Robbers made off with three priceless diamond sets from a state museum in Dresden on Monday, police and museum directors said, in what German media have described as the biggest art heist since World War Two.
The thieves at dawn broke into the Green Vault at Dresden's Royal Palace - home to around 4,000 precious objects of ivory, gold, silver and jewels - after a power cut deactivated the alarm.
The stolen items included brilliant-cut diamonds that belonged to a collection of jewellery of 18th-century Saxony ruler Augustus the Strong.
"We are talking here about items of inestimable art-historical and cultural-historical value," the director of Dresden's state art collections Marion Ackermann told reporters at a press conference on Monday.
According to the police, the amount of damage is still unclear. Source: AAP
"We cannot put an exact value on them because they are priceless," said Ms Ackermann, adding she was "shocked by the brutality of the break-in."
The thieves launched the brazen raid after a fire broke out at an electrical panel near the museum in the early hours of Monday, deactivating its alarm as well as street lighting, police said, adding that investigations were ongoing to determine if there was a link to the robbery.
Despite the power cut, a surveillance camera kept working and filmed two men breaking in.
Police arrived within minutes of being alerted to the robbery, but the suspects had escaped. Source: AAP
Using an axe, they smashed a window and cut through a grill before making their way to a display case "in a targeted manner" and destroying it, police said.
They then fled in an Audi A6 and remain on the run.
Bild daily said the heist was "probably the biggest art theft since World War Two".
'Hard-earned' treasures
Saxony's state premier said the heist went beyond the value of the artefacts stolen.
"The treasures that are found in the Green Vault and the Dresden Royal palace were hard-earned by the people of Saxony over many centuries," Michael Kretschmer said.
"One cannot understand the history of our country, our state, without the Green Vault and Saxony's State Art Collections."
In 2010, the museum hosted a meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel and then US president Barack Obama on his first state visit to Germany.
The museum remained closed and sealed off by police on Monday.
The theft is the second high-profile heist in Germany in recent years, after a 100kg, 24-karat giant gold coin was stolen from Berlin's Bode Museum in 2017.
Dresden police said they were in contact with colleagues in Berlin to examine "if there are any connections and if there are similar patterns in the crimes".
Germany's culture minister Monika Gruetters said that protection of museums and cultural institutions was now of "the highest priority".
"The theft of items which make up our identity as a nation of culture strikes at our hearts," she said.
