I will give just two examples. The delegation from the Czech Republic described the 94 tons of gold held by pre-war Czechoslovakia, most of which had been transferred abroad by the end of 1938. The Nazis managed, however, after their invasion in May 1939, to secure almost half of this gold, including the 26 tons of gold held in the Bank of England, which was transferred to the Reichsbank on the receipt of instructions which Czechoslovak Central Bank officials had been forced to sign. The Czech delegation delicately referred to the role of the British authorities involved in this episode as 'complicated', though he also quoted a British Member of Parliament who called it at the time 'a squalid form of financial appeasement'. The Italian delegation told us of the seizure of 111 tons from the Banca d'Italia in Rome in September 1943 by a squad of SS soldiers.
Question marks remain, however.
We still do not know precisely how much gold the Nazis stole. The Tripartite Gold Commission was set up by the British, French and United States Governments following the Paris Agreement on Reparations of 1946 to distribute monetary gold found in Germany or recovered from neutrals to the ten countries occupied by Nazi Germany, whose central reserves were looted. The Commission established fairly accurately that the monetary gold held in these reserves beforehand totalled about 514 tons. About 336 tons of gold found in monetary form in occupied Germany and elsewhere post-war, or recovered from neutral countries, was placed in the Commission's monetary gold pool, and the great majority of this has of course already been distributed to the countries concerned. The Allies in 1946 defined monetary gold as that which had formed part of the central reserves of the countries concerned and was looted or wrongfully removed by Nazi Germany.