The Tank Busters

In the 1920s, the Sass brothers were considered master thieves after pulling off one of the most spectacular robberies in the Weimar Republic. The duo consisted of Franz and his brother Erich Sass, who was a year and a half younger, two of five sons of tailor Andreas Sass and laundress Marie Sass from the Berlin working-class district of Moabit, where they all lived in poor conditions in a 40-square-meter apartment. The city’s youth welfare office was a regular visitor, as Marie had great difficulty keeping the rowdy boys under control. The brothers went astray at an early age and soon specialized in cracking bank safes. They used a benzene-powered cutting torch from the Fernholtz company, which was revolutionary at the time. But at first, the safe-cracking duo had little success. Their first attempt in March 1927 to crack the safe of the German bank’s deposit fund in Moabit failed due to the uncalculated oxygen consumption of the cutting torch. This deprived them of air to breathe in the stuffy basement. Various other attempts to rob the Dresdner Bank on Budapester Strasse, the Reichsbahn headquarters on Schöneberger Ufer, and the regional tax office in Moabit were also unsuccessful. However, the failed series of break-ins aroused the interest of criminal investigator Max Fabich, who from then on was hot on the heels of the hitherto unsuccessful brother duo. But after numerous failures, they actually succeeded in carrying out one of the biggest robberies of the Weimar Republic. In the winter of 1928, the brothers spent weeks digging a tunnel from the basement of a neighboring house to the basement of the Disconto Bank branch on Wittenbergplatz. On January 27, 1929, they broke into the bank’s steel vault and accessed the outer wall of the vault through an air shaft, which they opened silently with a cutting torch. They broke into an impressive 179 of the 181 safe deposit boxes and emptied them. The break-in was not noticed until three days later, when the 40-centner door, which was blocked from the inside, could not be opened. It took the Arnheim company another two days to open it. The damage amounted to between 2 and 2.5 million Reichsmarks, a handsome million-mark haul, which the brothers celebrated with two bottles of wine in the vault. Criminal investigator Fabich was certain that the Sass brothers were behind the break-in. He had their apartment in Moabit searched and both of them arrested. However, he had to release them on April 6, 1929, due to lack of evidence. Once free, the Sass brothers immediately held a press conference at the posh traditional restaurant Lutter & Wegner on Gendarmenmarkt. There, with brazen audacity, they boasted about film offers and unabashedly flaunted their wealth. However, this did not prove to be their undoing with the population, as they regularly put banknotes in the mailboxes of needy people in Moabit, like Robin Hood, the avenger of the disinherited. The press also celebrated the brazen brother duo, as they had excellently led the Berlin police apparatus by the nose. The media loved them for this and gave them the nicknames “gentleman crooks” and “master thieves.” When the National Socialists seized power in January 1933, the brother duo fled to Denmark, where they continued their series of burglaries. However, the Copenhagen police quickly caught on to them, led by detective Christian Bjerring, who searched their hotel room in 1934 and found clear evidence of the burglaries as well as hidden foreign currency. The brothers were sentenced to four years in prison. After their release in 1938, they were extradited to Germany. Detective Christian Bjerring immediately passed this information on to Detective Secretary Fabich. Upon arrival in Germany, the Sass brothers were immediately arrested. After two years in pretrial detention in Moabit and Plötzensee, where they were tortured to reveal the hiding place of the millions stolen from the Discontobank robbery, which they did not do, they were convicted by the Berlin court of jointly committing aggravated theft and currency offenses. Franz Sass received a prison sentence of 13 years and his brother Erich was sentenced to 11 years in prison. On March 27, 1940, the brothers were shot on the orders of commander Rudolf Höß while being transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. To this day, there is no trace of the millions stolen in the Disconto robbery. The Sass brothers took this secret with them to their graves.