Gold Reserves and Their Relevance in War Times (Example From WW II)
Preserving the gold reserves is of intrinsic value to nations and therefore highly relevant in contexts of crisis and war. A typical example is a secret memorandum by the Chief of staff from October 1939, at the beginning of World War II. The military and the Secret Service laid out “measures to be taken in the event of an invasion of Holland and Belgium by Germany” and presented them to the War Cabinet:
- “It will be for the Treasury in collaboration with the Bank of England, and the Foreign Office, to examine the possible means of getting the bullion and negotiable securities into the same place of safety. The transport of many hundreds of tons of bullion presents a difficult problem and the loading would take a long time. The ideal would of course be to have the gold transferred to this country or to the United States of America. The gold reserves of Belgium and Holland amount to about £ 70 million and £ 110 million respectively. Note: H. M. Treasury has particularly requested that this information, which is highly confidential should in no circumstances be divulged. The total weight of this bullion amounts to about 1800 tons and its evacuation would be a matter of the utmost importance would present a considerable problem if it had to be undertaken in a hurry when transport facilities were disorganised. At present this gold is believed to be stored at Brussels and The Hague respectively, neither of which is very well placed for its rapid evacuation in an emergency.”
The Belgian government rushed to get the gold out of the country into a safe place: Dakar. After the Germans had occupied Belgium and France in 1940 they demanded the gold reserve back. French officials took care of the transport and in 1941 handed almost 5,000 boxes with 221 tons of gold over to officials of the German Reichsbank.
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Famous quotes containing the words gold, reserves, relevance, war and/or times:
“In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; From the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“...I want to see a film, they send the Israeli army reserves to escort me! What kind of life is this?”
—Golda Meir (1898–1978)
“Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggarman.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)