The gold of the Reichsbank

Volumes, buyers and chronology

The figures on which all later discussion rests were established by the Independent Commission of Experts in a statistical overview published in December 1997 and refined in its interim report on gold of 1998 and in the final study of 2002. According to the statistical overview, the Reichsbank delivered gold worth CHF 1,949.8 million to Switzerland between 1939 and 1945. Of this total, CHF 1,685.0 million, or 389.2 million dollars at the prices of the time, went to the Swiss National Bank. After deducting the gold that the SNB passed on to third parties, the bank acquired gold worth CHF 1,212 million, or 280 million dollars, on its own account. This corresponded to 62 per cent of all Reichsbank deliveries to Switzerland.¹ The final gold study summarised the result in a sentence that has become the standard reference: during the Second World War, the Reichsbank handled 77 per cent of all its gold deliveries abroad through Switzerland.²

The historical encyclopaedia gives the same core figure for the SNB and adds the share of the commercial banks. It records that the German war economy obtained foreign exchange in Switzerland by selling currency gold of the Reichsbank, gold that had been confiscated in the defeated countries, for CHF 1,212 million to the Swiss National Bank and CHF 267 million to the Swiss big banks.³ Jakob Tanner, author of the encyclopaedia’s article on the SNB and himself a member of the Commission, gives a rounded gross figure of CHF 1.6 billion for purchases from the German central bank and adds that the Reichsbank’s sales in Switzerland accounted for more than three quarters of all German gold sales abroad.⁴ The difference between the gross figure of about CHF 1.6 to 1.7 billion and the net figure of CHF 1.2 billion reflects the gold that passed through the SNB’s hands to other central banks, above all those of Portugal, Spain and Romania.

These purchases have to be seen alongside the SNB’s much larger purchases from the Allies. During the same period the bank acquired gold worth some CHF 2.9 billion from the Western Allies, most of it between 1941 and 1945.⁵ The Allies bought francs with gold to pay for Swiss goods and services, for the costs of their diplomatic missions and for humanitarian operations, including the protecting-power activities that Switzerland carried out on their behalf. The Commission insisted, however, that the two sets of transactions could not be compared. The gold of the Allies came from legitimately acquired reserves. Much of the gold of the Reichsbank did not.⁶

The chronology is revealing. In the first phase of the war, from 1939 to the autumn of 1941, a significant part of the Reichsbank’s gold went to the Swiss commercial banks, which bought it in Berlin or took it over in Bern and sold it on at a profit. From 1941 onwards the SNB took the business almost entirely into its own hands. The historian Christophe Farquet has pointed out that the SNB’s large purchases from the Reichsbank began in October 1941, long after the acute military threat of the summer of 1940 had passed.⁷ The peak came in 1942, when the SNB bought German gold worth CHF 424 million. The last transaction was agreed in April 1945, a few weeks before the German capitulation, on the basis that the payments would be charged to the franc balances of the Reichsbank at the SNB in Bern.⁸

The Zurich dimension of these transactions lay in the structure of the central bank itself. The SNB had its legal and administrative seat in Bern, but its Governing Board worked in Zurich, where the bank had its main building at Börsenstrasse 15.⁹ The Governing Board consisted of three members. Ernst Weber was its president from 1939 to 1947, having succeeded Gottlieb Bachmann, who moved to the presidency of the Bank Council. Alfred Hirs, a career central banker from Dielsdorf in the canton of Zurich, joined the Board in 1942 as head of the department responsible for the currency and foreign exchange markets. He was later criticised for his part in the gold purchases and for his conduct in the Washington negotiations of 1946.¹⁰ The third member, Paul Rossy, had headed the Board’s second department since 1937 and remained on the Board until 1955.¹¹

