The Swiss National Bank and Looted Gold

The Swiss National Bank accepted gold deposits from Nazi Germany throughout the Second World War, including gold looted from the central banks of the occupied countries and a smaller but documented quantity of gold derived from concentration camp victims, including dental gold extracted from murdered prisoners. Switzerland’s role as the principal financial intermediary for Nazi Germany’s gold transactions became a major international controversy in the 1990s and led to a comprehensive independent investigation by the Bergier Commission. The findings constitute one of the most thoroughly documented cases of wartime commercial collaboration with Nazi Germany.

The gold transactions

The Swiss National Bank accepted approximately 1.7 to 1.8 billion Swiss francs of gold from Nazi Germany during the war, representing approximately 75 to 79 per cent of Germany’s total gold exports during the period. The gold was used by Germany to pay for imports from Switzerland (machinery, watches, optical and chemical products) and, more importantly, to pay for imports from third countries (raw materials from neutrals such as Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey) that would not accept the German Reichsmark but would accept Swiss francs.

The principal sources of the German gold were the central banks of the occupied countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, France) whose gold reserves had been seized by Germany after the occupations. Substantial portions of these reserves had been moved out of the occupied countries before German occupation; the gold that remained or was captured was transferred to Berlin and re-melted at the Reichsbank. Smaller quantities of gold derived from victims of the killing programmes were also transferred: the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office had collected dental gold and personal gold items from camp victims and had transferred these to the Reichsbank for re-melting and absorption into the wider gold reserves.

What the Swiss National Bank knew

The Swiss National Bank’s contemporaneous internal records, examined in detail by the Bergier Commission in the 1990s, show that the senior officials of the bank knew or had substantial reason to know that the gold included material looted from occupied countries’ central banks. The Belgian and Dutch national banks publicly protested the German seizures during the war and the Allied governments issued the Inter-Allied Declaration of January 1943 (the London Declaration) warning neutral states against accepting transfers of property from territories under enemy occupation. The Swiss National Bank continued to accept the German gold throughout the war.

The substantial concealment of camp-derived gold within the wider Reichsbank stocks made it harder for the Swiss to identify that specific component of the transactions. The Bergier Commission’s documentary work in the 1990s and 2000s established that small quantities of camp-derived gold did pass through the Swiss National Bank, although the larger documented issue was the gold looted from the occupied countries’ central banks.

The post-war reckoning, 1945 to 1946

The post-war Allied reckoning was substantially partial. The Tripartite Gold Commission, established by the United States, the United Kingdom and France in 1946, undertook to recover the looted gold and return it to the original central banks. Switzerland negotiated a settlement with the Allies, the Washington Agreement of 25 May 1946, under which Switzerland paid 250 million Swiss francs (around $58 million) into the Tripartite Gold Pool in exchange for the release of Swiss assets that had been frozen in the United States during the war. The settlement was substantially less than the value of the German gold that had passed through Switzerland and was widely understood, even at the time, as a partial settlement that left substantial questions unaddressed.

The Bergier Commission, 1996 to 2002

The Swiss Federal Council established the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland — Second World War in December 1996 in response to the international pressure that had produced the Volcker Commission audit of the Swiss banks. The Commission was chaired by historian Jean-François Bergier and conducted the most thorough national investigation of any wartime neutral. Its final report, published in 2002, ran to several thousand pages of documented analysis.

The Commission’s findings on the gold transactions were substantial. The Swiss National Bank had accepted German gold throughout the war, knowing or having reason to know that substantial portions were looted from occupied countries. The bank had not conducted adequate due diligence on the provenance of the gold. The bank had continued to accept the gold after the 1943 Allied warning. The 1946 Washington Agreement settlement had been substantially below what would have been justified on the documentary evidence. The Commission’s findings, accepted by the Swiss Federal Council and the Swiss banking industry, constitute the official Swiss position on the wartime conduct of the National Bank.

The wider significance

The Bergier Commission’s documentation of the Swiss National Bank’s gold transactions stands as the most thoroughly documented case of wartime commercial collaboration with Nazi Germany by a neutral state. The findings substantially changed the Swiss public conception of the country’s wartime conduct, replacing the post-war narrative of heroic neutrality with a more complicated documentary picture in which Swiss commercial interests had been substantially served by collaboration with the German war economy. The continuing public discussion of these findings in Switzerland is part of the wider European reckoning with the wartime conduct of neutral and occupied states.

See also

Sources

  • Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland — Second World War (Bergier Commission), Final Report, Pendo, 2002
  • Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland — Second World War, Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War, Interim Report, Bern, 1998
  • Tom Bower, Nazi Gold: The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe’s Jews and Holocaust Survivors, HarperCollins, 1997
  • Stuart E. Eizenstat, U.S. and Allied Efforts To Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War II, US State Department, 1997 (the Eizenstat Report)
  • Stuart E. Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice, Public Affairs, 2003
  • Jean Ziegler, The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead, Harcourt Brace, 1998
  • Tripartite Gold Commission records, US National Archives, Record Group 43