Crooks smash open cases to steal gems worth up to a billion euros after sneaking through small hole

This is the moment crooks smashed open cases to steal jewellery worth up to a billion euros from a German museum after sneaking through a tiny hole, as police link the raid to a huge coin theft more than two years ago.

Diamond thieves stole three sets of ‘priceless’ 18th-century jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault in the early hours of this morning in what could be the world’s biggest-ever heist.

Burglars switched off a power supply and broke in through a window before squeezing through a narrow gap. 

Once inside, the brazen raiders smashed open a cabinet and stole three jewellery ensembles which were commissioned by Saxony’s former ruler Augustus the Strong in an 18th-century show of power. 

Hooded thieves were seen on CCTV cameras inside the museum but they escaped in a getaway car and a manhunt has so far proved fruitless. 

According to police, two burglars destroyed a window grill and the window behind the building next to the museum, then got into the adjoining rooms before storming he jewel vault.

Security footage captured the moment the burglars, who were wearing torches on their heads, swung axes at the glass cabinets.

Two black-clothed figures were filmed running into the dark vault and targeting different sections of the secured cases.

One member of the gang could be seen repeatedly striking a vertical cabinet until the glass shattered and they could gain access to the jewels.

German media described the ‘strikingly small thieves’ who managed to get through a tiny hole to enter the vault, as leaving behind bulky objects such as vases or paintings.

The break-in only lasted only a few minutes, with the emergency call being made at 4.59am and the police arriving at 5.05am – but the raiders had already fled the scene. 

Investigators linked the gang to the an estimated $4.5million (£3.5m) theft of coins from a museum in Berlin in March 2017. 

In that heist burglars used a ladder to steal the huge gold coin featuring a bust of Queen Elizabeth II on the front from the Bode Museum.

According to Bild, up to a billion euros’ worth of treasures may have been stolen from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden – which would make it the biggest art theft in history.

Experts at the museum, who once boasted that their collection was ‘as secure as Fort Knox’, said today that the value of the items stolen was ‘immeasurable’ and pleaded with the thieves not to destroy them.

Police said they were alerted shortly before 5am by unarmed museum security guards who had spotted two burglars inside the downtown museum on video surveillance cameras.

The building was being patrolled by two guards in the centre of the building, according to German media.  

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.

Police later confirmed that an Audi A6 matching the description of the getaway car was found burned out in an underground parking lot in Dresden. 

Investigators suspect that a fire at an electrical junction box near the museum, which took out the streetlights at the time of the robbery, was linked to the crime, police said. 

The outage affected lights in front of a window through which the thieves gained entrance, somehow getting through bars and safety glass to reach the Jewel Room.

Police said they have established a special investigation team, codenamed ‘Epaulette’ and comprising 20 specialist officers, to solve the case. 

Investigators have not excluded the possibility more suspects could have been involved.

Museum officials said the sets that were stolen included intricate and dazzling brooches, buttons, buckles and other items. 

The jewels taken in the raid included a diamond rose hat clasp, a military medal of the Polish White Eagle Order and a chain of 177 Saxon pearls.

The museum also houses include a 25-inch figure of a Moor studded with emeralds and a 648-carat sapphire gifted by Tsar Peter I of Russia at a meeting in 1698.

Other valuable items include a jewel-studded sculpture of an Indian royal court, made out of gold, silver, enamel, precious stones and pearls.

Another is a 1701 golden coffee service by court jeweller Johann Melchior Dinglinger, decorated with lounging cherubs. 

Among the baroque collection of more than 4,000 rare objects is the largest blue sapphire in the world, worth around £23million, and a 50-carat cushion-shaped white diamond, worth nearly £10million.

At a press conference this afternoon, museum director Marion Ackermann said she was ‘shocked’ by the ‘brutality’ of the 5am raid.

Thieves smashed into a glass cabinet and made off with three sets of jewellery which were made for Augustus the Strong, the elector of Saxony in the 18th century, she explained.

Augustus competed with French monarch Louis XIV to assemble the most extravagant jewellery, she explained, describing the items stolen as ‘state treasures of the 18th century’.

Augustus, who was elector of Saxony from 1694 to 1733 and also king of Poland for much of that time, established Dresden as a cultural centre and founded the museum which was targeted today. 

The material worth of the jewellery was less important than the fact that the jewels had come as a set, Ackermann said.

Asked about the suggested value of a billion euros (£850million), she said the value of the items stolen could not be quantified. 

