 1701, the Amber Room is installed in the Berlin City Palace,

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but it won't be there for long.

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The Amber Room, unsurprisingly, attracts the attention of another European royal,

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Russia's famous Tsar Peter the Great.

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Peter the Great visits the Berlin City Palace in 1716 and he gets a tour of the Amber Room.

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King Frederick is trying to forge an alliance with Russia at the time,

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and he basically says, you want the Amber Room? You can have it.

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Around the time of Empress Catherine the Great, it's installed in the Catherine Palace,

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and that's where it stays, undisturbed and unmoved for about two centuries.

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And even after Russia becomes the USSR and St. Petersburg becomes Leningrad,

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the Amber Room is just there pretty peacefully until the Nazis arrive.

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And here's where the mystery starts, because after the Nazi siege of Leningrad,

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the Amber Room goes missing.

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We know that it was in the Catherine Palace.

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We know that Hitler sends Nazi troops to go recover it,

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but that's the last thing we know. Everything else is just theories.

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We think that the Nazis do in fact steal the Amber Room from Leningrad.

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The most valuable cultural institutions at the time are the old palaces of the Tsars,

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and so Hitler sets his sights on those. He's going to tear them apart.

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He's going to loot. He's going to pillage. He's going to burn them. He's going to destroy them.

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Hitler gives specific instructions not to destroy the Catherine Palace,

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at least not until the Amber Room is found.

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But apparently finding the Amber Room is easier said than done,

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because when the Nazis arrive, they don't see it.

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So there's this one room, pretty nondescript,

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and the soldiers notice a little bit of plaster on the floor,

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and they also notice a little bubbling in the wallpaper right near the seam.

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One of the soldiers just slides a fingernail right under the wallpaper,

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and there's a little bit of sheepskin or some other covering right behind that,

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and just beyond that, there's the glow.

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So he starts shouting,

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"'Ist here, Ist here!' and his comrades come charging down the hall.

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They rip off the wallpaper, and there it is, the Amber Room.

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The room had been hidden by head Soviet art curator, Anatoly Kuchimov.

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The original plan is for Kuchimov to pack up as many works of art as possible for safekeeping

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and bring them deeper into Russia and away from Nazi hands.

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Kuchimov does an analysis of the Amber Room,

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and he realizes that these panels are very delicate,

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and they've become brittle over time,

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so there's really only one move left to make.

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Kuchimov covers the Amber Room from floor to ceiling.

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In thick wallpaper, hoping the Nazis won't look too closely.

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But in this last ditch effort,

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the Germans uncover the roofs,

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and unlike Kuchimov, they have all the hands and time that they need

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to pack this thing up very carefully and slowly.

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They spend about two days dismantling the Amber Room and packing it into crates.

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But where does the Amber Room go from here?

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The Germans take the Amber Room, along with a number of other important Russian cultural artifacts,

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and transport them to Konigsberg Castle.

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Hitler's ultimate plan is to build a museum,

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the greatest museum in the entire world,

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and it was going to be in his hometown of Lentz, Austria.

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Eventually the Amber Room would go there,

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but while the museum was being built,

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the Amber Room would wait in Konigsberg Castle.

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On November 13, 1941,

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a local newspaper announces an exhibition featuring the Amber Room at the castle.

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So that's the best evidence we have that the Amber Room ever actually went to Konigsberg.

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But we don't have any photographic evidence of that,

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and so we're not really even sure if that ever happened.

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Now here's the really unfortunate part.

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While we don't know what happened to the Amber Room,

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we do know what happened to Konigsberg Castle, and it's not good.

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In August of 1944, Britain's Royal Air Force heavily firebombs Konigsberg.

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After that, the Soviets march in and take Konigsberg.

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But as part of the operation, they bring in a large quantity of heavy artillery,

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and they shell the city.

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By the time of their final occupation of Konigsberg on April 9, 1945,

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90% of the city lies in ruin.

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The castle suffers tremendous damage,

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so we have to wonder, is the Amber Room destroyed as well?

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This would be so embarrassing if the Soviets had actually destroyed the Amber Room.

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So they send a team to Konigsberg Castle, led by Professor Alexander Brusoff,

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because they have to be sure.

