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FRANKFURT—German authorities said they had recovered a significant part of the 18th-century treasures stolen three years ago from Dresden’s Royal Castle in one of the country’s biggest jewelry heists in recent memory.
The jewels stolen from the opulent Green Vault collection in November 2019 included items assembled by Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Six men from Berlin are currently standing trial in Dresden accused of the theft.
Public prosecutors and police said they found 31 of the looted Dresden artifacts in Berlin on the night of Dec. 16-17, according to statements on Saturday.
The haul included several pieces that appear to be complete, such as a Heron Tail hat decoration and the diamond-laden breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle. Other stolen items are still missing, including an epaulet containing the roughly 50-carat Dresden White Diamond that was damaged during the theft and a large bow-shaped brooch that belonged to Queen Amalie Auguste of Saxony.
“It’s a real Christmas miracle,” Marion Ackermann, director of the Dresden State Art Collections, told Central German Broadcasting, a public broadcaster.
One of the items stolen in the Green Vault burglary.
Photo:
polizeidirektion dresden/Reuters
Art experts had feared that the thieves would cut up and sell off pieces of the jewelry, which contain hundreds of small diamonds. Museum officials have said it wasn’t possible to put an exact value on the stolen pieces, which include several diamond brooches, a string of pearls and an epée with a diamond-encrusted hilt.
The recovery appeared to stem from information provided by the defendants as part of a deal to reduce their sentence. It followed “exploratory talks between the defense and the public prosecutor’s office, including the court, on a possible settlement of the procedure and the return of any booty that was still there,” prosecutors said.
The secured items were transferred to Dresden under the protection of special police forces. They will be examined there forensically and then by specialists from the Dresden State Art Collections to ensure their authenticity and completeness, prosecutors said.
Michael Kretschmer,
state premier of Saxony, thanked police and prosecutors on Twitter, saying that the artworks “are part of our country’s cultural heritage.”
During the predawn burglary at the 500-year-old Royal Castle of Dresden, thieves broke through a window, descended to the Green Vault treasury, took an ax to a jewelry case and within minutes had snatched several sets of Baroque-era jewelry.
Police said the thieves had set fire to a power-distribution box near the Royal Castle to plunge the area into darkness.
The castle’s unarmed security staff alerted local police when they spotted the burglars on surveillance cameras, but the thieves had fled by the time police arrived.
Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com
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