the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter IV
Bohemia and Moravia). When the
Office of the Reichsprotektor assumed
its functions in mid-April 1939, Müller
was made head of the banking group in
its department of finance and economy.
He was joined at the National Bank by
another exponent of the interests of the
German occupation administration,
Herbert Winkler, a commissioner of the
Office of the Reichsprotektor. The
Office of the Reichsprotektor likewise
secured for itself key positions in the
Protectorate finance ministry, whose
auditing division was run and overseen
by Walter Utermöhle, head of the
foreign exchange section of the finance
and economy department of the Office
of the Reichsprotektor. This branch of
the German occupation administration
was located directly in the Ministry of
Finance of the Protectorate. The already
powerful German influence on the
institutions of the Protectorate
government increased still further in
January 1942, when a Reich German,
Walter Bertsch was appointed Minister
of the Economy and Labour of the
Protectorate.
The independence of the National
Bank was purely formal; in practice it
was subordinate to and managed from
two centres – the Deutsche Reichsbank
in Berlin and the Office of the
Reichsprotektor. The two special
commissioners – the representatives of
the Reichsbank and the
Reichsprotektor’s office – interfered in
all areas of the National Bank’s activity,
including personnel matters. Their
overriding concern was “the interest of
the German Reich” i.e. the
subordination of the Protectorate to its
economic needs. One of the first
measures whereby the German Reich’s
economy siphoned off funds from the
Czech provinces was the mandatory
surrender of the National Bank’s account
surpluses to the Deutsche Reichsbank in
Berlin.
Armament dangerously depleted gold
and foreign-exchange reserves in the
Deutsche Reichsbank, and Hermann
Göring, who was also in charge of the
Reich’s foreign-exchange economy, saw
The Break up of Czechoslovakia and the Genesis
of the Transfer
126
in the Protectorate a welcome source of
funds, particularly for the import of
strategic raw materials. During the final
months of the Second Republic’s
existence, Göring had already
demanded uncompromisingly the
surrender of a portion of the monetary
gold that was supposed to be
surrendered to the Third Reich along
with foreign exchange in exchange for
the Czechoslovak withdrawn from the
ceded territories. Even though no
account was taken of the other
Czechoslovak property that remained
on that territory, at the beginning of
1939, Czecho-Slovakia transferred to
the Deutsche Reichsbank foreign
exchange to the value of 15 million
crowns and almost 14 tons of gold as
requested. After the Protectorate was
proclaimed, the occupying authorities
drew up a list of the gold and foreign
exchange in all banking institutions,
above all in the National Bank. One of
the first tasks of the Reichsbank’s
special commissioner in the National
Bank, Friedrich Müller, was to secure
this gold. On March 18, 1939, he issued
an order to the management of the
National Bank that the Czechoslovak
gold lodged by the Bank of
International Payments in Basle with
the Bank of England in London should
be transferred to the account of the
Deutsche Reichsbank. That order was
carried out just a few days later, on
March 24, and the German Reich
thereby acquired 23.087 tons of gold.
Although the decision was taken in
Berlin in 1940 to transfer all gold
reserves to the Deutsche Reichsbank it
was not fully carried out. Nevertheless
on the basis of that decision, in June
1940, 6.376 tons of gold were
surrendered by the National Bank,
along with a valuable numismatic
collection of gold coins, and in the
autumn of the same year a further 1.009
tons of gold from the reserves of Škoda
and Zbrojovka, that had autonomous
foreign-exchange accounts. The
National Bank was obliged to “sell” gold
in order to “pay its debts to the German
Reich”, and in the first year of the