Car thieves were booming in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the criminal business is going very badly – and worst in southern Germany.
Berlin (dpa / lby) – In Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the fewest cars are stolen nationwide. In the past few years, car thieves stole only 421 vehicles in the Free State, in Baden-Württemberg there were 413, as the General Association of the German Insurance Industry announced on Monday in Berlin. On statistical average, only every ten thousandth vehicle is stolen in both federal states, the corresponding rate is 0.1 out of 1000 cars.
The leader is Berlin, where the theft rate was more than twenty times higher at 2.2 per 1000 vehicles. But overall, the number of stolen cars nationwide fell last year to a record low of less than 10,000 vehicles. “Car thieves stole exactly 9,805 cars nationwide, around eight percent less than in 2020,” said Jörg Asmussen, general manager of the General Association of the German Insurance Industry (GDV) in Berlin.
The decline compared to the years after reunification is particularly striking: in some years in the 1990s, more than 100,000 vehicles were stolen. The time series published by GDV goes back to 1991.
The insurance association attributed the decline to several factors: better anti-theft devices in cars, better law enforcement and border patrols. This refers to the fact that organized gangs of thieves usually take stolen vehicles out of the country, often to Eastern Europe.
