Nazi gold

Much of the focus of the discussion about Nazi gold (Raubgold, "stolen gold") concerns how much of it Nazi Germany transferred to overseas banks during World War II. The Nazis looted the assets of their victims (including those in concentration camps) to accumulate wealth. In 1998, a Swiss commission estimated that the Swiss National Bank held $440 million ($8 billion in 2020 currency) of Nazi gold, over half of which is believed to have been looted.

Some of the accumulated wealth was used to finance the war, but the total spending remains unclear. The present whereabouts of the gold has been the subject of several books, conspiracy theories, and a failed civil lawsuit brought in January 2000 against the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order, and other defendants.

Acquisition


The draining of Germany's gold and foreign exchange reserves inhibited the acquisition of materiel, and the Nazi economy, focused on militarization, could not afford to deplete the means to procure foreign machinery and parts. Nonetheless, towards the end of the 1930s, Germany's foreign reserves were unsustainably low. By 1939, Germany had defaulted upon its foreign loans and most of its trade relied upon command economy barter.

However, this tendency towards autarkic conservation of foreign reserves concealed a trend of expanding official reserves, which occurred through looting assets from annexed Austria, occupied Czechoslovakia, and Nazi-governed Danzig. It is believed that these three sources boosted German official gold reserves by US$71 million ($1.3 billion in 2020 currency) between 1937 and 1939. To mask the acquisition, the Reichsbank understated its official reserves in 1939 by $40m relative to the Bank of England's estimates.

During the war, Nazi Germany continued the practice on a much larger scale. Germany expropriated some $550m in gold from foreign governments, including $223m from Belgium and $193m from the Netherlands. These figures do not include gold and other instruments stolen from private citizens or companies. The total value of all assets allegedly stolen by Nazi Germany remains uncertain.

Merkers Mine
Advancing north from Frankfurt, the U.S. Third Army cut into the future Soviet zone when it occupied the western tip of Thuringia. On 4 April 1945 the 90th Infantry Division took Merkers, a few kilometres inside the border in Thuringia. On the morning of the 6th, two military policemen, Private First Class (PFC) Clyde Harmon and PFC Anthony Kline, enforcing the customary orders against civilian circulation during an evening curfew, stopped two women on a road outside Merkers. Since both were French displaced persons, with one of them pregnant attempting to find a doctor, the military policemen decided to bring them back to PFC Richard C. Mootz. Luckily for Mootz, he and the women had something in common: they could all speak German. While getting to know them better and escorting them back into the town, they passed the entrance to the Kaiseroda salt mine in Merkers.

The two women told Mootz that the mine contained gold stored by the Germans, along with other treasures. Once back in his unit, he attempted to tell three other officers, but they weren't interested in listening. He called other military personnel; by noon, the story had passed on up to the chief of staff and the division's G-5 officer, Lt. Col. William A. Russell, who, in a few hours, had the news confirmed by other DPs and by a British sergeant who had been employed in the mine as a prisoner of war and had helped unload the gold. Russell also turned up an assistant director of the National Gallery in Berlin who admitted he was in Merkers to care for paintings stored in the mine.

The next day was Sunday. In the morning, while Colonel Bernard D. Bernstein, Deputy Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), read about the find in the Stars and Stripes's Paris edition, 90th Infantry Division engineers blasted a hole in the vault wall to reveal on the other side a room 23 m wide and 46 m deep. They found 3,682 bags and cartons of German currency, 80 bags of foreign currency, 8,307 gold bars, 55 boxes of gold bullion, 3,326 bags of gold coins, 63 bags of silver, one bag of platinum bars, eight bags of gold rings and 207 bags and containers of Nazi loot that included valuable artwork.

