The

The Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic.

When the Allies liberated the Merckers' mine in April of 1945, they recovered approximately

250 tons of gold bullion, along with billions in currency, priceless art, and the personal

effects of Holocaust victims.

It was the single largest treasury recovery of

the war, but it was not the total, not by a long measure. Historians have established that Germany

began the war with roughly $120 million in official gold reserves and subsequently looted

in excess of $600 million more from the central banks

of occupied Europe, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and others. And remember,

these are in $1945, so way more in today's dollars. Throughout the war, the Reich Bank traded

enormous quantities of this gold to neutral nations.

Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Argentina in exchange for the raw materials

and the hard currency needed to sustain the war machine.

The Swiss National Bank alone received an estimated $440 million in Nazi gold, more than half of which is believed to have been

plundered. When you add the totals, the pre-war reserves, the C's central bank gold, the Melmer

deliveries of concentration camp loot, the gold traded to neutrals and the gold recovered at Merkers

and the other sites across Germany, the numbers do not balance.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in gold remain unaccounted for.

Some of it undoubtedly sits in the vaults of Swiss and South American banks that have spent decades deflecting inquiries.

Some may have been used to finance the escape of Nazi fugitives to South

America along the infamous rat lines. But some of it, and here is where our story takes its

...