Visiting Switzerland

Among the notable tourist attractions in Switzerland are its famous crime scenes. Upcoming articles will focus individually on these places of special aura in which outlandish crimes have taken place.

Here, we present a now famous crime scene which was/is itself already a tourist attraction as a museum.

Last Monday Zurich’s E.G. Buhrle museum was the scene of the largest art heist in European history.

Three men wearing ski masks walked into the villa-sized museum in the quiet residential neighborhood of Seefeld half an hour before closing time, forced staff and visitors to the floor and stole at gunpoint four masterpieces worth over $160 million.

The collection is housed in a 19th century villa with no metal detectors and no bag checks.

The paintings taken were Cézanne’s ‘Boy in the Red Vest’ (itself worth over CHF 100 million), van Gogh’s ‘Blossoming Chestnut Branches,’ Monet’s Poppies near Vertheuil.’ and Degas’ ‘Count Lepic and His Daughters’ - all four paintings hanging in the same room in a row next to the door, suggesting that the robbery was as haphazard as it was brazen.

The thieves made off in a getaway car with the paintings hanging out of the open trunk. It could have been a scene in a George Roy Hill movie. Witnesses reported one of the thieves spoke German with a Slavic accent. It so happens that the week before in nearby Pfäffikon, other thieves stole two small Picassos worth about $4.5 million, so authorities are now conjuring up the specter of Balkan raiders attacking Swiss museums and private collections. Luxury boutiques have already for several years been the targets of armed robberies, frequently perpetrated by visitors from Switzerland’s distant Slavic neighbors.

The villa housing the E.G. Buhrle collection is therfore now a major ‘must see’ on any tourist’s visit.

E. G. Buhrle, the man behind the collection, was a German industrialist who made his fortune with armaments manufacturing, mainly through being an important supplier to the Nazis. He amassed his impressive collection by accumulating the artwork from fleeing Jews, paying mainly penny prices, or in other cases buying paintings which had been confiscated by the Nazis. In fact, the Monet painting which was stolen last Sunday belonged previously to a Hamburg Jew. Numerous works in the Buhrle collection had been cited in Art Loss Register as stolen property, among them the Cezanne portrait, ‘Boy in the Red Vest,’ and Buhrle figures prominently as well in the Bergier report on Swiss activities during and after the Second World War.