The diamond treasury of the Dresden royal palace: stolen by the mafia and returned in pieces

Some of the jewelry stolen from the Dresden Green Vault in 2019.polizei Sachsen

The head of the Dresden museum spoke of a "Christmas miracle" when, in mid-December, 31 pieces of the extremely valuable gold and silverware collection appeared in the Green Vault of the palace in this eastern German city.

It was unheard of.

They had been stolen in a spectacular heist three years earlier, and very few had any hope of recovering them.

They were thought to be disengaged, melted down, and gone forever.

The

does not respond to anything other than the attempt by the alleged thieves, six members of the same Berlin mafia family, to reduce their sentences.

The jewels appeared scattered on the meeting table of a law firm in the German capital while their lawyers negotiated a deal with the Prosecutor's Office.

But what at first seemed excellent news for German cultural heritage has been clouded by the analysis of the recovered pieces: most are broken, bruised, disfigured.

And precisely the most valuable are missing.

An expert testified this Tuesday in the trial that one of the pieces, covered in diamonds, is broken into nine pieces.

They all have whitish remains, probably from some corrosive substance used to clean them and remove evidence.

The brilliants look cloudy and grayish in color.

It is not ruled out that they remained underwater for a long time.

One of the defendants, Rabieh Remmo, covers his face upon his arrival for the trial at the Dresden High Court on January 10.

JENS SCHLUETER (AFP)

The judge of the Dresden Court where six men between the ages of 23 and 28 are tried, asked the restorer of the royal collections what she felt when she saw the jewels again: "It was very exciting," she replied, according to the chronicle of the

.

But he quickly listed the losses: the epaulette with the so-called

, a 50-carat diamond that cost the same as the construction of Dresden's Frauenkirche church when it was purchased in the 18th century, is missing.

Neither was a large bow with 650 diamonds or the necklace of Queen Amalia Augusta, which sported 32 of these large precious stones.

"They were the masterpieces of the collection," lamented the witness.

The Green Vault is one of the richest treasure chambers in Europe, with a magnificently preserved collection of 18th-century gold and silverware that, unlike other royal treasures, scattered by inheritance, was kept as a whole.

His most famous piece, the Green Diamond, was saved from theft thanks to the fact that it was on loan at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

If it had been in the poorly guarded and flimsy cabinets of the royal palace in Dresden, it too would have ended up in the loot of thieves.

The images from the security cameras, viewed at the trial, show that two hooded men entered through a window of the palace without the alarms going off and, knowing full well what their objective was, they smashed the display case containing the 21 most valuable jewels with an ax. from the collection.

They were out in a matter of minutes, escaping with an Audi A6 that was set on fire in a garage four kilometers from the palace, and changed vehicles to return to Berlin.

View of the room that houses the Green Vault jewelry collection, in Dresden. Sebastian Kahnert (AP)

Although at the beginning of the trial his lawyers assured that they would be acquitted, things have been going wrong for the Remmo, a well-known criminal clan in Berlin, related to many other serious crimes.

Despite the fact that they took the trouble to cover the treasure chamber with the foam from a fire extinguisher, the Police found traces of DNA that allow them to be identified.

The spectacular Dresden robbery raised many questions about the security of German museums.

To break the display case the thieves used an ordinary axe.

They managed to leave the museum in the dark minutes before entering, burning a nearby electrical box.

A few days before, the bars on the window they had climbed through had been sawn and glued together so that they would appear intact, and no one noticed.

They were arrested a year later, during an operation with more than 1,000 police officers from all over Germany who searched several houses in the Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln, where the Remmos reside.

Four of the six defendants are willing to cooperate in exchange for seeing their sentences reduced.

The deal proposed by the court not only requires the return of the jewels, but also that they confess how they planned the coup and what role each of them played.

As there are DNA tests of several, it is known that they participated materially.

One of them does not want to plead guilty and claims that he has an alibi.

The royal palace in Dresden, where the Green Vault from which the jewels were stolen is located.

Matthias Rietschel (Reuters)

The mystery about the whereabouts of the three most valuable pieces remains unsolved.

They were, along with the Green Diamond, the stars of the collection of goldsmith and jewelery masterpieces of Augustus II

, Prince of Saxony and King of Poland (1670-1733).

They were sold?

Do the Remmo still keep them as the ultimate jailbreak card up their sleeve?

The loot could have been, or still is, underwater.

During the Christmas holidays, 22 Police divers plunged into the Neukölln channel in search of the rest of the pieces.

They didn't find much more than rusty bicycles.

The stolen 18th century jewelery pieces, with a total of 4,300 diamonds, not only have an insured value of almost 114 million euros;

they are also of immense cultural and historical relevance for Saxony.

The first surprise when they were found was the number: at first glance there were 31, when 21 were stolen. Conservators were immediately dismayed to discover that most of them were in pieces.

A jewel that imitates a heron's tail and the breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle are complete, but damaged, and it is not yet known if they can be restored and returned to their original state.