61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Gold with Russian markings was less easily marketable due to fears that it
might be confiscated in order to settle longstanding claims on czarist Russia
dating from the First World War and earlier. During a second phase, from
June 1940 until the signing of the Swiss-Soviet Trade Agreement in
February 1941, the gold purchases were a direct consequence of the Soviet
Union’s need to bankroll its trade deficit with Switzerland. They were largely
profit-driven transactions in which there was little debate about any ideological
affinity of the banks with the Soviet Union or with Nazi Germany.
In these and other transactions with Germany, the Swiss banks sold francs and,
to a lesser extent, other currencies – especially escudos – in exchange for gold.
The francs were then used by the German war economy to make payments to
third parties. The Swiss francs entered the currency reserves held by foreign
central banks – either via the Reichsbank or via the commercial banks as a
means to obtain foreign exchange – and were then offered back to the SNB in
exchange for gold. In this way, the gold – available to the Reichsbank in increasingly
substantial quantities due to the vicissitudes of war and Germany’s persecution
policy – flowed via the Swiss «hub» to other central banks. The major
net purchasers were Portugal, Spain, Romania and, to a lesser extent, Hungary,
Slovakia and Turkey. As a result, the gold acquired unlawfully by the Third
Reich entered the reserves of freely available monetary gold. This process
became especially problematical after the United States imposed a general
embargo on continental European transactions on 14 June 1941. The SNB had
moved a substantial part of the Swiss reserves across the Atlantic in anticipation
of the military conflict; as a result, from June 1941, almost two-thirds of its
gold reserves were blocked, with this share rising steeply in the following years.
Under the law establishing Swiss adherence to the gold standard, a gold reserve
of at least 40 percent of the note issue had to be held within Switzerland.
However, the Federal Council removed this requirement in a secret Decree of
17 May 1940, and gold held on deposit in Britain or the US could henceforth
be counted as part of this minimum reserve. The total backing of the Swiss franc
always lay significantly above 100% throughout the war years; however, the
proportion held at domestic level declined from 40% to 31% between 1940 and
1945.
In order to prevent further losses of its domestic gold reserves, the SNB
attempted to centralise the gold trade in October 1941. At this point, it
considered imposing exchange controls, but then rejected this measure in favour
of «gentlemen’s agreements» with the banks. The Reichsbank was requested to
deal with the SNB instead of the commercial banks as before. From then on, the
commercial banks only engaged in smaller-scale gold transactions abroad. A
further tightening of the regulations governing the Swiss gold trade occurred
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