By Hank Huber

Marc J. Masurovsky, research director of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project at the National Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. is an expert on the details of gold looted by the Nazis during World War II and its ties to the International Monetary System.

In a recent lecture at Buffalo State College, Masurovsky explained how the Nazis acquired the funding to wage WWII, and talked about world gold policies, beginning with an explanation of the United States’ pre-war gold policy: The U.S. dollar was backed by gold, kept in the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and it was illegal for private citizens to own any of the precious metal. This contrasted with the traditional farm-based economic system of Europe.

It was customary before WW II for Europeans to hoard private stores of gold as insurance against hardships. When the Nazis began to seize control of Europe in 1938, the citizens of conquered nations were forced to surrender their personal gold savings to the Reichbank, or the German Central Bank. These transactions were all well documented and catalogued to deter theft by the collectors.

Where the gold came from

• Feb 1939—German law mandates that Jews, declared “non-human” in 1935, surrender all personal gold to nearest Reich banks.
• March 1939—National Bank of Czechoslovakia absorbed by Reichbank.
• Sept 1939—Polish gold reserves absorbed.
• May-June 1940—Gold reserves of Holland, Belgium and France absorbed.

As the war progressed, the Germans acquired gold from anywhere they could, including jewelry, heirlooms, and from the teeth of concentration camp victims.

$238 million of this loot was discovered in a salt mine and seized by Allied forces, but that was far from the total amount stolen by the Nazis.

Masurovsky said, “We have no sense of how much looted gold was put in Switzerland.”

Much of the higher quality gold found its way to Switzerland where it was sold to pawnbrokers for a fraction of what it was worth in order to keep the war machine rolling, according to Masurovsky.

“The Germans got 30 cents on the dollar from the Swiss,” he said. “They were happy to get that for it. They got the gold for free.”

The lower quality gold was melted into bars in the Prussian Mint. This included the jewelry and dental fillings.

These bars found their way into other European banks such as those of England, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden, as well as into Canadian banks and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in New York, although it often had to be re-melted to conform to size and purity standards.

Because many of these bars contained gold that was not pure enough to trade monetarily, it often was sold to jewelers, who use 14 and 18 carat gold alloys in their craft. Pure gold is too soft to use directly for jewelry making.

Deborah Hovland, a professor at Buffalo State, expressed concern for the possible origins of her personal jewelry, especially her gold wedding band.

“Do you mean that the gold in my wedding ring could contain dental fillings taken from Holocaust victims?” she asked.

Masurovsky answered that several generations have passed since the time the “tainted” gold would have been used in jewelry making, but conceded it was possible.

After the war all German property outside of Germany was subject to seizure, and in May 1946, the neutral countries that had bought Nazi gold were ordered to pay varying restitutions to nations robbed of their wealth by the German war effort.

Civilians, however, would not be compensated, even though detailed records of their losses were available. It was deemed that the rights of countries superseded the rights of individuals.

The neutral countries agreed to settle for different amounts. Switzerland agreed to settle for $58.1 million. In the settlement, Switzerland was absolved of responsibility, and the remainder of its gold was declared “clean.”

There’s no way to know how much Nazi gold the Swiss have, but experts agree that their $58.1 million settlement was a bargain.