Thieves take medals and jewellery from Berlin's Stasi Museum

Burglars have stolen communist-era medals and jewellery worth thousands of euros from Berlin’s Stasi Museum, located in the former headquarters of the East German secret police.

According to the police, the thieves entered the building in the German capital’s Lichtenberg district on Sunday morning after scaling the roof of the entrance hall and climbing through a firstfloor window.

Inside the museum the burglars smashed a number of glass display cases and removed several medals, including an Order of Karl Marx, an Order of Lenin and a Hero of the Soviet Union, before moving up a floor to the old offices of the former Stasi chief Erich Mielke, where they stole further items of jewellery.

The break-in comes only days after thieves stole diamonds worth millions of euros from the Green Vault, part of a former royal palace in Dresden, in one of the most spectacular heists in German history.

In March 2017 a group of men broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum and stole a 100kg gold coin worth an estimated €3.75m (£3.2m).

The value of the haul the burglars took from the Stasi Museum was rather humble in comparison. Of the eight stolen medals only one, a golden Patriotic Order of Merit, was an original – the others were facsimiles.

“A break-in is always painful because it disturbs your sense of security,” said the museum’s director, Jörg Drieselmann. “But in terms of the value of the stolen items, you can almost lean back and relax.”

Drieselmann told the Guardian he expected the burglars knew that some of the medals did not have a high material value but would still find enthusiastic buyers among collectors of East German memorabilia.

“We are not looking at great treasures here,” he said. “We are a historical museum and don’t expect breakins. We are not the Green Vaults.”

The haul of jewellery, which included a pair of earrings, a ring with pearls and gems, a gold watch and a gold timepiece, were mostly items the Stasi had confiscated from East Germans who had attempted to flee the socialist state into the west.

In the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, such items have mostly been returned to their original owners. Those pieces whose owners had proved impossible to track down had ended up at the Stasi Museum on permanent loan.