Britain’s central bank, the Bank of England, helped to sell looted Nazi gold from occupied Czechoslovakia months before the outbreak of World War II, experts have claimed. The bank’s archives, published digitally earlier this week for the first time, reveal that gold worth £5.6 million (an estimated US$ 1.1 billion in today’s value) was transferred just days after German troops occupied Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939.
Hitler Germany had annexed the mainly German-speaking Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938, following the Munich Agreement, and then invaded the rest of the country in March 1939.
While the transfers themselves were known at the time, the archives reveal private letters and telephone conversations in which the Bank of England avoided questions from the government over its Czechoslovak gold holdings.
The archives reveal that in March 1939 the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) asked the Bank of England to move gold, with a then-value of £5.6m, from a Czech National Bank account to a Reichsbank account that they also held. Some £4m of the gold then went to banks in Belgium and Holland, with the rest sold in London. The Bank of England then sold another tranche of looted gold for the Nazi regime in June 1939.
Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, told CNN that the Bank of England "in cold blood, and pretending not to know what these accounts were and where the gold was coming from, agreed to the transfer." Ritschl said: "From the Czech point of view this was very clearly a breach of trust." David Blaazer, a historian at the University of New South Wales and author of a study on the Bank of England and Czech gold, told CNN: "There is absolutely no doubt that the Bank knew which numbered BIS account belonged to which central bank."