Looted central bank gold: the Belgian case

The most important single source of the gold that Germany sold abroad was the reserve of the National Bank of Belgium. Before the war, Belgium held some 600 tonnes of gold. It sent about 200 tonnes to the United Kingdom and another 200 tonnes to the United States and Canada. The remaining 198 tonnes of fine gold, packed in 4,944 chests, were entrusted to the Banque de France in 1940 and shipped with the French reserves from the port of Lorient. After the ship reached Dakar on 18 June 1940, the gold was moved to Kayes in the interior of French West Africa. Under pressure from Germany, the Vichy authorities had it carried back across the Sahara to Algeria and on to Marseille, from where it went by train to Berlin and into the vaults of the Reichsbank.¹²

What happened next explains why the origin of German gold could be concealed from buyers who did not wish to know it. The Reichsbank melted the Belgian bars down at the Prussian State Mint and stamped the new bars with the dates 1936 and 1937, so that they appeared to come from pre-war German reserves.¹³ The Commission’s statistical overview puts the looted Belgian gold at 225.9 million dollars and the looted Dutch gold at 137.2 million dollars at the prices of the time.¹⁴ A large part of this gold reached Switzerland in the form of re-marked German bars. American officials estimated after the war that Germany had seized central bank gold worth about 579 million dollars from eleven occupied countries and that between 398 and 414 million dollars’ worth of German gold had gone to Switzerland, the larger part of it looted.¹⁵

Swiss institutions were not the only ones to receive such gold. The Bank for International Settlements in Basel, then under an American president, took delivery of 3.7 tonnes of gold from the Reichsbank that, as captured German records later showed, had been looted from the central banks of Belgium and the Netherlands. It returned this gold to the Tripartite Commission in 1948. The Bretton Woods conference of 1944 had in the meantime called for the liquidation of the BIS “at the earliest possible moment”, a resolution that European central bankers succeeded in setting aside by early 1948.¹⁶ The Basel episode is a reminder that the gold trade of the war years ran through an international network of central banks in which the Swiss institutions occupied the most important, but not the only, position.

Victim gold

The most painful finding of the gold research concerned the gold taken from individual victims of Nazi persecution. From 1942, the SS delivered to the Reichsbank the valuables taken from Jews and other victims in the extermination and concentration camps, including wedding rings, watches, coins and dental gold. These deliveries were made by SS-Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer and are known in the literature as the Melmer deliveries. The Reichsbank processed the material, sold part of it and had part of it melted into bars, which then entered its general gold stock.

The Commission estimated the value of the gold in the Melmer deliveries at a minimum of 2.9 million dollars at the time and established that gold from these deliveries was contained in the transactions that reached Switzerland.¹⁷ In proportion to the total volume of the Reichsbank’s sales, the victim gold was a small fraction. In moral terms it changed the character of the whole debate. The interim report of 1998 stated plainly that the fate of the victims was the reality at the heart of its inquiry. It closed with a judgement that has been quoted ever since. The decision-makers, it wrote, lacked imagination and foresight. They did not understand what crimes and tragedies lay hidden behind their arguments, their calculations, their pettiness and their self-righteousness.¹⁸

What the SNB knew

The question that dominated the debate of the 1990s was how much the SNB knew and when. The Commission’s answer, based on the bank’s own archives, was more precise than many participants in the debate had expected. By the autumn of 1940, the Governing Board had indications that the Reichsbank possessed new gold reserves that could only have come from the countries Germany had invaded. In June 1942, the SNB considered having the bars it had bought from the Reichsbank melted down, because it assumed that they came from occupied countries. In December 1943, the bank’s legal adviser noted that the Germans were confiscating assets in the occupied territories from private individuals as well, for example from deported Jews.¹⁹ Allied warnings added to this knowledge. On 5 January 1943, the Allied governments issued the London Declaration, reserving the right to declare invalid any transfer of property in the occupied territories. In February 1944 the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union extended this policy to looted gold, declaring that they would not buy gold from any country that had acquired gold from the Axis.²⁰

