NAZI COCAINE MONEY


Klaus Barbie

NAZI COCAINE DEALERS
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Cocaine_Politics.html
https://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/06/hitlers-shadow-reaches-toward-today/
http://miamiarchives.blogspot.ru/2013/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-carlos-lehder-rivas.html
https://vice.com/en_us/article/the-nazi-loving-drug-lord-who-revolutionized-the-medellin-cocaine-cartel-111
https://theguardian.com/world/2006/jul/11/chile.drugstrade
http://telesurtv.net/english/news/Nazis-Trained-and-Supported-Chiles-Operation-Condor-Activities-20161217-0004.html
http://mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/how-nazi-butcher-klaus-barbie-6828080
How Nazi Klaus Barbie unleashed global cocaine scourge
by Warren Manger / 13 November 2015

“As the brutal Butcher of Lyon, notorious Nazi Klaus Barbie spent the Second World War torturing children and sending whole families to the death camps. But when the conflict ended, the Gestapo captain didn’t face instant arrest and swift justice. Instead, the US allowed him to start a new life as a CIA spy, smuggling him into Bolivia where he helped hunt and kill the revolutionary Che Guevara. It was a disastrous mistake.

Once in South America, Barbie went on to join forces with some of the region’s most feared drug lords, including Pablo Escobar, to launch a global cocaine trade currently worth £60 billion a year. He even became a colonel in the Bolivian army, enlisted the help of terrorists called Fiances of Death and used drug money to fund a military coup, creating a narco-state where the traffickers could build a cocaine empire immune from prosecution.


Carlos Lehder, whose father was German, was fascinated with the Nazis, dressing in military fatigues and comparing himself to Hitler. According to Inscoe-Johnson: “He spent untold hours plotting a political career, aiming at the Colombian presidency.”

Peter McFarren, an American journalist who tracked down Barbie and interviewed him several times, says: “Barbie may not have been physically involved in shipping kilos of drugs, but he played a decisive role in the growth of the cocaine trade in Bolivia, Peru and Columbia. “He was the liaison between these kings of cocaine and the government, military and mercenaries.”

Barbie was the ultimate partner in crime for the drug lords. He proved his ruthlessness after he was appointed leader of Hitler’s secret police in Lyon in 1942, aged 29. Charged with hunting down members of the French Resistance, he earned his Butcher nickname by personally torturing men, women and children with sexual abuse, electrocution and breaking bones. After the war, some of Barbie’s new associates almost earned a similarly ferocious reputation.


Pablo Escobar

They included Pablo Escobar, the richest gangster in history who amassed a £30 billion personal fortune and killed thousands of Colombians to maintain his empire. The King of Cocaine held a monopoly on the import of coca paste from Bolivia to Colombia. At one point he was responsible for 80% of the powder smuggled into the US. Barbie almost certainly visited him at his 5,000-acre estate, Hacienda Napoles, with its private airport and its own zoo. It is likely the sadistic Nazi, who had a lucrative sideline as an arms trader, also supplied him with weapons.

But Barbie’s closest ally was Bolivian warlord Roberto Suarez Gomez, another notorious drug dealer, who inspired the character Alejandro Sosa in gangster film Scarface. While not as rich as Escobar, when his eldest son was caught by US police in 1982, Suarez Gomez wrote to President Ronald Reagan offering to pay Bolivia’s £2.5billion foreign debt as a ransom for his release. Barbie met Suarez Gomez regularly in the early 1980s, acting as a go-between for the drug lord and corrupt Bolivian army colleagues he wanted to bribe.


“Roberto Suàrez Gomez “offered to repay all of Bolivia’s foreign debt of $3 billion if charges against him and a drug-dealing son were dropped”

McFarren, who co-wrote a biography on Barbie called The Devil’s Agent, says: “I’ve spoken to people directly involved in those meetings, so we know Barbie received money from Suarez Gomez and the cocaine trade.” But the pair had bigger plans. They plotted to overthrow an entire government. Barbie’s letters reveal he was paranoid there would be a Communist revolution in Bolivia and he would be deported to France to stand trial for war crimes. Meanwhile Suarez Gomez wanted the freedom to expand his cocaine empire without fear of prosecution.

