Another little adventure with a country's gold reserve

The story of Belgian gold during World War II is one of the most dramatic financial and geopolitical thrillers of the war, involving a secret evacuation, a colonial betrayal, Nazi looting, and postwar restitution. At the outbreak of the war, Belgium’s gold reserves amounted to roughly 600 tonnes. The National Bank of Belgium split this reserve into roughly hree parts to secure its wealth.

400 tonnes were safely shipped across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. While another 198 tonnes remained to back the national currency but was hastily packed into nearly 5,000 chests and entrusted to the Banque de France as German troops advanced in May 1940. When France fell to Germany in June 1940, the French Navy evacuated the 198 tonnes of Belgian gold alongside their own reserves to Dakar, Senegal (then part of French West Africa).

The Belgian government, operating in exile from London, repeatedly demanded that France return the gold or send it to the United States. Instead, the collaborationist Vichy French regime capitulated to German demands. Between 1941 and 1942, Vichy France transported the Belgian gold across the Sahara Desert back to Europe, handing it over directly to the Nazi Reichsbank in Berlin. The Nazis melted down the Belgian gold bars, stamped them with falsified pre-war dates (mostly 1938), and used them to purchase vital war commodities—such as tungsten, iron ore, and oil—from neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden.

In April 1945, General George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army discovered the remnants of the Reichsbank's looted wealth hidden deep inside the Merkers salt mine in Thuringia, Germany. Along with thousands of stolen art pieces, the Americans recovered the exact administrative logs of the German central bank, which meticulously tracked the path of the stolen Belgian gold. Because the found gold had been laundered through various European networks, the Allies established the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold.

Belgium forced the Banque de France to take responsibility for handing over its gold, and as a result of legal agreements and pressure on neutral nations like Switzerland, the National Bank of Belgium eventually recovered roughly 130 tonnes (about two-thirds) of the assets betrayed in Dakar. In the mean time the Belgian government remained financially self-sufficient thanks to its colony, the Belgian Congo. The Congo’s local gold production contributed $28.5 million directly to the Allied war effort, alongside massive exports of rubber and the vital uranium used in the American Manhattan Project.