The German counterpart in these dealings was the vice-president of the Reichsbank, Emil Puhl, who travelled regularly to Switzerland and enjoyed the confidence of Swiss bankers and officials. Puhl argued that gold was fungible and that the Reichsbank had always regarded its gold holdings as a single whole. The Commission noted that he maintained close links with the SS leadership while presenting himself in Switzerland as a reasonable partner. It also quoted the head of the Federal Department of Finance, Ernst Wetter, as remarking with satisfaction that the management of the Reichsbank was in calm and reasonable hands.²¹ The Commission also recorded that the Allies, in their post-war estimates, put the looted gold taken over by the SNB from the Reichsbank at a minimum of CHF 800 million.²²

How the SNB justified its purchases

The SNB defended its conduct during and after the war with three main arguments, which the Commission analysed in detail. The first was the argument of dissuasion. Gold purchases, it was said, made Switzerland useful to Germany and thus reduced the risk of invasion. The second was the principle of neutrality, which in the SNB’s reading required it to treat both belligerents in the same way and to buy gold from Germany as it bought gold from the Allies. The third was the argument of good faith. The SNB claimed that it could not distinguish looted gold from legitimate gold and that it relied on the assurances of the Reichsbank. The Commission described this reliance as a “credulity trap” into which the decision-makers had fallen.²³

A fourth argument was monetary. The SNB presented its gold purchases as necessary to preserve the convertibility of the franc and to prevent inflation, especially after the United States froze continental European assets in June 1941 and Swiss gold held in New York could no longer be freely used. The SNB itself later commissioned research on this question. A study published in 1999 by two of its economists concluded that from 1943 onwards the SNB would have had the monetary room to limit its operations with the Reichsbank without incurring significant monetary risks.²⁴ Farquet has added a further perspective. In his reading, the contribution of Swiss gold purchases to the German war economy was real but limited and should be measured against the far larger resources that Germany extracted from occupied France through occupation costs and clearing deficits.²⁵ This comparative argument does not alter the Commission’s conclusions about knowledge and responsibility. It does, however, place the Swiss contribution in proportion, which the polemics of the 1990s often failed to do.

The legal assessment of the purchases was carried out in the Commission’s volume on public law. It concluded that the SNB had acquired looted gold, meaning gold that had been confiscated and plundered, in violation of the principles protecting property in international law.²⁶ For the financial centre, the lesson was specific. A central bank that bought gold without asking where it came from had exposed the whole country to claims that were settled only in 1946 and revived fifty years later. The idea that the provenance of an asset matters, and that a financial institution cannot rely on the assurances of its counterparty when the circumstances suggest otherwise, is now a basic principle of Swiss anti-money-laundering law. Its moral roots reach back to the gold of the Reichsbank.

