orecastA mine gallery deep beneath Thuringia. Seven thousand sacks, 8,198 gold bars, the entire gold reserve of the German Reichsbank — and within hours it will belong to America. That is how the new episode opens. The real story, though, is why your great-grandfather had to hand his gold in. Three times in one century, each time with date and signature in the law gazette.
1923: hand it over or go to prison
In 1923 Germany prints money until it is worth nothing. A loaf of bread costs billions, and wages are paid twice a day because money loses half its value between morning and evening. Whoever holds gold still holds something. So the state reaches for it: on August 25, 1923, Reich President Ebert signs a decree ordering privately held gold, silver, platinum and foreign currency to be surrendered.
The word sounds harmless. The penalties are not: up to ten years in a penitentiary, unlimited fines, confiscation of assets. Germans had given up their gold coins once before, in the First World War — voluntarily, under the slogan “gold I gave for iron”. This time nobody asks. Two years later the Reich Court rules that the surrender duty amounts to expropriation and the state owes compensation — by then the gold is long melted down. Not until March 6, 1931 does Hindenburg lift it. For eight years your gold was officially not yours.
1931: five months of freedom
The freedom lasts five months. On July 13, 1931 the Danatbank, one of the country's largest banks, collapses; every German bank stays closed for two days, and the emergency decrees return. This time the lever is called foreign exchange control: anyone holding more than 20,000 reichsmarks in gold or foreign currency must offer it to the Reichsbank. Then the exemption threshold drops to 10,000, to 1,000 and finally to 200 reichsmarks — down to one percent within seven years.
From 1936 Göring takes over: in October the duty to surrender gold, on December 1 the Law against Economic Sabotage. Moving capital abroad now carries the death penalty. In 1938 the old gold coins are withdrawn from circulation, the Kaiser's twenty-mark pieces; they must be sold to the Reichsbank by September 1. And this did not only happen in dictatorships: in 1933 Roosevelt banned gold for Americans too, Executive Order 6102 — not lifted until 1974.
1945: the treasure of Merkers
Many people buried their gold — in the garden, under the floorboards, inside a wall. Coins from those years still turn up during renovations today. In February 1945 the state itself starts hiding: the Reichsbank in Berlin is bombed out, the Red Army a hundred kilometers away, and Reichsbank president Funk has the gold evacuated — to a potash mine near Merkers in Thuringia, the Kaiseroda shaft, eight hundred meters underground, dry and bombproof.
In chamber eight, 25 meters wide and 50 meters long, workers stack up the wealth of a state: more than 7,000 sacks, 8,198 gold bars, more than 1,300 sacks of coin gold from Germany, England and France, 711 sacks of American twenty-dollar coins. And at the very back, 18 sacks plus 189 suitcases and crates labeled “Melmer”: loot collected by the SS, wedding rings and dental gold from the camps.
Two women give away the hiding place
On April 4, 1945 American troops take the village of Merkers. At night a military patrol escorts two women back into the village — one heavily pregnant, on her way to the midwife. They pass the shaft, and one says: the gold is down there. So the Reich's biggest hiding place is blown open. On April 8, engineers blast the vault wall on Patton's orders, and four days later Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton climb down themselves. Eisenhower insists that press and members of Congress document everything: the world is to see what happened here.
The find was worth 238 million dollars at the 1945 rate. Thirty-two ten-ton trucks carry everything to Frankfurt. The Reichsbank's gold never came back: it flowed through the Tripartite Gold Commission to the plundered central banks of Europe and into compensation for the victims — its last meeting came only in 1996. And Reichsbank president Funk sat in the dock at Nuremberg a year later: life imprisonment, in part for the Melmer gold in his vaults.
The third ban
For ordinary citizens the story repeats: from September 1945, Control Council Proclamation No. 2 applies — gold, silver and platinum are once again to be surrendered. This time the victors order it, the reasoning the same as ever: the currency is broken, the state needs hard assets. In 1948 the Deutsche Mark arrives, every citizen receives forty marks of starting money, and the old currency expires. On May 5, 1955 the last restriction falls in the Federal Republic: from that day on you may own gold again, just like that.
In the GDR things stayed different: the precious metals law of 1973 made trading without a state permit punishable by up to five years in prison, plus a duty to offer the metal to the state. In the East the gold ban only ended with the GDR itself, in 1990. Add it all up, and private gold in Germany was banned or restricted almost continuously from 1923 to 1955 — 32 years, half a lifetime.
And today?
Today gold sits in German drawers again, legal, unlimited, with no duty to report it: an estimated 8,000-plus tonnes in private households, more than twice what the Bundesbank holds. The Bundesbank itself keeps around 3,352 tonnes, the world's second-largest gold reserve after the United States, some of it still in New York and London. Merkers, by the way, is a show mine today, the gold room faithfully rebuilt, props included.
The three shafts from back then, Kaiseroda I, II and III, stand as three dots on our map, among 7,264 other documented mines in Germany. The map also holds 30 documented gold occurrences, old districts in the Harz, the Erzgebirge and along the Rhine — the largest of them Andreasberg in the Harz, an old silver district where gold turned up as a by-product. No reason to grab a shovel. Every reason to open the map.