The story
Early on 27 March 2017, three men climbed through a window of the Bode Museum in Berlin, smashed a display case in the coin cabinet and wheeled away a Canadian gold coin weighing 100 kilograms. The Big Maple Leaf, on loan from a private owner, was worth about 3.75 million euros in gold. Two of the thieves and a museum security guard were later convicted. The coin has never been found, and investigators assume it was cut up or melted down.
That coin cabinet holds more than 500,000 objects, and it is only one of three collections in the building. The museum stands on the northern tip of Museum Island, a domed neo-Baroque building by Ernst von Ihne, the Kaiser's court architect, finished in 1904. It opened as the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and has carried the name of Wilhelm von Bode, the director who shaped it, since 1956. Bode liked to show sculpture, paintings and furniture together, as they might have stood in a Renaissance interior.
Most visitors today come for the sculpture, from the Middle Ages to the 18th century. Donatello's Pazzi Madonna, a marble relief of the 1420s, has been in Berlin since 1886, and Tilman Riemenschneider, the late Gothic woodcarver of Würzburg, leads the German masters. The Museum of Byzantine Art, with icons and early Christian carvings, shares the building. In May 1945 hundreds of paintings from the museum's picture gallery, stored in the Friedrichshain flak tower, burned there. The damaged building reopened in stages in East Berlin and was fully restored only in 2006.
