Much of the focus of the discussion about Nazi gold (German: 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 had received $440 million (equivalent to $8.5 billion in 2024) of Nazi gold, over half of which is believed to have been looted. Some of the accumulated wealth was used to finance the war and potentially the escapes of Nazi fugitives to South America, but the total wealth or method of its spending remains subject to investigation. The fate 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 and the Franciscan Order.
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 on its foreign loans, and most of its trade relied upon command economy barter. 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. As Minister of Economics, Walther Funk accelerated the pace of rearmament and, as Reichsbank president, deposited the loot from Holocaust victims under the fictitious name Max Heiliger, in an arrangement with Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler. At some point, German-Argentine millionaire Ludwig Freude, who oversaw Buenos Aires's German Overseas Bank (a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank), established contacts with Swiss banks. An early 1940s investigation ordered by anti-Nazi president Roberto Marcelino Ortiz identified 12,000 Nazi sympathizers in Argentina who contributed some US$40.5 million (2025 currency) to a single account at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (later acquired by Credit Suisse). Government documents indicate financial ties amid the German Overseas Bank, the German-South American Bank (a subsidiary of Dresdner Bank), Freude, and others linked to numerous Argentine companies blacklisted by the U.S. In 1943, pro-fascist forces destroyed all known copies of the list, but one later resurfaced. During the war, Germany expropriated some $550m in gold from foreign governments, including $223m from Belgium and $193m from the Netherlands—not including thefts of private citizens and companies, producing an uncertain total value of stolen assets. 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 the Nazi 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. In 1984, a copy of the list of 12,000 Argentine Nazis was found. In 2020, it was shared with the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), which had previously noted a lack of disclosures about Nazi gold deposits into the Central Bank of Argentina, theorized that funds derived from Nazi plunder was sent to the Nazi collaborators for deposit in the Swiss account for Germany to withdraw as exchangeable currency. The SWC has pushed Credit Suisse's owner, UBS, to cooperate with a new investigation of alleged undisclosed funds from Holocaust plunder, potentially linked to financing the escape routes of Nazi fugitives. A final report for the U.S. Senate by former U.S. prosecutor Neil Barofsky is expected in early 2026.
Portugal During the war, Portugal, with neutral status, was one of the centres of tungsten production and sold to both the 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 78 tonnes (86 short tons) of "Nazi Gold" had passed through the station. It is estimated that nearly 91 tonnes (100 short tons) of Nazi gold were laundered through Swiss banks, with only 3.6 tonnes (4 short tons) being returned at the end of the war.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
