The Tripartite Gold Commission and the Bank for International Settlements
Tripartite Gold Commission
The TGC was established in September 1946 in accordance with the decisions of the Paris Reparations Agreement of January 1946. Located in Brussels, its task was to review and adjudicate the claims from governments (not individuals) for the restitution of looted monetary gold recovered in Germany or acquired from the neutrals in their negotiations with the Allies. Composed of representatives of the United States, Britain, and France, the TGC was to ensure that each claimant country would receive restitution from the Gold Pool assembled by the Allies for the Commission in proportion to its loss of monetary gold at the hands of the Germans. Ten nations made claims upon the TGC: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The Commission made its first distribution of $143 million from the Gold Pool in October 1947, with allocations to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Other payouts were made to Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in 1947 and 1948. A second round of allocations was made by the TGC between 1958 and 1966. A payment to Albania was made as recently as October 1996. Overall, payouts of 329 metric tons then worth nearly $380 million (today about $4 billion) have been made to claimant nations; of this amount, $264 million came from the FED. Because claims exceeded recovered looted gold, claimant countries received about 65 percent of their original claims. Approximately six metric tons worth about $70 million in today's gold values remains under Commission control in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England.
Bank for International Settlements
More than $4 million ($39 million today) of the monetary gold in the TGC Gold Pool was acquired by the Allies from the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) as a result of a settlement in May 1948 resolving Allied assertions that the BIS had accepted looted gold from Germany in partial settlement of wartime financial exchanges. A recent BIS study confirms the considerable amount of looted Nazi gold they accepted from Germany. The wartime activities of the BIS, and its apparent role as a financial facilitator for Nazi Germany in its foreign commerce, had attracted wartime suspicion and prompted a postwar investigation on the part of the United States and its Allies. Some senior officials in the U.S. Government even suggested it to be dismantled because of its wartime connections with the Nazis.
This document is in the public domain.
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A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida © 2005.