Thank you for your comments and interest, Sdaupanner. I bow to your expertise, but I doubt that you ever had the good luck to find a whole gold bar of any size in your pan!:thumbup: :D The gold bars found in the Merkers mine in 1945 were mostly from Berlin's national bank, but who can tell how many of the bars had been remelted from bars stolen from banks in France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Roumania, Hungary, and Russia from 1939 to 1945? I doubt that there was a standard weight measured each time the Nazis remelted them, but if that was done, it would have been in grams, not ounces. The Army's Monuments men were not involved in evaluating the contents of the 7,000 sacks of gold bars, and the men who handled them were not specialists -- their assignment was to remove them to a safer place for storage and later combine them with other gold hoards found in many other mines. As far as the Army was concerned, they counted the bars when the sacks were unpacked, and then stored them in Frankfurt. Responsibility for that mountain of gold was eventually transferred several times, opening a lot of loopholes for theft. The various nations who were Nazi victims never fully recouped their losses and finally gave up. Meanwhile, I wish you luck on your panning.

Dr. Wilk, I've been studying the Tripartite Gold Commission's final report (1959). I'm somewhat puzzled by what appears to be obfuscation. Correct me, please, if I'm wrong, but I assume the Army would have inventoried the gold bars as so-and-so many bars, not as so-and-so many ounces. That would be the way to ensure that any quantity discrepancies would become evident as time passed. The TGC report, however, states: "By July 1948 a total of 9,849,169 ounces of gold in bars, coins or pieces had been deposited with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Bank of England or was still being held at the Foreign Exchange Depository in Frankfurt by the U.S. military authorities." I'm aware that banks measure gold deposits in ounces, but at some stage the number of bars was converted to ounces by somebody, and I presume a record was kept of that conversion. I'd love to compare that to the original inventory taken at the mine. The grand total rose by another millon ounces during the next 26 years, indicating significant traffic volume in the gold storage areas.

Also, the fact that the bars were split up between New York, London, and Frankfurt reveals there was a lot of handling and shipping involved, exposing the gold to possible losses. As I mentioned earlier, the Army was engaged in drastic down-sizing and redeployments in 1945 to 1950, which meant frequent personnel changes among the officers and enlisted men assigned to guard, manage, and ship the gold.

According to the TGC, 80 percent of the total gold pool was distributed to the claimant Governments by November, 1950. The last two gold bars (net 797.539 ounces of fine gold) were recovered from "German financial authorities" on Sept. 27, 1996. They apparently were originally Belgian Central Bank gold bars looted by the Nazis, remelted by the Reichsbank and given false identification marks (Prussian State Mint insignia and a 1938 date stamp). But the Reichsbank had meticulous paper records that proved their real heritage.