BERLIN—As national euphoria gripped Germany on Tuesday with the arrival of its world champion soccer team, an apparent crime in the Rhineland served as a reminder that all was not well. Unidentified thieves, the police said, had spent the weekend stealing 10 truckloads of beer.

"Has anyone noticed a large amount of beer?" police in the city of Krefeld said in a news release. "Can anyone provide information on a possible storage area?"

Sometime after 5 p.m. last Thursday, the police say, thieves broke open a gate leading to the back of an unguarded warehouse. From there, they broke through another door leading into an office space and then to the warehouse itself. They loaded pallets of beer into tractor-trailers, drove them to an unknown location, and then returned for more. By Monday, when the theft was discovered, 300,000 liters—the equivalent of 140,891 U.S. six-packs—had disappeared, according to Krefeld police spokesman Acor Kniely.

By German consumption standards, to be sure, 10 truckloads of beer is little more than a drop in the barrel. According to statistics from the German Brewers' Federation, it would take Germans drinking at their 2013 pace approximately 18 minutes and 22 seconds to consume 300,000 liters of beer.

The police announced the theft on Tuesday—around the time an estimated one million people, many of them swigging from beer cups and bottles, toasted the German soccer team parading through Berlin.