So they arranged a military coup to install General Luis Garcia Meza Tejada as commander of the army, then as president in 1980, all funded by cocaine cash. For the next two years the government was directly involved in, and profited from, the cocaine trade. Corrupt officials ensured it left the drug dealers free to pursue a policy of ruthless expansion. McFarren says: “Overthrowing a democratic government with money from the drug trade was unheard of. It set a dangerous precedent of how democracy could be interrupted by the dollars and terrorism of cocaine trafficking bandits. “In Columbia and Peru there were individual government officials and military police who were part of the cocaine trade. But I can’t think of another regime that was completely in the pocket of the trade, and Barbie played a key part in that.”


“In the 1960s a ‘German colony’ was centred in the Sopocachi neighbourhood. Barbie’s home was located there, on Avenida 20 de Octubre.”

It is remarkable Barbie even made it to Bolivia. In the Second World War he was responsible for 14,000 deaths, but after Germany’s defeat he was recruited by the CIA to fight communism. When it emerged Barbie may face prosecution for his horrific war crimes, the CIA enlisted the help of the Vatican to change his name to Klaus Altmann, and he fled to Bolivia in 1951. Once in South America he kept a low profile, working at a remote lumber mill for 10 years. But Barbie found a new outlet for his sadistic talents by the 1960s, advising the Bolivian military on interrogation and torture techniques. “We know he was involved in several cases where people were tortured and killed in Bolivia” says McFarren.

He also boasted he helped the CIA hunt down Che Guevara in 1967. The Argentinian had played a key role in the Communist revolution in Cuba, but was now leading a guerilla army in Bolivia. Barbie’s position of power guaranteed him safety from extradition to France and he went to great lengths to preserve it, betraying anyone without hesitation. When the daughter of close friend Hans Ertl, who made propaganda for Hitler, joined an anti-government guerilla group, Barbie denounced her so she could be captured and killed.

McFarren says: “There were people who found it abhorrent Barbie was able to live well in Bolivia and become a public figure after everything he’d done. But many people were indifferent to it, he blended into the fabric of Bolivia. “He wasn’t seen as a horrible Nazi murderer. He became a grandfatherly figure. I saw him on the streets with his wife, hanging out in the local cafe.” Yet Barbie remained paranoid that his past would catch up with him, as McFarren learned in 1981 as a freelance journalist for New York Times. While investigating the drug money flooding the Bolivian government, McFarren traced Barbie to his villa in Cochabamba city, near the Andes.


“Barbie under arrest in 1983”

Barbie appeared on his balcony but, when pressed for an interview, called the local barracks. McFarren was soon staring down a machine gun barrel. McFarren says: “Heavily armed civilians surrounded the whole district and had us arrested. They threatened to torture us and pull out our finger nails.Their main concern was how we found out where Barbie lived. “After a few hours of interrogation we were let loose, but we had to leave the country the next day because we got all kinds of death threats.” The military coup, and the arrest of McFarren, put Barbie back on the map. It was precisely what he hoped to avoid.


“Barbie after being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987”

After the collapse of the military dictatorship, Barbie was extradited to France in 1983 to stand trial. By then 70, he remained unrepentant for his many crimes, declaring: “When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent.” Tried on 41 counts of crimes against humanity, he was found guilty and jailed for life in July 1987. He died four years later of leukaemia and cancer of the spine. McFarren says: “Most Nazis who escaped prosecution disappeared, often to South America, but they stayed off the radar. “But Barbie became a public figure. That makes him unique. And, despite that, he was able to live with impunity in Bolivia for more than 30 years. In that respect, America has a lot to answer for.”


