Visites · Leipzig · Historic Arcade
The Midnight Heist - Mädler-Passage
In the early hours of 20 April 2021, three masked raiders drove a stolen car straight through this Art Nouveau arcade and emptied a jeweller's display cases in under three minutes, escaping with over a million euros in watches before police had been alerted.
À propos de ce lieu
The Mädler-Passage is one of Leipzig's crown jewels of Art Nouveau architecture, a covered arcade built between 1911 and 1914 that links Grimmaische Straße to Neumarkt via a grand glass-roofed rotunda, with Auerbachs Keller, the wine restaurant immortalised in Goethe's Faust, in its basement. In the early hours of 20 April 2021, this elegant corridor became a crime scene. At 3:53 am, at least three masked men drove a stolen Skoda Octavia through the arcade's Neumarkt entrance and into the Messehof passage arm, ramming the roller shutter of the jeweller Brinckmann and Lange. Within barely three minutes they had hammered every display case to pieces, scooped up watches worth over one million euros, and escaped back through the same arcade in a second stolen car. Both vehicles had been stolen in Leipzig that same night. The Mazda used for the final getaway was found abandoned near the railway at Anton-Bruckner-Allee two days later. No arrest has ever been announced.
À retenir
- 3 minutes — The entire ram-raid lasted barely three minutes, from the moment the car hit the roller shutter to the last raider disappearing back through the arcade.
- 1 million euros — The raiders stripped the jeweller's display cases of watches valued at over one million euros, described by police as a low seven-figure sum.
- 90000 euros damage — The hammer attack on display cases and the impact on the roller shutter left roughly 90,000 euros of structural damage at the jeweller's premises.