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He's able to make it into the castle cellar,

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where he discovers the charred remains of three out of the four Italian mosaics

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that were part of the Amber Room.

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Brusoff thinks the room is toast, and he says as much in a report.

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He writes, summarizing all the facts,

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we can say that the Amber Room was destroyed between the 9th and the 11th of April, 1945.

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Brusoff's report won't be the last word on this mystery.

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When the Nazis steal the famed Amber Room from Russia,

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where do they take it?

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According to some, it's moved to the Konigsberg Castle.

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Where it's ultimately destroyed.

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But there at the castle, among the wreckage,

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there's only a small percentage of the Amber Room that's found.

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This leaves some to wonder,

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really, a whole room, and this is all that's left?

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A room that took crates and crates to pack away?

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This has many theorists thinking, there's got to be another explanation.

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What if the Germans move the Amber Room before the Soviet invasion of 1945?

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Unmoved!

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We have orders given by Adolf Hitler himself on January 21st and January 24th, 1945.

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The tide of war has changed.

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He knows that Allied forces are moving in,

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so he issues orders that all looted material in Konigsberg Castle be moved.

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Some speculate that a high-ranking Nazi commander named Eric Koch

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follows these orders.

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He was in charge of all civil administration, including police and Gestapo operations

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in East Prussia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

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This is a territory that includes Konigsberg,

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so anything that happens at Konigsberg Castle is happening under his authority.

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Then, in January 1945, Koch flees.

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Koch manages to stay on the run for four years until he's captured by the British.

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In 1950, he's returned to Poland where he's forced to stand trial for war crimes,

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at the end of which he is sentenced to death.

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But here's the strange thing, his death sentence is pretty quickly commuted to life imprisonment.

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Plenty of Nazis are executed for their war crimes.

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There's no real reason for Koch to be spared.

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His crimes are just as bad as any other Nazi, and he's unrepentant about it.

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He's truly a vile person.

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Is Koch spared because he has valuable information?

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Koch's sentence is commuted after a long period of interrogation by Soviet authorities.

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And we think that during this interrogation,

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Koch reveals that the Amber Room has survived.

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And he knows where it is.

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According to Eric Koch, Adolf Hitler ordered that the Amber Room be packed up and moved in January 1945.

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He reveals that they packed it up into 24 wooden crates and trucked it 60 miles from Konigsberg

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to a more fortified Nazi stronghold at Montmerichie, Poland.

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Keep in mind that throughout this interrogation, he continues to badmouth the Jews and the Soviets,

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and he's also singing the praises of Hitler and the Nazis.

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It's not like he was trying to tell the Soviets what they wanted to hear.

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That lens of credibility, that makes this a more of a believable possibility.

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This is also a testament to just how important the Amber Room is to the Soviets,

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that they're going to spare a top Nazi in exchange for a tip, basically,

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just to keep the hope alive of recovering the Amber Room.

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But when the Red Army arrives in Montmerichie in the 1950s, they meet an incredible challenge.

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Montmerichie was the center of the German command on the Eastern Front, and it was a massive complex.

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And Montmerichie hides a few secrets itself.

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Above ground, the Germans build about 200 buildings, and the entire fort covers about 600 acres.

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But guess what? Underneath the ground, it's even more impressive.

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There are miles and miles of underground bunkers and tunnels.

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It's a hidden maze, and that's because of the fact that during the course of the war, the Nazis backfill.

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They fill in some of the tunnels that they had built earlier in the conflict.

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Then, with the passage of time, Mother Nature works her magic,

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making this underground complex an extraordinarily difficult place to search.

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The Russians spend years searching Montmerichie with no results.

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So after two decades of searching, the Soviets are so desperate,

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they take Koch out of prison in 1970 and bring him to Montmerichie to try to find the Amber Room.

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He points at a particular bunker where he thinks the Amber Room was taken, but it's not there.

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To that, you could say that maybe Eric Koch's memory had lapsed.

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Or he's just trying to survive, because after all, if the Soviets do find the Amber Room,

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they have no more reason to keep Eric Koch alive.

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Playing the Soviets the way that he did, Eric Koch manages to stay alive for almost another 20 years

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until he dies of natural causes in 1986 at age 90.

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Even so, the search for the Amber Room continues.

