Huge jewelry theft at Dresden Castle. Historic Grüne Gewölbe robbed.

A theft of enormous proportions occurred tonight in Germany, at Dresden Castle: about one hundred pieces of eighteenth-century jewelry were stolen from the Grüne Gewölbe (“Green Vault”), the museum, set up in the castle, that contains the largest collection of jewelry in Europe (these are the Saxon crown jewels). According to reports in some German media, the value of the loot is said to be around 1 billion euros, although the director of Dresden’s state collections (to which the stolen jewels belong), Marion Ackermann, claims that it is impossible to put a value on the pieces taken away by the thieves, because “they are impossible to sell,” she told the press, “and because their material value does not reflect their historical significance.”

According to initial reconstructions, the theft, discovered around five o’clock this morning, was planned in detail: the thieves would purposely start a fire to knock out the museum’s electrical systems (and thus also the security and surveillance systems) in order to act undisturbed by entering through a window. Authorities immediately went to the scene this morning: Michael Kretschmer, president of Saxony, said that “it was not just the gallery that was robbed: all Saxons were robbed. It is not possible to understand the history of our nation and Saxony without the Grüne Gewölbe and Saxony’s state art collections.”

The museum consists of ten rooms housing about three thousand works of jewelry. The collection was founded in 1723 by the Elector Prince Augustus the Strong of Saxony and has been accessible to the public ever since. During World War II, three rooms of the museum were damaged but the jewelry collections had already been brought to safety and hidden in a safe place. In 1945, at the end of the conflict, the collection was seized by the Soviets, who returned it to the German Democratic Republic only in 1958. Today, the museum (one of Saxony’s most important tourist attractions) remains closed to the public to allow the police to carry out all necessary operations.

Pictured: one of the rooms of the Grüne Gewölbe.

Huge jewelry theft at Dresden Castle. Historic Grüne Gewölbe robbed.

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