A DECLASSIFIED document from the US State Department, made public at the weekend, has confirmed that contained in vaults at the Bank of England are gold bars made partly from the teeth fillings of Holocaust victims, Rachel Donnelly from London.
The World Jewish Congress (WJC) is demanding that officials from the bank return the gold to Jewish organisations and the secretary general of the WJC, Mr Israel Singer, has condemned the policy of Allied countries who have horded the results of Nazi war crimes since the end of the second World War.
The US document, the substance of which is a letter from a diplomat to the then secretary of state, dated 1946, is a report of gold analysed from the Merkers salt mine in Germany. The diplomat wrote that there were questions being raised concerning the source of 4,173 bags from the mine which contained 8,307 gold bars.
The gold bars, he wrote, could "after expert consideration" be determined "to represent melted down gold teeth fillings and therefore be classifiable as non-monetary gold."
It is the classification of the gold bars as non monetary which is causing controversy at the Bank of England. Their officials insist that the gold is "monetary" and therefore cannot be distributed to individuals many of whom believe their relatives' personal effects are being wrongly held. The bank maintains the gold is being held on behalf of the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, an organisation created in September 1946. Its members, France, Britain and the US, say they did not know of the gold's origins.
A British government document from 1948, however, casts a different light on the official version of the origins of the gold. It reads: "There are a few bags of `coins' which largely contain medals and gold tokens, which can hardly be monetary gold. I would like to speak to you as to whether we shut our eyes to this."