The employee who robbed the Munich Museum received a lenient sentence: he was caught by accident
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A 30-year-old man received a year and ten months for stealing and replacing paintings with copies.
The man, who was 23 at the time, got a job at the Munich Museum in 2016. Over the course of two years, he removed four paintings from the collections, replacing them with copies, and sold the originals at auctions. With the proceeds, I bought myself an apartment, a car and an expensive watch. The loss was discovered by accident.
Among the stolen paintings are “The Tale of the Frog Princess” by Franz von Stuck, two works by the Austrian artist Franz von Defregger and one by the German painter Eduard von Grützner. The thief, whose name remained a secret during the investigation, sold three of them and earned a total of more than 60 thousand euros. And he immediately began to lead a luxurious lifestyle – he paid off his debts, bought an apartment, expensive watches and a Rolls-Royce car.
The museum discovered the loss by accident, when one of the museum employees decided to check the painting “The Tale of the Frog Princess” and suddenly realized that its dimensions did not correspond to those stated in the inventory. We started checking the rest of the fund and found other substitutions.
The investigation and trial of the case took several years. As a result, the Munich court took pity on the defendant and gave him a lenient sentence, since he “repented and admitted his guilt.” The thief was ordered to compensate for the damage and return more than 60 thousand euros. He will serve a sentence of one year and nine months.
The story in Germany unfolds against the backdrop of a theft scandal at the British Museum, where, as it turned out in August, exhibits had been missing from the collections for years and were then sold on eBay for ridiculous sums. In total, more than 2 thousand items were stolen from the British Museum. Because of this case, the director of the museum, Hartwig Fischer, and his deputy, Jonathan Williams, have already lost their positions. Curator Peter Higgs, who had worked at the British Museum since 1993, was suspected of the thefts. However, he has not been arrested and his family maintains that he is innocent.
The investigation is ongoing, but no results have yet been publicly released. The scandal is growing: many countries are demanding the return of cultural property once taken out by British colonialists. And the Accounts Chamber had questions for the British Museum, which in its report for 2022-2023 did not even mention the disappearance of so many exhibits. Can a thief (or thieves) really count on a lenient sentence here too?
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