Isn't this the report people are talking about?
I can't tell whether this is negative for gold or not!?!?
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Friday May 22 11:01 AM EDT
Swiss to unveil report on Nazi gold trade
By Marcus Kabel
ZURICH (Reuters) - A long-awaited report on Switzerland's gold purchases from Nazi Germany will be released Monday and
may shed light on whether wartime Swiss bankers knew the gold they were buying was looted.
An international panel of historians appointed by the Swiss government said its book-sized report would be unveiled in English
and the three Swiss official languages German, French and Italian at a news conference in Zurich.
Swiss professor Jean-Francois Bergier, chairman of the group which is probing Switzerland's wartime past, has said the report
would detail to what extent the Swiss central bank, the biggest buyer, knowingly accepted looted Nazi gold.
"It is not going to be easy reading...It will be published without censorship," Bergier told journalists in March. He said it had
surprising elements but did not say what.
The Swiss government and the central bank declined Friday to say what they expected the report to uncover.
"I cannot comment on the contents, but the publication of this report will be important evidence that Switzerland is acting to
come to terms with its wartime past," said Marie-Marceline Kurmann, a spokeswoman for the Swiss government task force
responding to Holocaust-era charges.
The gold report was completed in March, more than a year later than originally planned, but the government asked Bergier to
postpone publication on April 6 until the roughly 200 pages in German could be translated into the other languages as well.
The international panel of historians, called the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland-World War Two, issued a first
brief study in December which charted the flow of gold into and out of Hitler's central bank, the Reichsbank.
A scathing U.S. government report last year alleged the Swiss accepted Nazi plunder that included gold from the teeth of some
Jews killed in the Holocaust.
But Bergier has said there was no evidence that Swiss purchases included gold from the dental fillings of Jews.
The question of exactly how much the heads of the central bank, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), knew about the origins of
Reichsbank gold has not yet been settled.
The U.S. report compiled by Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat said there was no evidence the SNB knowingly bought
Reichsbank gold stolen by the Nazis from death camp inmates and other individuals, or so-called victim gold.
But the Eizenstat report said Swiss officials knew the German gold included bars looted from the central banks of occupied
countries, or monetary gold.
For the SNB, vice-chairman Jean-Pierre Roth has said the bank's wartime governors should have suspected the Reichsbank
was selling looted monetary gold but there was no evidence they thought the gold might be coming from concentration camps.
The Swiss government asked the Bergier commission to investigate the full scope of the gold trade but has already ruled out
reopening a post-war accord under which Berne paid the Western Allies $250 million in gold to compensate for its wartime
purchases from Germany.
The Bergier commission's initial survey in December confirmed earlier studies showing Switzerland accepted the most gold
from Nazi Germany's central bank in the war years 1939 to 1945, with the Swiss National Bank (SNB) taking in 1.6 billion
Swiss francs or $389.2 million worth of Nazi German gold at wartime prices.
The Swiss central bank bought 1.2 billion Swiss francs or $280 million worth of the gold for itself and passed the rest on to
other banks.
The study also found Swiss commercial banks bought three times as much gold from Nazi Germany as previously assumed,
$61.2 million at 1945 prices that would now be $550 million.
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