On Sunday afternoon, Bernstein, after verifying to the fullest the newspaper story with Lt Col R. Tupper Barrett, Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, 12th Army Group, flew to SHAEF Forward at Rheims where he spent the night, it being too late by then to fly into Germany. At noon on Monday, he arrived at General George S. Patton's Third Army Headquarters with instructions from Eisenhower to check the contents of the mine and arrange to have the treasure taken away. While he was there, orders arrived for him to locate a depository farther back in the SHAEF zone and supervise the moving. (Under the Big Three arrangements, the part of Germany containing Merkers would be taken over by the Soviets for military government control after the fighting ended.) Bernstein and Barrett spent Tuesday looking for a site and finally settled on the Reichsbank building in Frankfurt.

Disposal
According to a late-1990s study for the U.S. Department of State led by American diplomat and attorney Stuart E. Eizenstat, gold looted from occupied countries and stolen from individuals was transferred to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to finance its war effort. Some gold was taken from Holocaust victims, though Eizenstat points out there is no evidence the SNB knew of this as the gold had been molded into bars. A Swiss commission headed by historian and economist Jean-François Bergier estimated that the SNB received $440m ($8b 2020) in gold from Nazi sources, of which $316m ($5.8b in 2020) is estimated to have been looted. Further, the Bergier commission found that the SNB's governing board knew at an early point that the gold was being looted from other countries. The U.S. study further found that Germany transferred over $300m (2.6b 1998)—about $240m of which was looted—to neutral countries Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey (all of which aided Germany through non-military exchanges), mostly using the SNB. Much of the gold was not recovered by the Allies, with only $18.5m of the looted $240m the neutral countries (excluding Switzerland) received in trade returned to the Tripartite Gold Commission; almost $15 million of this was from Sweden. That country separately provided about $66m of $100m provided by it, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, of about $480m sought for Europe overall. Eizenstat notes that although there were Argentine sympathies to the Axis, it was still unknown whether the country received any actual looted gold. He also recounts that after the war, the U.S. held that nations only had to return looted gold if they had purchased it directly from the Reichsbank, allowing the U.S. to accept such material as collateral for private loans to Spain.

The present whereabouts of the Nazi gold that disappeared into European banking institutions in 1945 has been the subject of several books, conspiracy theories, and a civil lawsuit brought in January 2000 in California against the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order and other defendants. The suit against the Vatican Bank did not claim that the gold was then in its possession and has since been dismissed.

Vatican
On October 21, 1946, the U.S. State Department received a top-secret report from U.S. Treasury Agent Emerson Bigelow. The report established that Bigelow received reliable information on the matter from the American Office of Strategic Services or U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command intelligence officials of the U.S. Army. The document, referred to as the "Bigelow Report" (oftentimes as the Bigelow dispatch, or Bigelow memo) was declassified on December 31, 1996, and released in 1997.

The report asserted that in 1945, the Vatican had confiscated 350 million Swiss francs ($1.5b 2020) in Nazi gold for "safekeeping," of which 150 million Swiss francs had been impounded by British authorities at the Austro-Swiss border. The report also stated that the balance of the gold was held in one of the Vatican's numbered Swiss bank accounts. Intelligence reports, which corroborated the Bigelow Report, also suggested that more than 200 million Swiss francs, a sum largely in gold coins, were eventually transferred to Vatican City or to the Vatican Bank, with the assistance of Roman Catholic clergy and the Franciscan Order.

Such claims, however, are denied by the Vatican Bank. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls stated that "There is no basis in reality to the [Bigelow] report".

Portugal
During the war, Portugal, with neutral status, was one of the centres of tungsten production and sold to both Allied and Axis powers. Tungsten is a critical metal for armaments, especially for armour-piercing bullets and shells. The German armaments industry was nearly entirely dependent on the supplies from Portugal.

During the war, Portugal was the second largest recipient of Nazi gold, after Switzerland. Initially the Nazi trade with Portugal was in hard currency, but in 1941 the Central Bank of Portugal established that much of this was counterfeit and Portuguese leader António de Oliveira Salazar demanded all further payments in gold.

In 2000, Jonathan Diaz, a French bus driver, found documents at the Canfranc International railway station that revealed 86 ST of 'Nazi Gold' had passed through the station.

It is estimated that nearly 100 ST of Nazi gold were laundered through Swiss banks, with only 4 ST being returned at the end of the war.