61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

The Fate of Individual Gold Bars
The detailed entries in the Reichsbank gold ledgers allow a reconstruction of
the path taken by individual gold bars. Immediately after the war, US
researchers used these ledgers and the detailed weights they provided (which
act as a kind of fingerprint for specific recast bars) to show that the consignments
to the SNB came from recast gold belonging to the National Bank of
Belgium, which had been taken via Paris to Berlin. The same process for the
identification of bars also allows the reconstruction of the path taken by
Holocaust victim gold, especially the consignments of gold labelled by the
Reichsbank as «Melmer» – sealed boxes delivered from August 1942 by SS-
Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer and containing foreign exchange, precious
metals, coins, and jewellery. This included dental gold, which until mid-
1942 had been reused by the SS medical office (Sanitätsamt) for dental
treatment of the SS; however, the quantities became too large to continue this
use. There were 76 of these consignments in all.
Three «Melmer» bars (numbered 36903, 36904 and 36905) with a total
weight of 37.5411 kilograms of fine gold (kgf) came from the seventh
«Melmer» delivery on 27 November 1942, and were shipped by the
Reichsbank to the SNB in Bern on 5 January 1943. Other «Melmer» bars
came to Switzerland by a more circuitous route. Bars 36873 and 36874 from
the second consignment (18 October 1942) and bars 36902 and 36907 from
the seventh consignment (27 November and 2 December 1942) were recast
together with German coins; they formed part of the 762 bars which were
sold to the SNB. Four bars (37192, 37193, 37194, 37195) which arrived at
the Reichsbank on 1 November 1943 were recast at the Prussian mint with
coins and bars from Belgium and the Netherlands, and sold to Switzerland
between 23 February 1944 and 8 June 1944. Bar 37198 was brought to the
Reichsbank on 11 November 1943, recast with Dutch coins, and delivered
to the SNB on 23 February 1944. In total, just under 120 kg of «Melmer»
gold, with a value of 581,899 francs, was sold by the Reichsbank to
Switzerland. In fact, this is a surprisingly low proportion of the total quantity
of «Melmer» gold, which amounted to at least 2,580 kgf, most of which was
sold through Germany’s two largest commercial banks, Deutsche Bank and
Dresdner Bank.
In a sense, this provides the clearest material link between Swiss banking and
Nazi genocide. Except for the first three bars, the bars were recast and mixed
with gold from Western European sources – looted both from natural persons
and from central bank reserves – at the Prussian mint, which could recast
bars, but not refine them. The refining had been done previously, almost
certainly by Degussa, which issued refined gold of an equivalent weight to
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