Swiss christening coins may have been been Nazi gold

How much did the Swiss central bank know about the origin of its gold, asks Gian Trepp

The European, London  March 27, 1997

For years Swiss godparents have given gold coins, nominally worth CHF20, as christening presents to their godchildren. the coins, named Vreneli after the girl whose face is on the coin, have been minted since 1897 by the Swiss National Bank. They are traded, like British Sovereigns and South African Krugerrands, by dealers worldwide.

But documents unearthed last week from the Swiss National Bank's archives reveal even this symbol of Swiss financial rectitude has been tainted by Switzerland's wartime relations with the Nazis. the documents show that in 1947 and 1949 the Swiss National Bank resmelted 46 tonnes of looted Nazi gold into 20 franc gold coins.

According to the minutes of a Swiss National Bank board meeting on 30 May 1947, the directors decided to get rid of gold bars received during the war from the German Reichsbank by converting them into eight million Vreneli. During the war the Reichsbank delivered about 340 tonnes of gold to the National Bank with a value then of CHF1.65 billion. Approximately 250 tonnes of that gold was sold to the national bank itself, the rest was taken by several other central banks as gold deposits at the national bank in Berne. Approximately 44 tonnes went to the Portuguese central bank, 18 tonnes to the Swedish central bank, 12 tonnes to the Bank for International Settlements, ten tonnes to the Romanian central bank, five tonnes to the Slovak central bank and one tonne to the Spanish central bank.

The official post-war justification by the national bank directors for changing Nazi gold, which suffered from a restricted value as an international means of payment, into the freely tradable Swiss franc, was as follows: as a central bank of a neutral country on a gold standard, the national bank was obliged by its constitution to buy gold from any other central bank when the value of the franc was rising. Not taking gold from a specific country would have been against its neutral status. In addition, Emil Puhl, Reichsbank vice -president, who traveled from Berlin to Zürich to sell the metal, have always assured the bank's directors that the gold was from pre-war stock.

Today such a blind faith in times of war seems to be rather perverse. The directors of the national bank must have suspected from 1942 at the latest that the Reichsbank gold was looted. The robbing of the monetary gold reserves from Belgium an the Netherlands in 1941 and 1942 was no secret in central bank quarters and the national bank must have known that the German war economy was in need of Swiss francs to pay for iron ore from Sweden and tungsten from Portugal. 

It is  not yet clear how much of the total of 340 tonnes of Reichsbank gold sold to the national bank was from the pre-war stock and how much was looted  gold. historical research demonstrates that 109 tonnes of the gold that the Nazis stole from the Belgian central bank and 115 tonnes they seized from the central bank of the Netherlands ended up in Switzerland.

How much of the gold looted from murdered Jews or extracted from the teeth of these gassed at Auschwitz an other camps was sold to the national bank? The exact quantity of the gold stolen from individuals, where it was resmelted an where was sold remains unknown. The answer lies in systematic research into the activities of European gold refineries during the war, because this gold could have been resmelted anywhere in Germany, German occupied territory, in Switzerland or in other neutrals like Portugal, Sweden and Spain.

Any detailed inquiry would start at the defunct Prussian Stat Mint in Berlin, where the looted Belgian gold was resmelted into German bars with false pre-war dates. But other still existing smelters such as the Swiss Tate Mint or private smelters like Germany's Degussa and d Switzerland's Métaux Précieux (part of the Swiss Bank Corporation) will inevitably have to face some agonizing questions about their past.