The Big Maple Leaf

At approximately 3:45 in the morning on Monday 27 March 2017, on the northern tip of Museum Island in central Berlin, three men crossed a regional railway track at the rear of the Bode Museum. They had a ladder. They had ropes. They had a hand-trolley. They had a wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow is, of all the equipment they brought, the detail that has stayed with anyone who has read the case file.

The Bode Museum

The Bode Museum is a nineteenth-century neo-baroque palace at the northern tip of Museum Island. It houses one of the largest numismatic collections in Germany. Inside it, in a glass case, on permanent display in a second-floor gallery, sat a single object: the Big Maple Leaf, a coin issued in 2007 by the Royal Canadian Mint, on loan to the museum. The coin was the size of a manhole cover — fifty centimetres in diameter, three centimetres thick. It was made of pure four-nines gold and weighed exactly one hundred kilograms. Face value was one million Canadian dollars. Melt value, in March 2017, was approximately three point eight million euros. As a numismatic object, considerably more — only five Big Maple Leafs had been cast worldwide, and the Bode Museum's was on long-term display.

It sat in a special climate-controlled glass case with a custom mount. It was, in the museum's words at the time of acquisition, irreplaceable.

The window

The window the three men climbed to that night was, by police reconstruction, on the second floor at the rear of the museum. It had been left, on summer nights, occasionally ajar by staff for ventilation; on this night, it was unlocked and slightly open. The men had visited the museum, multiple times, as paying visitors. They knew the precise location of the coin. They knew the floor plan. They had measured the case dimensions. They placed the ladder against the rear wall. They climbed up. They climbed in.

They walked across the gallery to the case. They smashed the case with an axe. They removed the coin. With great difficulty — given that it weighed a hundred kilograms — they placed it on the hand-trolley they had brought. They wheeled the coin across the gallery. They reached the window.

The drop to the railway track below was eight metres. Far too far to lower a man with a hundred kilograms of gold strapped to him. They had brought ropes. They lowered the coin from the second-floor window down to the wheelbarrow that was waiting on the track. They climbed down after it. They placed the coin in the wheelbarrow. They wheeled the wheelbarrow along the railway track for approximately three hundred metres to a position where they had parked a vehicle. They lifted the coin into the vehicle. They drove off.

Total time, from when they entered the gallery to when the vehicle pulled away, was under twenty minutes.

The Remmo clan

Within weeks, German federal investigators had identified the suspects as members of an extended Berlin family. Known to the police, in court records, as the Remmo clan. The same family that, two years and eight months later — in November 2019 — would walk into the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden with axes and remove twenty-one pieces of Saxon royal jewellery from a treasury Augustus the Strong had assembled in 1723.

The Bode Museum theft was, in effect, a rehearsal for Dresden. The Remmo investigation was already running by the time of the Dresden heist. German police had been watching the family for years. The Bode Museum coin had been the largest single object the family had taken at that point. They had developed, by 2017, a particular method. Climbing in. Removing. Wheeling out. The Dresden operation, two years later, would be louder, faster, and more violent. But the basic structure was the same.

The trial

The coin, the prosecution case at trial established, was almost certainly broken up and melted within days of the theft. A hundred kilograms of pure gold, spread across multiple buyers in the unregulated end of the bullion market — and the Berlin family had, by 2017, established access to those buyers — would have been converted to cash within about a week. Trace amounts of gold dust were later recovered from a vehicle and a property associated with the family. The amounts were tiny. They were sufficient to convict.

The trial concluded at the Landgericht Berlin in February 2020. Three of the Remmo family members were convicted of aggravated theft and sentenced to approximately four and a half years each. A Bode Museum security guard, who had assisted the family with information about the building's interior layout, was convicted as an accomplice. The court ordered the family to pay damages of approximately 3.3 million euros, the melt value of the coin. The family has not paid.

They could not return the coin. The coin no longer existed. By the end of 2017, of the five Big Maple Leafs ever issued, four remained. The Royal Canadian Mint, asked by German press whether they would consider issuing a replacement, declined to comment. They have not.

The Remmos came back to museums two years later, with axes, in Dresden. The Bode Museum had been the rehearsal. The Green Vault was the show.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 13. Stream the episode here.