The Big Maple Leaf

Berlin, 27 March 2017. At 3:45 in the morning, three men cross a regional railway track at the rear of the Bode Museum on Museum Island. They place a ladder against the back wall. They climb to a second-floor window — left ajar by staff for ventilation — and they climb in. They walk to a glass case in a numismatic gallery. They smash the case with an axe.

Inside the case is a single coin. The Big Maple Leaf. Issued in 2007 by the Royal Canadian Mint. Fifty centimetres in diameter. Three centimetres thick. One hundred kilograms of pure four-nines gold. Worth approximately 3.8 million euros at melt value, considerably more as a numismatic object.

They have brought a hand-trolley. They wheel the coin to the window. They lower it eight metres on ropes. Onto a wheelbarrow waiting on the railway track below. They climb down. They wheel the coin three hundred metres along the track to a vehicle. They drive off. Total time: under twenty minutes.

The Bode Museum thieves were members of the Remmo clan — the same Berlin-based extended family that, two years and eight months later, would walk into Dresden's Green Vault with axes. The Bode Museum theft was the rehearsal. The coin was almost certainly broken up and melted within days. Of the five Big Maple Leafs ever issued worldwide, by the end of 2017 there were four.

Maren and Ellis on the wheelbarrow at the rear of one of Europe's largest numismatic collections — and the family who, in 2017, were learning.