“Adolf Hitler in 1944 with his personal physician, Theodor Morell”

SEE ALSO : NAZI DRUG ADDICTS
http://cocaine.org/misc/nazicoke.html
http://nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/blitzed-very-drugged-nazis/
http://dw.com/en/crystal-meth-and-cocaine-in-german-wastewater/a-36768085
http://aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/10/history-war-drugs-vikings-nazis-161005101505317.html
https://theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/25/blitzed-norman-ohler-adolf-hitler-nazi-drug-abuse-interview
http://express.co.uk/expressyourself/60629/The-Nazi-cocaine-connection
by Paul Callan / Sep 2, 2008

“The mild-looking man who took his dog for a walk each morning had a bearing of a provincial bank manager. Only a few people knew him in Cochabamba, where the climate is ideal and cool. He enjoyed living quietly with his family in this Bolivian city. Here wealth was just a way of life. In a country where poverty sat alongside huge riches, Cochabamba might have been made of gold. New cars jostled on the streets, expensive restaurants were everywhere, luxury apartments were springing up almost daily and the nightlife was the most exciting in the country. The reason? Cocaine. And one of the main architects of the city’s success was the quietly spoken man strolling with his black Labrador. Passing him, you would never have guessed that this was Klaus Barbie – former SS Officer, fanatical Nazi and a Gestapo chief whose brutality had earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Lyon”.

And more than that – he was a key player in the country’s multi-billion pound cocaine industry. That link alone was enough to stop actress Dame Helen Mirren from ever snorting cocaine in the Eighties. “I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties,” she said in a magazine interview. “Klaus Barbie was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron. And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff at a party had an absolute direct line to this fucking horrible man in South America, and from that day I never touched cocaine again.”

But there is far more to the story of Klaus Barbie and cocaine than just that. Amazingly, he was also a vital part of America’s fight against communism and was an important agent for the US spy organisation the CIA, which used cocaine as a weapon in the Fifties. When the war ended Barbie had fled back to Germany where he was quickly recruited by the British along with many other top Nazis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJAvfXFUCR4

But in April 1947 he was spotted by the Americans who were impressed by his abilities at organisation and interrogation. One officer who recruited him described him as: “An honest man, both intellectually and personally, absolutely without nerves or fear. He is strongly anti-communist and a Nazi idealist who believes that his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power.”

Indeed, the Americans were keen to use his talents and willing to overlook his brutal record in the Gestapo. It was said that he was responsible for the torture and deaths of more than 26,000 people. And he personally tortured leading French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. He carried this out with much relish and was decorated by Hitler himself for his merciless efforts. But none of this appeared to daunt the Americans. His ardent anticommunist stance was what they were interested in and on March 22, 1951, he was smuggled from Germany, through Austria to Italy by the Americans. From there he was shipped to Argentina, ending up in Bolivia.

During the Fifties he was sentenced to death in absentia by the French but he continued to enjoy the protection of the US intelligence community and by 1957 had obtained Bolivian citizenship, using the alias Klaus Altmann. At this time the Americans were in a state of near hysteria about the spread of communism in South America. With many Left-leaning regimes virtually on their doorstep, the US was willing to spend billions of dollars in secret deals and covert operations that would support more Right-wing governments.

The huge cocaine industry was an integral part of these measures and Klaus Barbie proved to be useful in American operations. In the mid-Sixties he started the company which, apart from selling bark and coca paste, also marketed assault weapons to Right-wingers in other South American countries. Barbie was one of a criminal cabal of former Nazi officers who had fled to South America at the war’s end and many were funded by the newly formed CIA for their Right-wing efforts. Barbie was also involved with the establishment of a major shipping company which generated millions of dollars in profits from the cocaine business.

Following a coup in Bolivia in 1970 Barbie stayed with the new dictatorship running the country and was paid $2,000 a month for his “consulting services”. A year later French agents positively identified him as the Butcher of Lyon but the Bolivian government refused to extradite him on the grounds that he was now a citizen of that country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRnPIG50qY

Barbie was also involved in such CIA operations as Operation Condor, part of the US fight against communism. And he was one of the principal figures in the Bolivian “Cocaine Coup” of 1980. He was at the heart of the flow of drug money into Right-wing coffers – at one point $30 million was being sent to prop up paramilitary operations in Central and South America.

