Is Nazi gold real?

As Nazi forces tore through much of Europe and North Africa during World War II, gold, valuable artifacts and priceless paintings disappeared from the conquered territories, and many of these treasures are still missing to this day. Many people believe the Nazis hid these treasures away in secret locations. Its perfect fodder for urban legends: the loot stashed away by Nazi soldiers, its location only revealed on a difficult-to-obtain map. But are the tales true? Does gold stolen and concealed by the Nazis really exist?

The answer is yes: Not only is Nazi gold real, it was a driving force in paying for Hitler’s regime. As Nazi forces spread across Europe, their policy was to loot their victims’ valuables, largely from the Jews. This included fine art, jewelry, Oriental rugs, silverware, porcelain and glass. But the most important item, economically, was gold. 

Nazi gold is an umbrella term. It includes both monetary gold, which is held by governments in central banks as part of their currency reserves, and valuable items stolen from individuals (often not gold at all). “Monetary gold is gold that Germans seized from central banks belonging to the state,” Ronald Zweig, professor of Israel studies at New York University, and author of “The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary” (William Morrow, 2002), told Live Science. “This is not stuff stolen from individual private victims. We know that the Germans stole the monetary gold reserves of all of the national banks of the countries they occupied, and only 70 per cent of that money was restored after the war.” 

Typically, the Nazis seized monetary gold and stored it in central depositories, and then used it to finance the Nazi war effort. But the Nazis also looted gold from individuals. “Non-monetary gold was derived from looting the homes, possessions and even the bodies of the victims,” Zweig wrote in his book. Much of what was looted from private individuals was either lost or seized at the end of the war.

Sayer claims to be the only person to have tracked down missing Nazi gold since the initial repatriation efforts at the end of the war. Rather than a buried cache of loot, however, he tracked down two gold bars belonging to the Nazi Reichsbank, the central bank of the German Reich until 1945.

By studying records that documented the movement and storage of gold immediately after WWII, Sayer located the two bars of gold in a bank vault owned by the Deutsche Bundesbank. They were held in the account of an unnamed individual, and, over two decades, U.S. government officials repeatedly denied knowledge of the whereabouts of the two gold bars in their correspondence with Sayer, according to his book. U.S. military authorities issued a detailed report which listed the two gold bars in a vault in U.S. custody in the Munich Land Bank, and, even though a later report mistakenly declared them missing, they remained in the same vault, according to an article later published in the Bank of England’s staff magazine.  

However, the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold (TGC), which had been set up in 1946 to recover gold stolen by Nazi Germany and return it to its rightful owners, could not complete their work until all Nazi gold on record had been returned. The whereabouts of the two gold bars were then publicly disclosed in 1997. 

Prior to the London Conference on Nazi Gold that year, which aimed to finalize the work of the TGC, the Bank of England released a statement disclosing the exact amount of gold it was holding on behalf of the TGC, as well as two gold bars. The published that year in the Bank of England’s staff magazine identified them as the two gold bars that Sayer had tracked down and charted their history. They had been transferred to a Bank of England vault in 1996 after an investigation by the TGC and remain there to this day. A representative of the Bank of England arranged for Sayer to visit the vault and view the gold himself in view of his efforts. Sayer turns down several requests every year to join treasure-hunting expeditions looking for Nazi loot. “Yes, I’m sure there are caches [of undiscovered loot]”, he said, but “I don’t think there’s anything left where you’ve got a map where X marks the spot.” 

livescience