61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

customers (such as the Reichsbank) who brought gold in an impure or
unrefined state (such as dental or jewellery gold). It is therefore impossible
to determine what happened to the physical atoms of gold extracted from the
victims of Nazi genocide.
At the same time, in the second half of 1940, as Jacobsson, Weber and Wetter
were contemplating the political implications of the gold transactions, the SNB
received the first indications that gold was being taken from individuals as well
as from the national banks in occupied countries. Evidence that German gold
had been stolen was later presented in Swiss newspapers (in particular, in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung in August 1942). 15 In its report to the Federal Council on
16 May 1946, however, the SNB claimed that Allied warnings had only made
it clear in January 1943 that gold sold by Germany to the neutral countries
might have been stolen (a statement which was factually incorrect, since
unofficial warning voices had been heard earlier on). The clearest indication,
together with details of the long history of the Belgian National Bank’s gold
reserves, was presented by the Governor of the Banque de France, Yves de
Boisanger, in the summer of 1943, when he provided information underpinning
the suspicion that the stolen Belgian gold had been taken to Berlin and was
being used in international transactions. In fact, De Boisanger played a key role
in the transfer of the Belgian gold to Berlin: the gold – which had been
entrusted to France at the outbreak of the war – was shipped from Bordeaux to
Dakar, and then taken across the Sahara back to France. Pierre-Eugène Fournier,
the former Governor of the Banque de France, had refused to release it to the
Germans without Belgian consent; the Vichy Government dismissed him and
the more compliant De Boisanger was appointed in his place.
The warnings in January 1943 prompted a new round of discussions between
the SNB general directors and the political authorities, especially in the SNB’s
supervisory body, the Bank Committee (Bankausschuss) (meetings of 22/23 July
and 26/27 August 1943). At these meetings, there was a difference of opinion
between Chairman of the SNB Governing Board Ernst Weber and the President
of the Bank Council and the Bank Committee, Gottlieb Bachmann, who had
been Weber’s predecessor as Chairman of the Governing Board from
1925–1939. Weber argued that adherence to the gold standard necessitated
purchases of gold from other countries, whereas Bachmann emphasised the
political dimension of this issue and explained that during the First World War,
Sweden and the Netherlands had refused to purchase gold on the technical
grounds that such purchases would lead to a surplus of credit money. During
the course of the debate, SNB Director General Paul Rossy stated that the bank
had not been informed that Germans had looted any gold, and that interna-
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