Saxon royal jewels are stolen from a German museum

Thieves broke into a museum in the eastern German city of Dresden early Monday and made off with three collections of jewellery from the royal house of Saxony, made of gold and precious stones, that authorities said were of immeasurable historical and cultural value.

The break-in took place in the Jewel Room, one of 10 rooms in the Royal Palace known as the Grünes Gewölbe, or Green Vault. The rooms hold a collection of 3,000 individual objects, gathered by August the Strong, an 18th-century ruler of the German state of Saxony, as well as of Poland and Lithuania.

At least two thieves broke the special security glass of a display case and made off with an unknown number of objects from three sets of royal jewels comprising more than 90 individual pieces — cuff links, buttons and brooches adorned with rubies, sapphires and diamonds — Dresden police and museum authorities said.

“I don’t have to tell you how shocked we are by the brutality of this break-in,” Marion Ackermann, general director of the consortium of museums known as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, of which the Green Vault was a part, told reporters hours after the crime was discovered. “As you know, the historical and cultural value of this is immeasurable.”

Ackermann did not assign a monetary value to the objects, but said that an examination of the display case later Monday revealed that fewer pieces were taken than previously feared.

“Many works are still in the display cases,” she told ZDF, a public broadcaster. “The thieves were not able to take everything because each work was individually attached” to the background on which they were displayed.

The objects in the Green Vault are one of the world’s most intact collections of Baroque jewels. The building was heavily damaged during World War II but was painstakingly rebuilt after German reunification and reopened to the public in 2006.

Police said they received a call at 4:59am from security guards at the museum who witnessed the robbery on a live video feed from the room in the Green Vault that housed the display case. Ackermann said that it was standard museum procedure for the guards, who are not armed, to alert police instead of intervening personally.

The first officers arrived at the museum within 10 minutes of receiving the call, but by that time, the thieves were already gone, said Jörg Kubiesa, chief of Dresden police. The officers found a broken security gate and window into the room where the collection had been displayed.

The police said they had later moved to shut down the highway around the city and alerted their colleagues in neighbouring cities and countries to the hunt for the thieves, although they conceded that it would take no more than four minutes to reach the highway from the museum.

At about the same time as the first call to police, firefighters were called to an electrical fire on the nearby August Bridge, said Claudia Kuba of Drewag, the electricity supplier for Dresden. An electrical distributor for the area around the museum had to be manually shut off because of the fire, she said.

The ensuing power shutdown caused the streetlights around the museum to go out, although the building itself appeared not to have been affected, police said, adding that officers were investigating whether the fire and power interruption were linked to the break-in.

About 15 minutes after the initial alert from the museum, firefighters were called to put out a blaze in a car parked in a street across the Elbe River from the museum, said Volker Lange, chief of the Dresden criminal police. Authorities were investigating whether the car, which was unregistered, had been used by the thieves.

The stolen jewellery is far more valuable as a collection than as individual pieces, Ackermann said, and she appealed to the thieves not to break them apart or melt them down.

Dirk Syndram, director of the Green Vault, said, “Nowhere else in Europe has any other collection of royal jewels been preserved in this form and quality and quantity.”

He said the museum planned to put out detailed information in the course of the day about the exact pieces that were taken, in hopes of helping to relocate them.

At least one famed treasure of the palace’s permanent exhibition was not stolen. A flawless, 41-carat gem, the Dresden Green Diamond, is on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for the “Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe” exhibition scheduled to start Monday. The diamond is normally on show in its own case, one story above the ground-level floor where the stolen jewels were displayed, Syndram said.

August the Strong, a prince-elector of Saxony and little-loved monarch of Poland and Lithuania, collected rare, glittering objects like goldsmith Johann Melchior Dinglinger’s jewel-encrusted figurines “Court of the Grand Moghul of Delhi” and the “Golden Coffee Set.”

In 1723, August founded the Green Vault, so named for the pale green colour of its domed ceiling. It eventually came to house more than 3,000 medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque works, the biggest surviving princely art collection in Europe.

“Not only have the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen been robbed, but also we Saxons!” Michael Kretschmer, the state governor, wrote on Twitter. “The history of Saxony cannot be understood without the Grünes Gewölbe. The treasures found here have been acquired by the people of our state for years.”

A sign posted outside the Dresden museum and on its website said that it would be closed Monday for ‘organisational reasons.’ Authorities later said that they expected the museum would reopen Wednesday.

© 2019 New York Times News Service