61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

on 7 December 1942, when the Federal Council established maximum prices
for gold coins and bars, thus restricting the opportunities for the banks to profit
from the sharp rise in the price of gold. In addition, SNB permission was henceforth
required for the import or export of gold. Credit Suisse (Schweizerische
Kreditanstalt, SKA) was given a licence to import small amounts of gold;
however, in September 1943 it was refused permission to accept the delivery of
gold from the suspect operations of Deutsche Bank’s Istanbul branch. 3
The largest transactions in the context of the «escudo business» (Escudo-
Geschäft) took place up until the summer of 1942. These transactions enabled
the Reichsbank to sell gold to the SNB for francs or Portuguese escudos in order
to pay for strategically important raw materials and other key imports for the
German war economy. The Banco de Portugal then bought gold from the SNB
with the francs accumulated in its foreign currency reserves. Such transactions
with the Reichsbank reached their peak in the winter of 1941/42. From the
summer of 1942, Germany began to sell gold directly to Portugal via the
deposit account in Bern, and the escudo deals became less significant for the
Swiss financial centre. Nonetheless, the associated gold shipments by the
Reichsbank continued to be channelled through Switzerland.
The substantial purchases from Germany, including coins (mostly from the
Latin Monetary Union which included Belgium, France, and Italy as well as
Switzerland) continued for some time. It was later revealed that all these coins
had come from the holdings of the Belgian Central Bank. At the same time, the
SNB sold a large quantity of gold coins on the market, including those acquired
from the Reichsbank. These transactions were an attractive source of revenue:
the SNB earned 12.3 million francs from the purchase and sale of foreignminted
gold coins during the war. A significant proportion of these coins may
eventually have been exported by private individuals, especially to France,
where they are likely to have sustained an active underground or black market
economy. The following graph illustrates the gold purchased by the SNB from
the Reichsbank (per quarter).
In addition to these purchases, consignments from the Reichsbank to the SNB
amounted to around 500 million francs. This gold went to the depositories
maintained in Bern by other monetary institutes or by the Reichsbank itself.
Switzerland thus became the centre of complex gold transactions, for in
addition to the Reichsbank and the Bank for International Settlements, BIS
(Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich, BIZ), more than a dozen other
central banks availed themselves of the SNB’s services. The gold sales by the
Reichsbank to Switzerland began to assume unprecedented dimensions in the
last quarter of 1941 and remained at a high level throughout 1942 and 1943.
It was only in the second quarter of 1944 that the volume of these transactions
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