Prague - Thieves stole 327 bronze tablets, likely for sale as scrap, from a cemetery at a former Nazi concentration camp in the Czech Republic, police said Tuesday. The plaques at the Theresienstadt memorial site, north of Prague, bore names of victims from area's Jewish ghetto and concentration camps. The thieves probably struck overnight last week, police said.
Police opened a criminal investigation, but memorial director Jan Munk said anti-Semitism apparently was not the motive, as thieves have been stealing metal for a decade from the site at Terezin, as the town is known in Czech.
"This goes beyond humanity. This is a disgrace," he said.
The perpetrators probably stole the plaques to sell as scrap, police spokeswoman Alena Romova said.
Replacing the plaques with resin-board replicas will cost nearly 1 million koruny (63,755 dollars).
In recent months, Czech police also suspected scrap-metal sellers behind the disappearance of a four-ton iron railway bridge and the theft of 48 bronze reliefs from the Red Army tombstones in Prague, which caused a short-lived diplomatic spat with Russia.
