Thanks to Adolf Hitler, the most elaborate and arguably the most glorious work of amber art ever created disappeared in 1941. It was at the height of World War II that invading Nazis dismantled the fabled Amber Room of Czar Peter the Great and carted the whole thing off.

Perhaps they thought they were entitled. The room was commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701 for his lavish palace in Berlin. It took Europes finest craftsmen eight years to complete the dozen 16-ft.high mosaic panels, comprising nearly 100,000 perfectly fitted pieces of carved amber depicting flowers and Prussian royal emblems.

Fredericks son Frederick William I had no use for such frills, so in 1716 he gave the panels to Peter the Great. In 1755 they were assembled in the freshly completed Ekaterininsky Palace, near St. Petersburg, and supplemented with trompe loeil amber wallpaper and amber objects from Peters collection. In the rays of the setting sun, according to contemporary accounts, the whole room seemed to glow.

It must have looked good to the invading Nazis, who shipped the room (six tons worth of paneling valued at more than £100 million) to Konigsberg (modern Kaliningrad). What happened to the panels is a mystery. They may have been deliberately burned, or inadvertently bombed in an Allied raid, or even (a theory that Boris Yeltsin reportedly favours) preserved to this day in a private German collection. "There are an enormous number of legends," says Alexander Shedrinsky, an art-conservation expert at New York University, "but I think the most realistic suggestion is that they disappeared during the bombing."

That doesnt mean, however, that the Amber Room is lost forever. Since 1979, Russian craftsmen have been painstakingly trying to re-create it, using as their guide a single colour photograph, some drawings and notes, and bits of amber that fell off the original walls. The project is expected to cost millions of dollars and take at least five more years. "What they have done so far is absolutely mind-boggling," says Shedrinsky.

Visitors to the amber exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History will get a chance to judge for themselves: on display will be a corner table and surrounding wainscoting which seem illuminated from within in warm tones ranging from pale yellow to coppery red. Master amber craftsmen from Russia will be on hand to demonstrate their techniques and to prove that not every instance of Nazi desecration is irreversible.