Thieves steal jewel sets from Dresden museum
Collections said to have ‘invaluable cultural value’
BERLIN — Thieves broke into Dresden’s Green Vault, one of the world’s oldest museums, early Monday morning, making off with three “priceless” sets of 18th century jewelry that German officials said would be impossible to sell on the open market.
The treasury of Augustus the Strong of Saxony was established in 1723 and today contains around 4,000 objects of gold, precious stones and other materials on display in Dresden’s Royal Palace.
Authorities said it appeared the thieves had broken open only one glass case containing three sets of Baroque jewelry made up of dozens of gems each.
“This is a bitter day for the cultural heritage of Saxony,” the state’s interior minister, Roland Woeller, told reporters.
He said the thieves “stole cultural treasures of immeasurable worth — that is not only the material worth but also the intangible worth to the state of Saxony, which is impossible to estimate.”
Police are still carrying out forensic exams of the crime scene and museum officials said they have not yet been able to determine whether all the 100-or-so pieces were missing, but that the sets included intricate and dazzling brooches, buttons, buckles and other items.
Green Vault director Dirk Syndram stressed that the collections in the museum have “invaluable cultural value” — particularly their completeness.
“Nowhere in any other collection in Europe have jewels or sets of jewels been preserved in this form and quantity,” he said. “The value is really in the ensemble.”
Police said they were alerted shortly before 5 a.m. by unarmed museum security guards who had spotted two burglars inside the downtown museum on video surveillance cameras.
The first officers arrived on the scene within minutes but the thieves had already fled in a waiting getaway car, which managed to elude immediate attempts to find it in the surrounding area and on the nearby highway, Dresden police chief Joerg Kubiessa told reporters.