Notes

1. UEK, statistical overview of the gold transactions of the Second World War (December 1997), https://www.uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/goldtransaktion.pdf; English version: https://www.uek.ch/en/publikationen1997-2000/dec97-e.pdf. ↩
2. UEK, Die Schweiz und die Goldtransaktionen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, UEK publications vol. 16, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/16d.pdf. ↩
3. HLS, “Zweiter Weltkrieg”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008927/. ↩
4. HLS, Jakob Tanner, “Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013747/2015-06-29/. ↩
5. UEK publications vol. 16, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/16d.pdf. The 1998 interim report gave a figure of just under CHF 2.3 billion for purchases from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada alone: UEK, Die Schweiz und die Goldtransaktionen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Zwischenbericht, Bern 1998, https://uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/gold.pdf. ↩
6. UEK, statistical overview (December 1997), https://www.uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/goldtransaktion.pdf. The overview states that the gold taken over from the Reichsbank is not comparable with that acquired from the Allied side, because the Allied gold had been lawfully acquired. ↩
7. Christophe Farquet, “Die Wahrheit über das Nazi-Gold in der Schweiz”, SWI swissinfo.ch, 22 April 2025, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/geschichte/die-wahrheit-%C3%BCber-das-nazi-gold-in-der-schweiz/89171439. ↩
8. UEK publications vol. 16, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/16d.pdf. ↩
9. HLS, Jakob Tanner, “Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013747/2015-06-29/; Swiss National Bank, “The history of the SNB”, https://www.snb.ch/en/the-snb/organisation/history. The Zurich main building, known as the Pfister building, was completed in 1922. ↩
10. HLS, Andrea Weibel, “Hirs, Alfred”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/044230/2010-07-29/. For Weber and Bachmann see HLS, “Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013747/2015-06-29/. ↩
11. Swiss National Bank, “Short biographies”, list of the members of the Governing Board by department, showing Paul Rossy as head of Department II from 1 July 1937 to 30 June 1955, alongside Weber and, from 1 October 1942, Hirs, https://www.snb.ch/en/the-snb/organisation/history/short-biographies. ↩
12. Leen Bultinck, “Belgian gold in the hands of foreigners”, National Bank of Belgium Museum, 16 February 2021, https://museum.nbb.be/en/resources/belgian-gold-hands-foreigners. ↩
13. National Bank of Belgium Museum, “Belgian gold in the hands of foreigners”, https://museum.nbb.be/en/resources/belgian-gold-hands-foreigners. After the war, the Banque de France, which had compensated Belgium, recovered about 130 tonnes through the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, around two thirds of what it had lost. ↩
14. UEK, statistical overview (December 1997), https://www.uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/goldtransaktion.pdf. ↩
15. William Z. Slany (coordinated by 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. Preliminary Study, Washington, May 1997, https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/Doc_5_Eizenstat_Report.pdf. ↩
16. Bank for International Settlements, “History – the BIS during the Second World War (1939–48)”, https://www.bis.org/about/history_2ww2.htm. ↩
17. UEK, Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War. Interim Report, Bern 1998, English version, https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/Doc_6_golde.pdf; German version, https://uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/gold.pdf. The 1997 statistical overview had given a minimum of 2.5 million dollars for coins and bars from the Melmer deliveries and a possible range up to about 4 million dollars. ↩
18. UEK, Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War. Interim Report (1998), conclusion, https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/Doc_6_golde.pdf. ↩
19. UEK, Die Schweiz und die Goldtransaktionen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Zwischenbericht (1998), https://uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/gold.pdf. ↩
20. Stuart E. Eizenstat (coordinator) and William Z. Slany (historian), U.S. and Allied Efforts To Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War II: Preliminary Study (May 1997), https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/Doc_5_Eizenstat_Report.pdf, p. 5 on the Inter-Allied Declaration of 5 January 1943 and p. xxi on the Allied Gold Declaration of February 1944, by which the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union declared “that they would not buy gold from any nation that had not broken relations with the Axis or that had acquired gold from a defeated or Axis country”. ↩
21. UEK, Die Schweiz und die Goldtransaktionen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Zwischenbericht (1998), https://uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/gold.pdf. ↩
22. UEK publications vol. 16, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/16d.pdf. ↩
23. UEK, Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War. Interim Report (1998), https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/Doc_6_golde.pdf. ↩
24. Swiss National Bank, “The history of the SNB”, https://www.snb.ch/en/the-snb/organisation/history, referring to the study “The Swiss National Bank’s gold transactions with the German Reichsbank from 1939 to 1945” (1999). ↩
25. Christophe Farquet, “Die Wahrheit über das Nazi-Gold in der Schweiz”, SWI swissinfo.ch, 22 April 2025, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/geschichte/die-wahrheit-%C3%BCber-das-nazi-gold-in-der-schweiz/89171439. Farquet writes that France paid more than one and a half times its annual GDP to Germany between 1940 and 1944. ↩
26. UEK, Die Schweiz, der Nationalsozialismus und das Recht. I. Öffentliches Recht, UEK publications vol. 18, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/18d.pdf. The same volume records violations of neutrality law in the export of weapons ordered by the military administration and in the insufficient control of rail shipments through the Alps. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.