Bank of England Sold Stolen Gold For Nazis

As a sidebar for March 8's "Did the Bank of England ever return the gold they took from Venezuela?":

Before the seizure of Russian - and Russian citizen's - assets, before the Canadian government began freezing citizen's bank accounts sans any type of judicial review ("It's an emergency" honk, honk) before GoFundMe stole the $10 million donated to the Canadian truckers - a decision since reversed after people started disputing the charge on their credit cards, something that was going to cost GFM $15 per disputed charge - before all that, the Bank of England took Venezuela's gold.

And now that the Biden administration is treating with Maduro the gold-grabbing might be important and as far as I can tell the BofE never gave back the gold they took....

From The Independent, July 31, 2013:

Documents reveal Bank of England sold stolen gold for Nazis

Archived material details how gold bars plundered from Czechoslovakia were sold on behalf of Germany's central bank in 1939

The Bank of England's involvement in the sale of gold stolen by Nazis following the invasion of Czechoslovakia has been revealed in newly released documents.

Archived material released by the BoE details how the gold bars were sold on behalf of Germany's central bank, the Reichsbank, in 1939, after being seized during the Nazi invasion, despite the fact that British government had frozen all Czech assets being held in London at the time.

The BoE documents have been made public following the first stage of the digitalisation of the bank's archive.

In the report written in 1950, the BoE admit that at the outbreak of the Second World War “and for some time afterwards” the incident involving the Czech gold “still rankled”.

Officials wrote: “Outside the Bank and the Government the Bank's position has probably never been thoroughly appreciated and their action at the time was widely misunderstood.”

They describe how a request was made in March 1939 to transfer gold worth £5.6m, which would translate to approximately over £700m today, from a Czech National Bank account at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to a Reichsbank account they also held. Some £4m of the gold went to banks in Belgium and Holland, with the rest sold in London....

....MUCH MORE