Robbers made off with three priceless diamond sets from a state museum in Dresden, police and museum directors confirmed yesterday, in what German media have described as the biggest art heist since World War Two.
The thieves broke into the Green Vault at Dresden’s Royal Palace, home to around 4,000 precious objects made of ivory, gold, silver and jewels after a power cut deactivated the alarm at dawn Monday.
The stolen items included three “priceless” sets of diamonds, the director of Dresden’s state art collections Marion Ackermann told reporters at a press conference yesterday. Ackermann confirmed the sets included brilliant-cut diamonds which belonged to an 18th-century collection of jewellery assembled by the museum’s founder.
“We are talking here about items of inestimable art historical and cultural-historical value,” she said but declined to give an exact estimate of the financial damages. “We cannot put an exact value on them because they are priceless.”
Dirk Syndram, another director at the museum, said the sets amounted to “a kind of world heritage”, totalling about 100 jewellery items. Bild daily said the heist was “probably the biggest art theft since World War Two”.
At dawn yesterday, a fire had broken out at an electrical panel nearby, deactivating the museum’s alarm as well as street lighting, police said, adding the investigations were ongoing to determine if there was a link to the robbery. Despite the power cut, a surveillance camera kept working and filmed two men breaking in.
The thieves had smashed a window and cut through a fence before “approaching in a targeted manner a showcase, which they destroyed”, head of Dresden police Volker Lange said.
Ackermann said she was “shocked by the brutality of the break-in.”
Founded by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony in 1723, the Green Vault is one of 12 museums which make up the famous Dresden State Art Collections. One of the oldest museums in Europe, the Green Vault holds treasures including a 63.8-centimetre figure of a Moor studded with emeralds and a 547.71-carat sapphire gifted by Tsar Peter I of Russia.