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These days, Montmerichie is overgrown and falling apart,

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but parts of it are run as a museum by a Polish man named Bartek Plabancik.

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And he fully believes that the Amber Room is still there.

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They even have a replica of the Amber Room inside of the museum.

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And every year, Bartek excavates a different bunker in Montmerichie.

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It's all he can afford to do one a year, but he's going to keep going until he finds the Amber Room.

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So far, they have found tons of Nazi and Soviet artifacts,

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but it's estimated that only 1% of the entire compound has been searched.

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That means that there could be tunnels and bunkers still in that complex,

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just waiting to be explored and waiting to produce discoveries.

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These tunnels and chambers have been unexplored in over 70 years.

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So each dig could be the one that turns up the Amber Room.

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For decades after World War II,

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a global army of treasure hunters searched for the lost Amber Room.

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It's become the obsession of thousands of people across Europe, across the Americas.

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People have even gone looking for the Amber Room in Japan.

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While some believe it could be in Poland,

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two German historians think they know the truth.

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The Amber Room.

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Eric Stenz and George Mederer see this news story coming out of the Czech Republic in 2007.

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A former cook who used to work in Czechoslovakia's Friedland Castle when it was under Nazi rule

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tells a fascinating tale.

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Back near the end of the war, the cook says that she sees hundreds of SS soldiers arriving at the castle,

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bringing in crates.

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Every night for two weeks, they carry these crates into the cellar of the castle,

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and then they're gone.

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Stenz and Mederer immediately think that these are the crates that could hold the Amber Room.

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When Adolf Hitler orders the Amber Room's evacuation from Konigsberg,

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if it was moved to Memeriki, it's still dangerously close to the front lines.

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It would make sense for it to be moved to Friedland Castle,

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which is much deeper in German territory.

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So they go to Friedland Castle down into the cellar.

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They see these two large areas that have been walled off with modern bricks and cement.

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They think this seems suspicious, so they go to the Czech authorities.

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Who tell them initially that the cellar in the castle doesn't even exist,

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but of course they were just there, so this feels like a ridiculous bluff.

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At this point, Stenz and Mederer feel like they're getting the run around from the Czech authorities.

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But they press on, and they have photographs of the cellar and the walled off areas,

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so they go back to the Czech authorities, who basically have to say,

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oh, you mean that cellar?

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Nothing to see there. There's just some books from a Berlin library behind there.

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Unsatisfied with this response, Stenz and Mederer ask permission to keep searching Friedland Castle.

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Surprisingly, the authorities say yes, and they allow them to continue their investigation.

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However, they forbid them from bringing in any kind of special equipment

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that would allow them to see past these modern walls in this old cellar.

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Is it possible the Czech authorities have something to hide?

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There is one incident that suggests that the Czechs are trying to keep a secret from the rest of Europe,

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and it dates back to before the war.

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In 1938, as part of a notorious treaty called the Munich Agreement,

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this region of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Hitler by Britain, France and Italy to avoid war.

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It's considered one of the greatest betrayals in history.

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Six months later, Hitler violates the pact and invades the rest of Czechoslovakia.

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The Nazis and the Munich Agreement are still a sore subject in all of the Czech Republic,

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but particularly in the region where Friedland Castle is located.

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Stenz and Mederer are convinced that the amber room is hidden behind the castle's walls,

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and their theory is that the Czechs are hiding it because of the Munich Agreement back in 1938.

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The Germans betrayed them and all of Europe was in on it.

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After the Nazis are kicked out, the Czechs decide not to give the loot back.

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They wall it up and hide it, sitting on these national treasures as an act of revenge.

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Stenz and Mederer continue to pressure the Czech authorities to reveal what's behind those walls,

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and the Czech authorities continue to resist.

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While they still haven't revealed what's behind those walls, they insist it is not the amber room,

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and they say Stenz and Mederer are just a couple of diluted treasure hunters trying to spin fantasies.

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But what if the amber room is not behind any walls?

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Once again, let's assume that the Nazis did pack up the amber room into 24 crates

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and remove it from Konigsberg Castle under Adolf Hitler's orders.

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The thing is that at this point in the war, in January 1945, when Hitler gives that order,

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the Nazis are expecting to lose a lot of territory in East Prussia.

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And so they're not going to just move back a few miles.