‘We’re dealing with priceless artistic and cultural treasures,’ she told reporters in Dresden this afternoon. ‘We cannot give a value because it is impossible to sell.’

Pleading with the thieves not to destroy the objects or melt them down, she said the jewellery was of ‘inestimable cultural and historical value’ and could never be sold on the open market. 

Dirk Syndram, another director at the museum, said the sets amounted to ‘a kind of world heritage’, totalling about 100 jewellery items. 

He explained that the stolen sets were part of a ten-set collection which includes not only diamonds, but also sapphires, rubies and emeralds. 

He said: ‘Nowhere in any other collection in Europe have jewels or sets of jewels been preserved in this form and quantity. The value is really in the ensemble.’ 

One expert has already warned that it will be difficult to trace the diamonds if they are not found in the next few days. 

The thieves may well break them up and sell them in separate parts as trying to sell a whole ensemble would look too suspicious, said Tobias Kormind of jewellery firm 77Diamonds.  

Police say they were alerted to the break-in at 4.59am and suspect that the thieves were behind an electrical fire which broke out nearby.   

Shutting off the electricity may have helped the burglars to disable the museum’s alarm systems and also left the area in darkness. It is unclear whether the alarms had a backup power supply. 

In addition, a burned-out vehicle was discovered nearby and detectives are now trying to track down the owner to establish whether the fire was related to the theft. 

Reports in Germany say the thieves were ‘noticeably small’ and able to fit through a tiny space in a window.  

At the press conference, police said that the smashed cabinet had been made of special safety glass but that it was unclear how the thieves had broken it. 

Detectives are now examining the video footage on which two people are seen, but others may have been waiting outside to help them escape in a getaway car.  

A getaway car could have been well on its way to the motorway within minutes of leaving the museum, they warned.   

State police officers are now at the crime scene as they investigate how the thieves got inside and stole the jewellery. 

‘We have not identified a perpetrator and nor have we yet made any arrests,’ police spokesman Marko Laske said.  

A notice on the museum’s website this morning states only that the building is closed today for ‘organisational reasons’. It is not expected to re-open before Wednesday. 

‘Not only our state collections but we the people of Saxony have been robbed,’ said regional premier Michael Kretschmer. 

‘You cannot understand the history of our state without the Green Vault. The treasures found there were made by the hard work of people in our state.’  

The security measures at the museum had appeared to be in order and ‘comprehensive’, he said. 

State interior minister Roland Woeller said it was a ‘bitter day for the cultural heritage of Saxony’. 

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,’ he said.  

A €1billion art theft would be comfortably the largest in history, surpassing the $500million raid on the Gardner Museum in Boston nearly 30 years ago. 

Two thieves disguised as police officers stole 13 works of art from the Boston museum in March 1990 and the crime remains unsolved.  

In 1911 a thief stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris. According to an estimate in the 1960s, the painting could be worth around $700million today.  

The Dresden museum was founded by in 1723 and houses thousands of items including historic coins and jewellery.  

However, one of its most valuable treasures – a 41-carat naturally green diamond called the Dresden Green – is currently out on loan in New York. 

The museum did not put a current value on the piece, but said that at the time of its purchase it cost 400,000 thalers, compared to the 288,000 thalers it cost to build the city’s lavish Frauenkirche church at around the same time. 

In 2010, then-museum director Martin Roth boasted in an interview with Die Welt that the Green Vault was ‘as secure as Fort Knox’. 

Roth explained how the vault was protected by ‘invisible’ security systems, but warned that the biggest danger was information leaking out from inside.  

The collection dates back to 1723, while the Dresden royal palace which houses it was first built in 1533 as the home for the electors and later kings of Saxony. 

The Green Vault gets its name from the green-coloured columns and decoration in some of the rooms.  

The museum and palace were rebuilt after the devastating Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. Some of the items were looted by Soviet troops in 1945, but later returned. 

Part of the collection remained closed to visitors during the Cold War, when Dresden was part of communist East Germany. 

However, the museum was extensively rebuilt in the 2000s and its two exhibitions now form one of the ‘best-preserved treasuries in Europe’, its website says. 

Angela Merkel hosted then-US President Barack Obama there in 2009 during his early months in office.  

In 2017, a 220lb gold coin the size of a manhole cover was stolen from a Berlin museum and is feared to have been melted down. 

Prosecutors allege that the burglars broke into the museum through an upstairs window and used a ladder, wheelbarrow and rope to extract the coin. A trial remains underway.