Nazi gold
The present whereabouts of the gold has been the subject of several books, conspiracy theories, and a failed civil lawsuit brought in January 2000 against the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order, and other defendants.
Advancing north from Frankfurt, the U.S. Third Army cut into the future Soviet zone when it occupied the western tip of Thuringia.
Since both were French displaced persons, with one of them pregnant and attempting to find a doctor, the military policemen decided to bring them back to PFC Richard C. Mootz.
He called other military personnel; by noon, the story had passed on up to the chief of staff and the division's G-5 officer, Lt. Col. William A. Russell, who, in a few hours, had the news confirmed by other DPs and by a British sergeant who had been employed in the mine as a prisoner of war and had helped unload the gold.
Russell also turned up an assistant director of the National Gallery in Berlin who admitted he was in Merkers to care for paintings stored in the mine.
In the morning, while Colonel Bernard D. Bernstein, Deputy Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), read about the find[5] in the Stars and Stripes's Paris edition,[6][7] 90th Infantry Division engineers blasted a hole in the vault wall to reveal on the other side a room 23 metres (75 feet) wide and 46 m (151 ft) deep.
[8] On Sunday afternoon, Bernstein, after verifying to the fullest the newspaper story with Lt Col R. Tupper Barrett, Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, 12th Army Group, flew to SHAEF Forward at Rheims where he spent the night, it being too late by then to fly into Germany.
At noon on Monday, he arrived at General George S. Patton's Third Army Headquarters with instructions from Eisenhower to check the contents of the mine and arrange to have the treasure taken away.
According to a late-1990s study for the U.S. Department of State led by American diplomat and attorney Stuart E. Eizenstat, gold looted from occupied countries and stolen from individuals was transferred to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to finance its war effort.
[9] Further, the Bergier commission found that the SNB's governing board knew at an early point that the gold was being looted from other countries.
He also recounts that after the war, the U.S. held that nations only had to return looted gold if they had purchased it directly from the Reichsbank, allowing the U.S. to accept such material as collateral for private loans to Spain.
[13][14] The report established that Bigelow received reliable information on the matter from the American Office of Strategic Services or U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command intelligence officials of the U.S.
