When a group of masked thieves drove into a garage in an industrial city in western Germany last weekend, they were not simply searching for a parking spot.
The thieves broke through a door to a local bank, forcing their way into its archive room, the police said. Then they started drilling through a thick wall, making a hole wide enough for them to crawl through.
The robbers knew what they were looking for, the police said. They went through the hole and entered the bank’s safe, spending hours opening private lockers with what was likely a crowbar.
The heist in Gelsenkirchen, a city of roughly 260,000 residents near Cologne, at first attracted little attention because the stolen contents were unclear. The scale of the theft only started to emerge in recent days, and some now consider it one of the most brazen bank robberies in recent German memory.
The bank, Sparkasse Gelsenkirchen, said that the robbers had broken into 95 percent of the branch’s 3,250 personal lockboxes. The insured value of the contents of those boxes was at least 31 million euros, or $36 million, the bank said. The size of that haul has drawn comparisons with the Green Vault robbery of 2019, when thieves broke into a former royal palace in Dresden, eastern Germany, and made off with 90 pieces of jewelry.
“It was the work of professionals,” Thomas Nowaczyk, a police spokesman, said on Wednesday.
Many details about the theft remain unclear, including the identity and the number of robbers involved, Mr. Nowaczyk said.
A security camera inside the parking garage captured the thieves using a black Audi station wagon with stolen plates and a white Mercedes-Benz van to carry away the haul. While the thieves paid for a parking token for the Audi, which they left in the spot during the heist, they lifted the garage barrier by force for the van to enter and exit.
The police have not confirmed when the vehicles were captured on camera, but the authorities did say that a fire alarm in the complex went off at 3:58 a.m. on Sunday morning.
The bank insures each box for up to 10,300 euros, or $12,100. But because many Germans use bank vaults for valuables of unknown — or undeclared — worth, the thieves may have taken far more than the boxes’ insured value of 31 million euros.
As word of the heist spread on Monday, up to 200 customers gathered in front of the bank demanding to speak with staff members about their valuables, according to the police. The atmosphere intensified as crowds grew; some started hurling threats. “We want in, we want in,” the customers chanted, according Deutsche Presse-Agentur, the main German newswire.
As many as two dozen police officers were at the bank to control the crowd.
“We can understand the frustration with the bank, but there are limits,” Mr. Nowaczyk said.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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