01/15/2026

German Bank Vault Heist Leaves 3,000 Customers Facing Losses as €90m Disappears in Christmas Robbery

European Business Magazine

Thieves spent an entire Christmas weekend drilling through concrete walls to loot 3,250 safe deposit boxes undetected—exposing catastrophic security failures that have left thousands of customers facing uninsured losses and Germany’s banking sector scrambling for answers

Opening paragraphs:

German banks are facing a reckoning over vault security after one of the country’s largest-ever heists left more than 3,000 Sparkasse customers staring at losses between €10 million and €90 million—most of it uninsured and potentially unrecoverable.

The audacious Christmas weekend robbery in Gelsenkirchen saw a professional gang spend approximately 48 hours inside a supposedly secure underground vault, using industrial drilling equipment to bore through reinforced concrete walls and systematically crack open 95% of the branch’s safe deposit boxes. Police described the operation as “very professionally executed,” comparing it to Ocean’s Eleven—except this time, the criminals got away with it.

What has shocked Germany’s banking establishment isn’t just the scale of the theft, but how it happened. The perpetrators drilled through concrete generating 100-decibel noise—as loud as a motorcycle—used hundreds of litres of water, required industrial electrical power, and moved freely through the facility for an entire weekend. Yet nobody noticed until a fire alarm triggered early Monday morning, long after the gang had vanished with their haul of cash, gold, and jewelry.