Barbie’s abilities as an organiser attracted considerable praise. One fighter in the Right-wing struggle said: “He was a great use because he played such an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against communism. He had great administrative ability.” And in 1980 Barbie headed a neofascist group called the “Fiances of Death”. An undercover drug enforcement agent, Michael Levine, said of the group: “The masked thugs were not Bolivian. They spoke Spanish with German, French and Italian accents.

Their uniforms bore neither national identification nor any markings, although many of them wore Nazi swastika armbands and insignias.” So deeply involved was Barbie with the cocaine business – in a position of power clearly approved by the CIA – that Bolivia soon became the principal supplier of the drug to the then fledgling Colombian cartels. By the Eighties Bolivia had become highly significant as a drug supplier to the US. Barbie’s anti-communism now obsessed him and he felt secure because of his CIA backing.

There is also some suggestion that he orchestrated the capture of the Marxist guerrilla Che Guevara. The latter had helped Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba and remained his tough right-hand man until captured by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia in October 1967. The intriguing possibility that Barbie had masterminded Guevara’s capture was raised in last year’s documentary film My Enemy’s Enemy by Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald. The CIA had been hunting Che and, according to the film, turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare.

Barbie had come to Hitler’s attention during the war with his attempts to crush the French Resistance and Alvaro De Castro, one of his long-time associates, said in the film: “We met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US. Altmann (Barbie) no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this type of guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in the Second World War. They made the most of the fact that he had this experience.”

Nor did Barbie have much respect for Che. De Castro recalls him saying: “This poor man would not have survived at all if he had fought in the Second World War. He was a pitiful adventurer. Nothing like his popular image. The people have turned him into a myth. A great figure but what has he actually achieved? Absolutely nothing.”

Others claimed in the film that Barbie would frequently boast that it was he who devised the strategy for the murder of Guevara. Director Macdonald – who also made The Last King Of Scotland in 2006, a fictionalised account of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin – said he could see parallels between Amin and Barbie. “The other side to Barbie is there was a great charm to him, which is one of the things that make him fascinating. He was a bit like Amin: someone of enormous charm but also of enormous evil and had an utter lack of respect for human life.” But by the early Eighties Barbie’s bloodstained past was beginning to catch up with him and a new government in Bolivia finally allowed the French government to extradite him.

In 1984 he was put on trial in Lyon for war crimes. The evidence against him was often horrifying and one witness, Ennat Leger, said: “He had the eyes of a monster. He was savage, my God, he was savage. It was unimaginable.”

Barbie personally tortured prisoners and relished the sadism and suffering of those he dealt with – often using methods that are too sickening to repeat in a newspaper. Several times during the trial spectators and journalists had to leave the courtroom when the descriptions of torture meted out to Barbie’s prisoners became too graphic.

However, Barbie remained mostly impassive. Sometimes he would argue with his lawyer and when he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment he stood in the dock with a haughty bearing of the former SS officer he had been. After the stomach-churning recital of his brutality it now seems highly ironic that the CIA was willing to use him and insidious cocaine in its own battle against the communism on America’s doorstep. Morality played no part in the CIA’s choice of foot soldiers in the Cold War. Klaus Barbie died in 1991 – a broken, lonely old man, ravaged by cancer, in a French cell. And, not surprisingly, the CIA didn’t send a wreath.”

STOLEN NAZI GOLD (cont.)
http://wanttoknow.info/911/black_eagle_trust_fund
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-305-the-bormann-organization/
http://phibetaiota.net/2016/06/mongoose-911-gold-collateral-account-back-story-black-eagle-trust-two-books/
https://roguemoney.net/stories/2016/3/13/nazigold
The Nazis Want Their Gold Back
by Bankster Slayer  /  March 14, 2016

“It was a tiny headline posted by the Associated Press ten days ago, gone unnoticed by nearly everybody. “Argentine president says Obama to visit Bariloche.” Almost no details were given. Just a quick note that President Obama will be standing in that infamous region known as San Carlos de Bariloche on March 23-24, 2016. Even if the only thing you know about this region comes from watching the History Channel series “Hunting Hitler,” your eyebrows should still be raised.

