Difficult Legacy

Still No Leads on Flick Grave Robbery

Billionaire Friedrich Karl Flick was one of the richest men in Germany. But since his corpse was stolen out of a cemetery in Austria earlier this month, investigators have been flummoxed.

The man was nothing if not fastidious when it came to security. Billionaire Friedrich Karl Flick spent much of his life worrying that his family could become the victims of a crime. Bodyguards followed the children around wherever they went. To be prepared for the worst, Flick even had a nuclear bunker installed beneath his Munich mansion. When he walked out onto the terrace, a panel of bulletproof glass would automatically emerge from the ground. His house on Lake Wörther is as secure as Fort Knox. Cameras detect intruders instantly, and security personnel stop anyone approaching the estate.

But there was one weakness in Flick's security concept. Despite his having imposed such strict security measures throughout his life, unknown intruders managed to make off with Flick's body only two years after his death. Last week, they removed the coffin, weighing in at about 250 kilograms (551 lbs.), contents included, from the family mausoleum in Velden, Austria. The grave robbers must have needed heavy equipment for their post-mortem abduction. They even attempted to cover up the crime by carefully pushing the silicon sealant back into the grooves around the roughly 300-kilogram (660-lb.) tomb slabs.

The incident has put an end to graveyard peace in Velden, a lakeside resort town in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia. With morbid curiosity, Austrian media and investigators are concocting theories to explain the grisly abduction, from an admirer stealing the corpse to acquire Flick's DNA, to an act of revenge or a prank by amoral youth. There is also speculation that the coffin, following in the tradition of the pharaohs, could have been filled with money.

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Solid leads, though, have not so far emerged. Financial gain is seen as the most likely reason for the grave robbery. Flick was one of Germany's richest men. After receiving a master's degree in business, he went to work for the family holding company, Friedrich Flick. His father, a funder of the Nazi party and beneficiary of its policies, earned part of his fortune in the weapons industry.

The Flicks ran one of Germany's most powerful industrial empires, which gained renewed notoriety in the 1980s, during the so-called Flick affair, when it was revealed that millions in political donations had been paid to the major German parties, the CDU, CSU, FDP and SPD, for years. In the mid-1980s, Friedrich Karl Flick sold his company to Deutsche Bank for the equivalent of about €2.7 billion ($3.4 billion) and withdrew into private life.

No Ransom Demands

There has been no evidence so far of any attempt to blackmail the family. "No ransom demands have been received," says Jörg Andreas Lohr, who manages the private Friedrich Karl Flick Foundation. Lohr was the one who notified Flick's shocked widow, who was in the United States at the time and promptly boarded a private jet to join the children at home.

The grave robbery is on everyone's mind in Velden. Mayor Ferdinand Vouk is "deeply shocked" by the appalling crime. "They don't even respect the peace of the dead," he complains. The cemetery is near the lake, between the center of town and the Vienna-Rome railway line, and the roar of passing trains is never far away. The Flick mausoleum, designed by Werner Hoftmeister, a Carinthian artist, is at the very end of the cemetery. The mausoleum, at a clear distance from nearby graves, is now guarded by two security guards who keep the many curious onlookers at bay. A woman visiting the cemetery, commenting on the opulence of the now-disappeared Flick's final resting place, shrugged her shoulders and said: "The better half lies over there, the others here. But it didn't do him any good."

Authorities now fear that all the attention could lead to copycat crimes. To be on the safe side, the Austrian State Office of Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism has sent officers to guard the grave of the deceased Carinthian Governor and far-right politician Jörg Haider, who recently died in a car crash after drinking and speeding. The authorities fear that the Flick case could lead to a resurrection of the now more or less obsolete practice of grave robbery.

Under Two Meters of Concrete

The Flick case recalls other prominent corpse abductions. The body of Italian banker Enrico Cuccia, for example, was abducted in 2001. The body of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini experienced a prolonged final journey when, in April 1946, a group of diehard supporters of Il Duce removed it from an unmarked grave in Milan and -- after losing one leg -- released it only months later. At the government's behest, the fascist dictator's remains were placed into an unmarked box and kept at a monastery until, in 1957, they were finally buried in Mussolini's home town of Predappio.

There have also been partial abductions, with body parts of prominent political figures having fallen into the hands of grave robbers. The bodies of both former Argentine President Juan Peron and revolutionary Che Guevara are missing both hands.

It is not necessarily cause for concern that, well over a week after the abduction, nobody has contacted the Flick family. When the body of Charlie Chaplin was stolen in Switzerland in 1978, it took 11 weeks and tough negotiations before the robbers were captured. Chaplin's wife Oona made it clear that she would not pay a ransom. "Charlie would have found it ridiculous," she said.

After the grave robbers had been caught, the body of the film star, which had been stored temporarily in a field, was ceremoniously reburied. This time it was for eternity -- under two meters of concrete.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan