Fed ‘Reissued’ Nazi Gold in the ‘50s, Report Says

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York melted down $23 million worth of Nazi gold bars and recast them in the 1950s, replacing the swastika with a U.S. seal, the New York Times reported today.

Citing recently released memos from the Federal Reserve, the newspaper said the United States Treasury knew that the bars had been looted by the Nazis from Belgium and the Netherlands.

However, there was no evidence in the documents indicating that the Federal Reserve or the Treasury suspected that the gold it had received had come from Holocaust victims, the paper said.

A federal report issued this year concluded that gold jewelry and tooth fillings taken from concentration camp victims were melted together with gold the Nazis took from the central banks of Europe.

The gold made its way to the vaults of lower Manhattan in 1950 after being sold on world markets by the Swiss National Bank during World War II.

In the 1950s, the Fed melted down the bars after the National City Bank, which is now Citibank, urged their “reissue” for use as collateral to help Spain purchase a new phone system from ITT Corp., the report said.

The deal was part of Europe’s rebuilding under the U.S. assistance program known as the Marshall Plan.

The reissue required the bars to be melted down to erase the swastika seal, which was replaced with the words “United States Assay Office.”

Jack Morris, a spokesman for Citicorp, the parent company of Citibank, told the paper that “this all happened in an era when there wasn’t as much introspection about this kind of transaction.”