Joseph P. Farrell took notice. Farrell has been informing us of the activities of the Nazi International for many years. Jim Marrs likewise wrote of these developments in his book “The Rise of the Fourth Reich“. Both authors have commented on the operation that the Nazi officials carried out long before World War II ended to transfer their gold and assets into safe hands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZxazTWcwik

Marrs said it was code named “Operation Eagle Flight.”  Dr. Farrell wrote long ago that this transfer of assets by the Nazi party was set with a time limit. Farrell said, “That marker is going to come due someday and you’d better be able to pay up when they want it.”  Six years ago, he gave an audio interview to explain these views based on his then recently-published book “Babylon’s Banksters.” Here is a transcription of some of Farrell’s comments from that audio near the 11-minute pointer. The notations with [brackets] are my own interpolations.

Prince Bernhard was an SS officer. For all intents and purposes he was still answerable to his superiors in the SS chain of command [in the post-WWII Nazi extra-territorial state], one of course would be Martin Bormann. He was also a senior manager at I.G. Farben.


“Ferrari 500 Superfast Series 1, one of twenty-five
custom built cars
owned by Prince Bernhard” 

“The original purpose of the Bilderberg group was to take all that Nazi loot, in terms of liquid cash and assets, that could be moved into western banks in London and New York and laundered. And then laundered back to Europe where that money, under the guise of the Marshall Plan and so on and so forth, would be moved back into Europe to re-create the infrastructure after WWII and to help build the European Union.”

“Incidentally, that was one of Martin Bormann’s stated objectives for the Nazi party after the war. Now the reason why this idea is so significant is that it means, to a certain extent, that all this money was put at the disposal of those western banks. In other words, it vastly expanded their ledger credit-making entry ability because they now had a huge reserve. That marker is going to come due someday and you’d better be able to pay up when they want it. Because they’ve got the organization to take you out and they’ve been researching the technology to pull the trigger if you don’t want to pay up when the time comes.”

Let’s bring this forward to 2016 and the events that we all have been witnessing with the financial rise of China, the impending takeover of the physical gold and silver markets by Shanghai, and the Migrant Crisis and Debt Disaster threatening the European Union. In his most recent book, “The Third Way: The Nazi International, European Union, and Corporate Fascism,” Farrell has called attention to a 1950’s document called the “Madrid Circular Letter” and draws on the research of T.H. Tetens’ book “Germany Plots with the Kremlin“. Farrell and Tetens say this, below, about the Nazi pivot to Asia as part of the New World Order agenda to resume power at some point in the future.

“… the Circular also advocates a policy of a German “pivot to Asia”: “Germany’s industry will regain its previous position: the markets in East and Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Africa. China and the rest of Southeast Asia offer us a great future. There we can eliminate the British and Americans from the competition, especially if we conduct our negotiations with the Soviets in a smart way. Our increasing economic power and ability to elbow our way politically, must be employed alternately. A prudent and undeviating policy will make it possible to establish some day (sic) a new political order in the world which will supersede the present colossi — the United States and the U.S.S.R.”

Farrell then summarizes: “Notice that the Circular is essentially advocating the creation of what amounts to the current [BRICS] trading bloc of nations as a means for the expansion of German trade and hence, for the expansion of German heavy industry.”

NAZI INTERNATIONAL
https://gizadeathstar.com/2016/12/germany-investigate-post-war-nazi-influence-chancellery/
https://gizadeathstar.com/2016/12/remember-german-gold-repatriation-thing-well-going-faster-planned/
https://gizadeathstar.com/2016/05/us-move-space-assets-deep-space-strange-goldman-sachs-commercial/
https://gizadeathstar.com/2016/03/president-obama-to-visit-san-carlos-di-bariloche-you-fill-in-the-rest/
President Obama to Visit San Carlos De Bariloche
by   /  March 12, 2016

“Now, for those who’ve been following my books, you’ll immediately recognize San Carlos de Bariloche as the epicenter for all sorts of postwar Nazi mischief: “fusion” projects for Juan Peron, Estancias (ranches) for ‘Dolf and other high ranking murderous malcontents, and, just over the Andes in roughly the same southern regions of Chile (around Paral, if  you’ve been paying attention), the notorious Colognia Dignidad, training center for Pinochet’s intelligence forces, infamous Nazi compound, and secret manufacturer of chemical weapons – little things like Sarin gas and other WMDs.

