Hamburg beheaded the pirate Störtebeker, legend put his gold in a church spire, and a skull said to be his was stolen from the city museum in 2010

Klaus Störtebeker is remembered as a leader of the Victual Brothers, who seized merchant ships in the Baltic and North Seas. A Hamburg fleet under Hermann Langhe and Nikolaus Schoke sailed for Heligoland in August 1400. A Hamburg bill records the digging of graves for 30 Victual Brothers that year, which suggests the beheadings were in 1400, not the traditional 1401. Legend adds more. He offered a gold chain long enough to go around Hamburg for his life. His headless body walked past eleven of his men before the executioner tripped it, and the eleven were killed anyway. His ship's masts were said to have cores of gold, silver and copper, which became the tip of St Catherine's Church. In 1878 builders in the warehouse district, where pirates' heads had been displayed on spikes, found a skull pierced by a large rusted nail. The Museum for Hamburg History showed it from 1922 as his. Forensic work suggested a man beheaded around 1400, and a DNA comparison with possible descendants was inconclusive. On 9 January 2010 the skull was stolen. In February 2010 a skull marked "No Tacos," slang for the Bandidos biker gang, was left outside the Hamburger Morgenpost. Museum archaeologist Ralph Wiechmann said it had axe wounds and no nail hole and was not the stolen skull. Police recovered the original in March 2011^†.