Germany’s treasure chamber, famously known as the ‘Green Vault’, had 100 pieces of priceless jewellery stolen from it on Monday 25th November.
The Green Vault, located in Dresden Castle, was home to one of the largest collections of treasure in Europe. It originated in the 18th century, when Augustus the Strong established Dresden as a centre for the arts by commissioning rooms to showcase his valuables.
Roland Woeller, the state’s interior minister, told reporters that the thieves have “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.”
The police tweeted images of some of the specific items that were stolen:
On their website, the police explained how the security staff alerted Dresden police in the early hours of Monday morning about the burglary, leading to an extensive investigation that is still ongoing.
But the question on everyone’s mind is how exactly did the theives pull of such a huge scale heist? Well, the criminals were said to have started a nearby electrical fire, disabling the museum’s alarm system and knocking out all of the streetlights in the area at the time of the robbery.
If one of the biggest heists of the century wasn’t enough, go and read about the €182k painting that was stolen from a gallery in Moscow!