It’s a vacation wonderland for former Regia Marina, Kriegsmarine, and Imperial Japanese Navy sorts, among many others. Even the grand master of the Italian Loge Propaganda Due, Licio Gelli, managed to make his way to the place after the Italian government shut him down. We know the region for its Bavarian-style chalets and  “hotel,” which used to be a plastic surgery clinic (I wonder why?), for its annual anniversary celebrations (among many other such places in South America) of ‘Dolf’s birthday.  Across the border with Brazil, we have all heard of those stories of the village where Indian parents are bearing children with blond hair and blue eyes.

Now if you’ve been following all those postwar developments, then you can probably guess what my high octane speculation of the day is, so, for the moment, we’ll forego mentioning any of that, to concentrate on a few obvious and much more rational explanations. In recent years there has been a running battle between Argentina, and western hedge funds managers, over moneys Argentina owes them. Recall, for a moment, those fiery speeches given by former Argentine President Fernandez de Kirchner at the UN. Argentina has a new President now (Mauricio Macri), and doubtless, those outstanding issues will top the list of discussions between Macri and Obama, and doubtless the latter is being sent more as an emissary of those vested financial interests.

So… we can all take a deep breath, and relax, and quit thinking about what we were all thinking about, namely, that “peculiar history” of the region in the immediate postwar period. That’s all old news, old history. Surely nothing like that is possible now. Yet… I wonder. Consider the statements, or rather, lack thereof about Mr. Obama’s visit. In fact, most versions of this story are so short, we can cite the entire thing:

Argentina’s president says that U.S. President Barack Obama will spend several days in a popular part of Patagonia during his trip to the South American country this month. President Mauricio Macri made the comments to reporters Thursday in Bariloche, a visit televised by several local stations. The town in southern Argentina is known for its lakes and snow-covered mountains. Macri said Obama would “spend a few days” in Bariloche, but didn’t provide more details. A spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina declined comment. A spokeswoman in Argentina’s Foreign Ministry said she couldn’t immediately comment.Obama’s visit to Argentina is planned for March 23-24. It was not immediately clear if the trip to Bariloche would be a vacation or if the official visit would be extended a few days.

Of course, what’s interesting here is first of all the obvious: it’s nothing more than a quiet peaceful region with beautiful scenery and snow-covered mountains. (A veritable Argentine version of Obersalzberg). In other words, nothing whatsoever is said about the postwar “peculiarities” of the region in the lamestream media, and one would think that it would merit at least some mention, just as a “curiosity”: “Oh how fun! Obama is going to play golf where there used to be a bunch of Nazis.”

But then there’s that series of statements that Argentina’s Foreign Ministry, the U.S. Embassy, and even President Macri himself, are declining further comment, doubtless because the agenda – that well-known dispute between Argentina and the various western hedge funds – is at the top of the list. But then there’s that disturbing possibility that we’re all thinking about.

Perhaps the meeting is between “certain people” and Mr. Obama, so that the latter can be informed of “the way things are” and to receive new “marching orders.” After all, the locals of the region preserve stories of a quiet, sudden, quick, and secret visit of President Eisenhower to the region in 1954, during that period he famously “went missing” for a couple of days, ostensibly to have a tooth worked on, or, if one listens to the UFOlogy crowd, to have a secret meeting with extra-terrestrials at California’s Muroc air base.

But if one listens to the locals in Bariloche, he was there, meeting with representatives of a military-industrial complex, one that he had fought. So, color me skeptical here, but I cannot help but wonder. And in any case, the story is worth watching carefully.”

