Restitution Vowed as Conference Probes Mystery of Looted Nazi Gold

Half a century ago, Roman Halter, a Polish Jew, survived the Holocaust as a teenage slave making bullets for Adolf Hitler’s army. This week, as a 70-year-old London architect, Halter symbolized the pathos behind the international community’s attempt to belatedly unravel one of World War II’s great mysteries.

“We have lived in a terrible century. Only by ventilating what has happened can we avoid having it happen again,” he said.

A three-day, 40-nation conference on looted Nazi gold ended here Thursday as it began--in hope, and in pain, with bold new scholarship and unslaked old acrimony. Amid it all came the promise of restitution for victims.

Halter represents 326 Holocaust victims in Britain, among an aging 350,000 survivors, mostly in Europe, who could benefit from an international fund established by the United States and Britain to offer some material compensation.

That may have been its most concrete result, but the unprecedented conference was more about morality than money. American delegate and Undersecretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat called it “a landmark event . . . coming to terms with this painful period of history and doing justice for its victims.”

An avalanche of new information emerged in preparation for the conference, as more than a dozen countries created historical commissions to explore Europe’s looted wartime gold. In one country after another, archives have been opened to investigators for the first time.

Almost 50 presentations from as many countries, nongovernmental agencies, state banks and survivors told stark stories of gold stolen by the ton from bank vaults and ripped from the suitcases and sometimes the corpses of Holocaust victims.

The Bank of Italy recounted how SS troops appeared one day at its Rome offices in 1943 and in matter-of-fact fashion trucked away 111 tons of gold. A delegate from the Czech Republic told how, after the German occupation in 1938, the central bank was forced to order that Czechoslovakian gold on deposit with the Bank of England be delivered to Germany’s Third Reich.

The delegate referred to the “complicated” role of British officials. At the time, one British legislator termed it “a squalid form of financial appeasement.”

With information flowing more freely than ever, a follow-up conference in Washington next spring will examine Nazi looting of art, real estate, bank accounts, insurance policies and other personal possessions.

Still, despite the newfound resolve in evidence here, the haze of history obscures answers to half-century-old questions: Those questing for answers have been stymied by missing documents, dead witnesses and dead ends. No one is yet sure how much gold the Nazis stole; gold reserves of occupied countries were an estimated 514 metric tons when war began. Afterward, a Tripartite Gold Commission collected 337 metric tons.

Neither is it certain how much gold was generated by forced sales from citizens of Germany and other countries and how much was stolen from Nazi victims. “It is clear from the records how unclear things are,” said Gillian Bennett, the British Foreign Office historian whose pathfinding research laid groundwork for the conference.

Noting that many Holocaust survivors are now in their 70s, Eizenstat called for quick restitution and overall resolution before the end of the century. “We must not allow this to degenerate into a biological solution. These people have a right before they go to their grave to know that everything possible has been done to uncover the truth,” he said.

Britain’s Greville Janner, a member of the House of Lords who had long agitated for a Nazi gold conference, hailed the meeting as “a moral triumph . . . a worthy beginning to restitution.” He described conference deliberations--closed to the press--as “brisk, forthright, and on the whole, instructive.”

Speaking for the World Jewish Congress, Elan Steinberg said the conference “exceeded all our expectations.” He said the meeting “laid a foundation for continuing study and has provided moral and material restitution.”

Eizenstat praised Switzerland, a wartime neutral whose banks received 85% of the stolen gold, for its attempts to make belated amends. The Swiss began making payments from a $190-million restitution fund last month.

A number of delegates were critical of the tripartite commission’s refusal to open its archives before it pays the last $54.5 million in looted gold recovered from the debris of war. The United States has called for immediate release of all commission records but failed to win support from Britain and France, the other two members. They want the commission dissolved first.

Steinberg, for one, attacked Switzerland and the Vatican, whose archives remain sealed and whose two representatives sat through the conference as mute observers. “Vatican archives are desperately needed for transparency,” Steinberg said. “And the Swiss are acting as if it’s business as usual: ‘We got away with gold 50 years ago, and we’re going to keep it.’ ”

Although the fund created by the conference did not immediately receive the enthusiastic support its sponsors had hoped for, Britain gave $1.6 million and the United States will contribute up to $25 million over the next three years, a sum initially reported by American spokespersons as $29 million.

Britain and the United States called for all countries receiving part of the last payout from the tripartite commission to donate their share to the new fund.

There were 10 countries in line to receive gold looted from their central banks when the tripartite commission was created. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, their number has grown to 15, given the split of the former Czechoslovakia into two and of the former Yugoslav federation into five.

On Thursday, Austria said it will donate its $9-million share. Poland pledged its $500,000 slice of gold. Undisclosed contributions were promised by Luxembourg, Croatia and Greece. But there were no immediate offers from major recipients Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. Wartime neutrals at the conference were also urged to donate, but only Argentina said it will.

On Thursday, Halter addressed the conference. His story typified life and death as a Nazi prisoner: He told of waiting in a cattle car for 10 hours at Auschwitz while officials decided if 500 young workers would be gassed with 2,700 other people on the same train. He told how workers could smell burning flesh as their cars pulled away from the death camp and headed for slave labor at an arms factory in Germany.

“For so many years, no one cared, no one listened,” Halter said. “Now at last there is agreement--certain wrongs in this world must be righted, not just for us survivors, but for history.”