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They need to trigger an overall broader evacuation, and that becomes Operation Hannibal.

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So Operation Hannibal is an attempt to evacuate all of East Prussia via the Baltic.

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We're talking the German army, civilians, anything they can evacuate.

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And some eyewitnesses think they also attempt to rescue the amber room.

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Thousands of people descend on the harbor of Gotenhaben, where the converted luxury liner Wilhelm Gustloff is standing by to provide an evacuation.

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People are just cramming into this area. They're desperate. There's no turning them back.

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They eventually get on the Wilhelm Gustloff. I'm talking about 10,000 people,

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and they think this is Noah's Ark. This is their salvation. This is going to get them to safety.

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The boat departs on January 30th, 1945.

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But the Soviet Navy is waiting for any transports moving back and forth on the Baltic.

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And with an hours of departure, the Wilhelm Gustloff is torpedoed and sunk.

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So we wonder, was the amber room inside of it?

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With a death toll of more than 9,000 killed, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the greatest maritime disaster in history,

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greater than the Titanic and the Lusitania combined.

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But was the amber room actually on board?

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Evacuaries there report seeing the 24 crates containing the amber room being loaded aboard the ship.

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The Russians believe any number of valuable stolen goods are on the Wilhelm Gustloff, including the most valuable one of all, the amber room.

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So several months later, the Russians conduct a dive.

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They find bodies, equipment, and crates, but no amber room.

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But they find something suspicious. It looks like someone has gotten there first,

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because there's this large panel that's been removed from the hull of the ship,

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and behind that is this big cargo hold that could have held the two dozen or so crates holding the amber room, and it's been emptied out.

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They think a theft has taken place, because most of the wreckage is pretty much undisturbed.

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So it really looks like someone who knew what they were doing went in and looted this specific area.

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For the dive team, this discovery is bittersweet, because on the one hand, it means that the torpedo didn't destroy the amber room.

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But where is it?

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The Wilhelm Gustloff is now classified as a war grave, making future expeditions illegal.

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If the ship wreck contains more clues to the amber room's whereabouts, they will remain hidden forever.

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For over 50 years, the search for the amber room started with one question.

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Where did it go after the Nazis stole it?

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There was no reason to challenge the belief that Hitler's army took the artwork to Konigsberg Castle for display,

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until a radical new theory emerged with a shocking twist.

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What if the Nazis stole the wrong amber room?

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In 1995, a Russian historian named Vladimir Lapsky reveals this new extensive research that he's done, and potentially a new finding.

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Lapsky claims to have uncovered proof that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created a ruse to trick the Germans.

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According to Lapsky, it starts out not as a trick at all. It starts out as an act of good will, because in 1939, the Germans and the Russians aren't enemies yet.

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They're close neighbors, and they actually have really good reason to try to keep the peace after the devastation of World War I.

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They signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, which has also been called the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

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It's technically a partition of Poland by the two countries, but it serves to try and slow Germany's rapid progression toward war.

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To commemorate signing the pact, Stalin orders a copy of the amber room to be made for Hitler.

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Stalin intends to give it to Hitler when he finally visits the Soviet Union.

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It'll be a nice version. It just won't have all of the precious metals and gems as the original.

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It won't be worth about half a billion dollars. It'll be worth more like 10 to 12 million.

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Stalin commissions Anatoly Baranovsky, Russia's most famous amber craftsman, to make the copy.

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So Baranovsky actually makes a copy, and in addition to that, his apprentices make another copy.

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But Hitler never receives the gift. Instead, he breaks the non-aggression pact and invades Russia.

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Of course, Stalin knew the reputation that Hitler had. The reputation for stealing art and treasures and taking them back to Germany.

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And he knows that Hitler wants the amber room.

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So according to this theory, Stalin plays a brilliant trick on his former ally.

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The theory goes like this. Before the Nazis were able to get to the Catherine Palace, the Russians were able to swap the original amber room for the reproduction.

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And that's what the Nazis steal. The wrong room. The copies of the amber room were made in May 1941.

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But the Germans don't get to Leningrad until September. And it was during that time that the switch is made.

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Vladimir Lapsky says that the Soviets do actually pack up the amber room panels and hide them away.

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And they leave the apprentice copy in its place. So it's a bait and switch, the eighth thunder of the world.