MISSING GERMAN GOLD (cont.)
http://zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-22/german-court-demands-bundesbank-audit-sovereign-gold-holdings
http://zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-24/why-did-bundesbank-secretly-withdraw-two-thirds-its-london-gold
http://zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-24/year-later-bundesbank-has-repatriated-only-37-tons-gold-700-total
http://zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-26/bundesbank-repatriates-gold-new-york-paris-faster-planned
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/12/25/bundesbank-brings-back-germany-gold-in-new-york-paris/
Bundesbank Hauls its Gold back from New York & Paris ‘Faster than Planned’
by Wolf Richter  /  Dec 25, 2016

“In 2016, we brought back again substantially more gold to Germany than initially planned; by now, nearly half of the gold reserves are in Germany,” Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann told the German tabloid Bild in what has become an annual Christmas interview about gold – to soothe the nerves of his compatriots. Because they’d been frazzled, apparently, by this whole saga.

The German Bundesbank, which is in charge of managing Germany’s gold hoard of 3,381 tons, the second largest in the world behind the US, got into hot water in 2012 when rumors were circulating that some or much of its 2,000 tons of gold stored in New York, London, and Paris might not be there anymore, that it might have been melted down, leased, or sold.

The ensuing hullabaloo left some folks at the Bundesbank red-faced. Then the Rechnungshof (the federal government’s independent office of financial control) told the Bundesbank to rethink its overseas gold hoard. So the Bundesbank got to work. And in January 2013, it promised that by 2020 it would bring back all 374 tons of its gold that it kept at the Banque de France in Paris and 300 tons of its gold at the New York Fed.

Bundesbank Executive Board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele told the German daily Handelsblatt at the time that these moves were a “trust-building” measure, and he tried vigorously to put the rumors about the missing gold to rest. The idea was to restore confidence. But it’s not easy. Central banks don’t often move tons of physical things around. They’re more into moving things digitally. And maybe they had trouble rounding up enough gold. So at the end of 2013, Weidmann proudly told the Bild in his Christmas interview that 37 tons had been repatriated to Frankfurt from New York and Paris.

It had been a “big logistical challenge” he said at the time, transporting those paltry 37 tons of gold back to Frankfurt. This caused an even greater hullabaloo. Rumors ran wild that the gold was really gone, and that the Bundesbank had one heck of a time trying to round it up. About 45% of Germany’s gold was held at the New York Fed, and that’s where a lot of fingers were pointing. So the Bundesbank got with the program. In February 2015, it published a video, explaining “how Germany’s gold reserves came into being and the reasons behind the relocation.”

I don’t think it went viral. And the Bundesbank got serious about hauling Germany’s gold back to Germ. On January 27, 2016, it announced that much progress had been made: “In 2015, 210 tons of gold were transferred to Frankfurt am Main from storage locations abroad: around 110 tons from Paris and just under 100 tons from New York.” By then 1,403 tons of gold were in the vaults in Frankfurt, making it “our largest storage location, ahead of New York, since the end of last year,” Thiele said. The transfers were going “smoothly,” and “operations are running very much according to schedule.”

So now Weidmann tells the Bild, that there are 1,600 tons of gold in the vaults in Frankfurt at the end of 2016, out of Germany’s total hoard of 3,381 tons. Originally it was planned to have 1,700 tons back in Germany by 2020, he said, but the Bundesbank will “have finished the planned move sooner.” Perhaps someone else will end up with the missing gold. But Germans breathed a sigh of relief. The message that 1,600 tons of their gold was safely back in Germany came just in time for Christmas.”

PREVIOUSLY

BLACK GOLD SLUSH FUNDS
https://spectrevision.net/2014/12/19/black-gold/
the UNDERGROUND REICH
https://spectrevision.net/2014/08/01/the-underground-reich/

EXCHANGE STABILIZATION SLUSH FUND
https://spectrevision.net/2015/04/17/exchange-stabilization-slush-fund/
NARCO-PHILANTHROPY
https://spectrevision.net/2015/02/27/narco-philanthropy/