The World Cup Heist - Germanisches Nationalmuseum
Germany's largest museum of art and cultural history became the scene of one of the country's most embarrassing art thefts on the night the national football team won the 2014 World Cup. Two drunk students from Erlangen climbed scaffolding to reach the roof, broke in through a skylight, and lifted a painting worth nearly a million euros right off the wall.
About this place
The Germanisches Nationalmuseum is Germany's most comprehensive museum of art and cultural history, founded in 1852 inside a former Carthusian monastery and expanded over the following century into a sprawling complex along Kartäusergasse. Its collection of over 1.3 million objects spans two thousand years of German culture, from Albrecht Dürer drawings and medieval goldsmithing to early scientific instruments and twentieth-century expressionism. The boulevard leading to its entrance, the Straße der Menschenrechte, is lined with white columns inscribed with every article of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, making it a monument to justice as much as a gateway to art. On the night of July 13th to 14th, 2014, as Germany beat Argentina in the World Cup Final in Rio de Janeiro, two students from Erlangen found construction scaffolding left on the museum facade and a ladder lying nearby. They climbed to the roof, located an unsecured skylight, and lowered themselves into the silent building. Using only their mobile phones for light, they navigated through the darkened galleries until they found Emil Nolde's expressionist painting 'Herr und Dame', painted in 1910 and valued at approximately 900,000 euros. They lifted it from the wall. What they did not know was that the painting had a silent alarm. A guard spotted the glow of their phone torches moving through a gallery at around 4:30 in the morning, police sealed the building, and the pair were arrested in the museum courtyard with the painting in their hands, undamaged. At their trial on December 2nd, 2014, the judge handed down suspended sentences and remarked that the theft could hardly be called professional.
Key facts
- 900000 euros — The estimated value of Emil Nolde's 'Herr und Dame', the expressionist painting lifted from the wall during the 2014 World Cup heist.
- 2014 year — The year two celebrating students climbed onto the museum roof and stole a painting, only to be caught in the courtyard before they could escape.
- 0 days in prison — Both students received suspended sentences at their December 2014 trial, meaning neither served a single day behind bars for stealing a nearly million-euro painting.