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So the Nazis were duped. The amber room that they took back to Konigsberg is the fake amber room.

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So all of these people who are chasing theories from there, they are chasing the copy, not the original amber room.

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From the Russian perspective, this story is a phenomenal bombshell because it would provide relief for Russian authorities.

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Because it would be proof that they did not lose or destroy the amber room.

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But if this is true, where's the real amber room?

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So some believe that in November of 1941, the original amber room was packed up and sent to a pro-Soviet billionaire in the United States named Armand Hammer.

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Armand Hammer was a pharmaceutical and oil magnate, and he was the son of Russian immigrants who were big supporters of Lenin.

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So Hammer's strong Soviet tides lead to this nickname, Lenin's Chosen Capitalist.

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Hammer has this world famous art collection, and it's alleged that the amber room became part of it, maybe as some sort of collateral in his business deals with Russia.

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Others think it ended up back where it started.

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In 1979, the Soviet government orders yet another copy of the room.

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24 years later, this new copy of the amber room is completed, partly paid for by the Germans for a total cost of $11 million.

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It is ultimately installed in the Catherine Palace, and that's where it is on display to this day.

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But there are some who believe that this is actually the real original amber room, that it was pulled out of storage and reinstalled by the Russian government decades later.

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That would be an incredible story if it were true, but unless there was a confession by somebody who truly knows, we will never know.

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For 75 years, some experts believe the amber room was lost at sea when a German ship called the Wilhelm Gustlov was torpedoed.

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But early searches of that turned up nothing, and there's another ship that the Nazis used during the evacuation, and that ship was thought to be lost until now.

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Could the amber room actually be on that long lost vessel? The SS Karlsruhe?

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The Karlsruhe was made in 1905 as a ship with a 218 foot overall length and a beam of 33 feet.

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It was a part of Operation Hannibal in 1945, which was the seaborne evacuation of German military personnel and civilians as the Soviet military approached.

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And here's the thing, the Karlsruhe departed from Konigsberg.

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A lot of people have focused on the Wilhelm Gustlov, which was a much larger ship, and that left from Gotenhafen, which was about 100 miles away.

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The Karlsruhe was practically within walking distance of Konigsberg Castle.

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The ship departs at nearly the same time the Allies destroy Konigsberg Castle in air raids.

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The wreckage of the Karlsruhe has never been found, so in 2020 this Polish diving team decides they're going to go for it, because there could be the most interesting story sitting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

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The team is led by salvage diver Tomek Stetura.

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SS Karlsruhe was one of the 247 ships which sank during the Hannibal operation in 1945.

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We were looking for this wreck a few months when we realized that maybe on the deck of this wreck something important.

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We didn't want to be too excited, but we have to admit that maybe it's amber room over there, because if the Germans want to send something valuable or something important to them to the west, the Karlsruhe was last chance for them.

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So the ship departs Konigsberg on April 11th, 1945.

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It was part of a convoy that was headed to the German port of Swinemünde, which is now part of modern day Poland.

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According to Nazi Navy reports, the ship is carrying 1,083 people, mostly German civilians.

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The Karlsruhe also appears to be carrying about 360 tons of other goods on crates.

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So the diving team thinks there's a good chance that the amber room is among those crates.

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So the reports say that the ship was overloaded, which means it probably fell behind the rest of the convoy, making it a perfect target for the Soviet Navy.

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It's going to meet the same fate as the Wilhelm Gurslaw. It's going to be torpedoed, it's going to go underwater, everyone on board, everything inside of it goes down with it.

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Now Stature's job is to figure out where that happened.

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The Baltic is an incredibly challenging place to conduct any kind of an underwater expedition.

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It's because of the fact that you have very difficult temperatures during the winter months.

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Howling winds and the howling winds churned up extremely heavy surf.

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And these are all things that are enemies of conducting any kind of an underwater search.

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We had the access to the Russian archives, which said that, 13th of April 1945, Russian aircraft sank SS Karlsruhe.

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But the problem was that they show five different positions in the distance between each other, it was between 10 to 15 miles.

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The problem here is that this ship may have actually engaged in evasive maneuvers, so it could basically turn up anywhere.

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But the search team has some original documents, and that's because when the ships sank, the Germans were able to rescue 113 survivors from the wreck.

