The Payslip Hold-Up

In Berlin in 2009, on a cold morning in the Tiergarten district, a man walked into a small branch bank with a single piece of paper in his pocket. The paper had three sentences on it, written in ballpoint pen. Money. Now. Or I shoot. He had no weapon. He had no disguise. He had no getaway driver. He had a note, and on the basis of the note, he had decided to commit an armed robbery.

The note was not, on its own, a problem. It implied a weapon without producing one — a category of offence that, in Germany, is treated as functionally equivalent to armed robbery under section 249 of the criminal code. The problem was the paper.

What a German payslip says

The man had not brought a fresh sheet. He had not torn a page from a notebook. He had not used the back of a receipt. The only piece of paper available to him at the moment he had written the demand note was the most recently issued document in his possession — his Lohnabrechnung, his German employer's monthly payslip, posted to him the previous Friday.

A German Lohnabrechnung is not a payment record in the casual sense. It is, by regulation, a complete identity document. The standard format prints, on a single sheet, the employee's full legal name, residential address with postcode, date of birth, tax identification number, social security number, employer name and address, department, personnel number, gross salary, tax bracket, and marital status for tax purposes. There is no orientation in which a German payslip does not function as a small dossier on the person it belongs to.

He had, days earlier, taken it out of its envelope, read it, folded it, placed it in his jacket. On the morning of the robbery, needing something to write a threatening note on, he had reached into his jacket, pulled out the payslip, and used the blank reverse side. He had not, at any point, reflected on what was on the other side.

The cashier

He entered the branch at approximately ten in the morning. He walked to the cashier's window. He slid the note under the glass. He said nothing. The cashier, a woman in her fifties, read the note. She looked at the note. She looked at the man. She looked back at the note. And she did something that, in retrospect, deserves more attention than it has received.

She did not panic. She turned the note over.

On the front of the note — that is, on the front of the payslip — was a complete printed record of the man now waiting at her counter. She read it. She placed the note carefully on her side of the counter, out of his reach. With her foot, she pressed the silent alarm. To the man, she said quietly that the manager would need to authorise the withdrawal because the requested amount was above her till limit. This was a lie. There was no requested amount on the note.

She and the suspect stood at the counter for approximately three minutes while the Berlin Polizei drove to the address. He grew uncomfortable. He whispered to her, through the glass, that he wanted the money. She continued to wait. She did not, he later told the court, behave in any way that indicated she knew who he was.

The arrest

Officers entered the branch and arrested the suspect without struggle. He had no weapon. He had no escape route. His hands had been in his jacket pockets for several minutes; he had not produced anything from them. The note was placed into evidence, with both sides photographed. The cashier was praised. The bank's manager arrived a few minutes later, having been delayed in traffic, and was informed that the situation had resolved itself without his involvement.

Trial

The case was tried at the Amtsgericht Berlin-Tiergarten. The defendant was charged with attempted robbery under section 249 of the German criminal code. He had no defence. The note was the note. The payslip side of the note bore his name. The address on the payslip matched the home address officers had used to confirm his identity within hours of the arrest. He pleaded guilty. He received a custodial sentence within the standard range for the offence.

His employer, contacted by Der Spiegel for comment, declined to elaborate beyond confirming that the man was no longer in the company's employment. The administrative consequence of the case had taken approximately twenty minutes to settle: the cashier had stopped the robbery, the police had made the arrest, and the employer had terminated the contract by lunch.

It is, in some ways, a story about paper. There were several hundred million sheets of paper in active use in Berlin offices in 2009. He had selected the only one, in his possession, that was specifically designed to identify him. He had then handed it to a stranger. And then he had waited.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 8. Stream the episode here.