How the Establishment funded Hitler’s War : Part 1

The Bank of England Governor & BIS

Shortly before England and Germany went to war, the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Montague Norman, transferred gold to the Third Reich. Nine years earlier, he had created the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), through which the transfer was made. BIS today, unaccountable to any nation state, is facilitating major changes to how we live. How did this happen?

In the spring of 1939, days after German troops occupied Czeckoslovakia, Hitler demanded the country hand over their gold reserves. Through the Bank for International Settlements. Sir Montague Norman, then governor of the Bank of England, moved the gold into the Third Reich’s account. There was an uproar in the House of Commons. George Strauss, a Labour MP, spoke in fury for many : ‘‘The Bank for International Settlements is the bank which sanctions the most notorious outrage of this generation - the rape of Czechoslovakia.’’

The Bank of England’s archives, published digitally for the first time in 2013, revealed that the gold transferred was worth £5.6 million (an estimated US$ 1.1 billion in 2013 value).

While the transfers themselves were known at the time, the archives reveal private letters and telephone conversations in which the Bank of England avoided questions from the government over its Czechoslovak gold holdings.

The archives reveal that in March 1939, the Bank for International Settlements asked the Bank of England to move the gold, from a Czech National Bank account to a Reichsbank account, they also held. Some £4m of the gold then went to banks in Belgium and Holland, with the rest disposed of in London.

The Bank of England then sold another tranche of looted gold for the Nazi regime on the 1st June 1939 , when there were sales of gold (£440,000) and gold shipments to New York (£420,000) from the No.19 account of the BIS. This represented gold which had been shipped to London by the Reichsbank.

Given the uproar in Parliament, it seems extraordinary that Montague ‘Monty’ Norman was allowed to stay in post, while the UK waged war with Germany. Historians long to get their hands on documents held in BIS from WW2, which they believe will go to the heart of the British financial establishment and show that the Bank, led by Sir Monty, bent over backwards to help the Nazi war machine.

Norman, on the face of it, appears to have been quite a flamboyant character.

Norman on the cover of Time in 1929

In an age without television, he was, apparently, a household name, known for a supercilious manner, a bad temper, and a contempt for the political leaders of the day. He was a banker’s banker, aiming to create a network of central bankers like himself, free from the control of governments.

He does not appear to have had too much truck for humanity either, reportedly making this remark:

The above quotation was reprinted in the Idaho Leader, USA on 26th August 1924, and has been read into the Australian Federal Hansard twice: by John Evans MP, in 1926, and by MD Cowan MP, in the session of 1930-31.

He, himself, was from the British aristocracy, and both his grandfathers were bankers. His maternal grandfather was a partner at Brown Shipley & Co, in the City of London, where Monty was also a partner, after a stint at Brown Brothers on Wall Street, where he was friends with the Delano family, famous for producing three Presidents, including FD Roosevelt.

He was also close friends with Hjalmar Schacht, the President of Germany’s Central Bank, and Monty became godfather to one of Schacht’s grandchildren. In 1930, Monty and Schacht were the key movers in setting up the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, the bank involved with the Czech gold transfer.

An agreement to set up BIS was reached at a committee chaired by American industrialist Owen D. Young in 1929, and a new arrangement established for the payment of Germany’s WW1 reparations. Young was the founder of the Radio Corporation of America, and, at that time, a member of the board of Trustees at the Rockefeller Foundation. BIS was to handle the reparations, co- ordinated by JP Morgan.

However, whilst this was going on, so too was the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and with Germany’s banking system so hard hit, the reparation payments were scuppered. Instead, BIS morphed into a bank for Central Bankers, and to this day serves as their depository and meeting space, outside the influence of nation states.

During the war, BIS claimed to be neutral, something supported by the Bank of England.

However, between 1933 and 1945, the BIS board of directors included several Nazis who were later convicted of war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This included Walther Funk, a prominent Nazi official, and Emil Puhl responsible for processing dental gold looted from concentration camp victims, as well as Hermann Schmitz, the director of IG Farben, and Baron von Schroeder, the owner of the J.H. Stein Bank [de].

In fact, BIS was so entwined with the Nazis, it kept the Third Reich going: it carried out foreign exchanges for the Reichsbank, it accepted looted Nazi gold, recognised the puppet regimes installed in occupied countries who, together with the Third Reich, dominated the bank’s shares.

The American government passed a resolution to shut down BIS after the war, but the central bankers ignored it. Fast forward to today, and BIS is at the heart of financial change.

On June 28th 2021, Mark Carney delivered a lecture at BIS, to Central Bankers. In it, he discussed a change to money, and a preparation for “the fourth industrial revolution (which) will lead to a long period of difficult adjustment, and rising inequality”, and “in the new financial system, every decision must take climate change into account.”

He suggested large technology companies could be central to credit intermediation, with a system of account based Central Bank Digital Currencies and digital ID’s. “A new world order…(will replace)…the old normal of cash, bank based finance and bank payments…(with) …a new form of money (that will) track and help reduce carbon emissions.”

How much policy is being made at BIS, as opposed to facilitating policy made elsewhere, is unclear. Mark Carney is on the Foundation committee of the World Economic Forum, the WEF, which generates policy, and is also a global organisation based in Switzerland. He was also employed by UK PM Johnson to play a key role in the climate change conference COP26, held in 2021.

No public debate has happened about the nature of climate change and whether evidence supports an imminent crisis. There is not scientific consensus on the matter, despite some acting there is. Nor has there been a public conversation about a cashless society, digital money linked to your carbon footprint, or digital ID’s. All this has profound implications for our way of life, and in my opinion, I do not want to have unelected people shaping the future of the world and humanity. It’s time for public accountability in policy making. But how will we bring this about?