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In addition to that, the British intercepted and decoded transmissions relating to the sinking.

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And the British intercepted a German telegram about the rescue as well.

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All of the evidence points to an area a few dozen miles north of the Polish town of Ustka.

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The ship is about 300 feet down. So this is a dangerous mission, it's an expensive and resource-intense mission, and it's going to take perfect weather and a whole lot of luck.

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In June 2020, the Baltic team finally launches their expedition from Gdansk.

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We have 300 feet of water, cold, dark water. This dive is very demanding, and we don't need only to dive, we have to work underwater.

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We have a lot of good equipment, we have underwater drone, we have multi-beam, we have sonars, and we have 10 very well-trained divers.

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This is like an amazing moment in the history.

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You know, this is the kind of expedition that truly just lights up the imagination, because there's so much history down at the bottom of the Baltic Sea and potentially the Amber Room.

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And it could all resurface for the first time in 75 years.

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It's June 2020, and an expedition led by Tomek Stachura is heading into the Baltic Sea on a treasure hunt.

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Its mission? Locate the wreck of the torpedoed Nazi steamer SS Karlsruhe and see if the Amber Room's on board.

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We don't know exactly what we can expect on the bottom. Maybe the current will be huge, maybe the visibility will be close to zero, or the wreck will be covered by nets.

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All of them are very dangerous, so we must be prepared for all conditions.

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For 75 years, no one has seen this ship. It's just been lost. But we know that it carried hundreds of tons of Nazi goods. So could the Amber Room be among them?

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As the divers descend to 288 feet, the search conditions grow more challenging.

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In a safe way, we have to use a lot of equipment. We have to use very high quality drysuit, special underwater heating system.

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We have to survive more like three hours underwater.

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We have 300 feet of cold, dark water. It's not easy dive, and we have to do it in a very, very safe way.

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After a careful 20 minute descent, the divers pinpoint the SS Karlsruhe.

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This is the first time the ship has been seen since 1945.

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So this is the moment. After 75 years, we salvaged Karlsruhe from the dark.

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We saw the beautiful wreck, if you can say about the wreck beautiful. I have never seen so many artifacts, so many crates, so many things on the wreck on the bottom. This is amazing.

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It's a treasure trove of material. They find china plates that are in great shape. They find military vehicles still intact with the rubber still on the tires.

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But what about the Amber Room?

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Beneath a large pile of debris, the divers make out what appears to be dozens of sealed crates.

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Now that's the most interesting thing, of course. Here we have crates that match the description of the Amber Room. Of course, they might just contain ammunition or silverware, sundries, but what if?

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Unfortunately, the team is unable to safely transport the crates. They'll have to return with additional equipment.

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So unfortunately, they can't search the crates on this trip. At those depths, you really only have about 30 minutes max down there. The last thing they want to do is potentially damage the Amber Room in the process.

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This expedition is step number one to identify the wreck to check what is this. But definitely we need expedition number two when we can check exactly what cargo contains.

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Plans are moving forward for a salvage and recovery mission in the next few months.

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To check cargo on the car thru it, we need to do it on the proper way. On the proper way, that means that we have to spend days or even weeks on the position that we have to anchor permanently the boat with special equipment for the divers.

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This time they'll be bringing many more resources to the effort. They'll have divers that can work on a rotating basis. They'll have equipment that can float large objects.

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If they find a crate, they'll need to leave it sealed until they get it to the surface.

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The dive team is also going to be bringing a representative from the National Maritime Museum in Gdansk, Poland as an advisor.

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It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring something as rare and as valuable a cultural resource as the Amber Room to the surface.

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This is a mystery on par with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the discovery of King Tut's tomb. Is it down there? I don't know.

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But I certainly hope it is because I would love to see this thing finally revealed. I would love to see this mystery solved.

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I couldn't imagine how would we feel when we find hard proof on the Carthwares ship that we find Amber Room. This is absolutely out of my imagination.

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But perhaps it will be something special and unique and maybe I remember this moment till the end of my life.

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Could the Amber Room lie in crates at the bottom of the Baltic Sea? If the dive team is successful and can salvage what's aboard the SS Carlsruhe, we may soon know the answer to this enduring mystery.

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I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.