Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion Read Free

vanity, and a potent constraint as a monetary standard. No other object has commanded so much veneration over so long a period of time.” 2
    Of course, the metal has also had its enemies. The Roman poet Virgil wrote in the
Aeneid
, “To what extremes won’t you compel our hearts, you accursed lust for gold?” Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet, “There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls, doing more murder in this loathsome world, than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.” In December 1921, Thomas Edison called it “an invention of Satan.” The British economist John Maynard Keynes dismissed it as “a barbaric relic.” 3
    Gold is beautiful, malleable, and rare. It is also indestructible, which probably accounts for its connection to eternal life. Treasure hunters still today find shiny coins from Spanish galleons that sank in the early 1700s off the coast of Central Florida. Gold does not rust. Even if buried in the ground for thousands of years it still sparkles. The metal is extremely heavy: a cubic foot of it weighs a half-ton. It can be easily turned into products ranging from wedding rings to teeth. It is used in computers and has even gone to the moon. An ounce of gold can be stretched to a string fifty miles in length or made into a sheet measuring one hundred square feet. It can be pounded down into gold leaf one-tenth of the diameter of a human hair. The world’s total gold holdings amount to only about 165,000 tons. A metric ton in the form of a cube is only fifteen inches on each side. All the gold mined in world history would fit into three-and-a half Olympic-sized swimming pools. 4
    The ancient Chinese and Egyptians practiced alchemy, a quack science that attempted to turn base metals into gold. King Croesus of Lydia, who ruled the area of modern Turkey, introduced large-scale gold coinage. French historian Fernand Braudel called the metal the “lifeblood of Mediterranean trade in the Second Millennium B.C.” 5 Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. wrote admiringly of the Carthaginians, “If willing to help, of all existing states they are the best able; for they have abundance of gold and silver, and these make war, like other things, go smoothly.” 6
    Explorers during the Age of Discovery set off in sailing ships to look for gold. The objectives of Columbus were gold, god, and glory. On October 12, 1492, the day after he landed on the island of Guanahani in the Bahamas, he set out on a quest for the metal. He wrote of his first experience: “Seeing some of them with little bits of this metal hanging at their noses, I gathered from them by signs that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed large vessels of gold, and in great quantities.” 7
    Two years after that first voyage to the new world, the proud Columbus proposed to his Spanish patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the rules for gathering gold from the new territories. Colonists, for example, should be obliged to get a license from the Spanish governor, and all gold found should be smelted immediately. He wrote them, “Without doubt there is in these lands a very great amount of gold.” In the century after Columbus, the world’s stock of gold increased five-fold setting off one of the world’s most productive eras of gold discovery. 8
    Under the mercantile system, which dominated the world economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, countries imported as few goods as necessary, exported as much as feasible, and sold as little of their gold as possible. This was followed by the international gold standard, which was the bedrock of global finance for the next century, leading up to World War I.
    The British in the early eighteenth century established the value of a country’s currency on the basis of gold. Sir Isaac Newton, the master of London’s Mint, in 1717 tied the value of the pound sterling at 113.0016 grains of pure gold.