A Small Nation In The Turmoil Of The Second World War

This monograph presents an in-depth analysis of Belgium's monetary and financial history during the Second World War. Exploring Belgium's financial and business links with Germany, France, The Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the study focuses on the roles played by the Central Bank and private bankers in Brussels, by the Belgian government in exile in London, and by the Belgian minister plenipotentiary in New York. Among the subjects arising are: German attempts to plunder Belgium and Belgian resistance strategies; the peripeteia of the Belgian gold reserve; the role of the Belgian Congo; Belgium's participation in the discussions leading up to the Bretton Woods conference; and the negotiations for creating a Customs Union, blueprint for the 1958 Treaty of Rome. The final part of the book analyzes the famous monetary reform devised by Belgian Minister of Finance Camille Gutt at the liberation of the country in September 1944.

Nazi Germany and Japan occupied huge areas at least for some period during World War II, and those territories became integral parts of their war economies. The book focuses on the policies of World War II aggressors in occupied countries. The unbalanced economic and financial relations were defined by administrative control, the implementation of institutions and a variety of military exploitation strategies. Plundering, looting and requisitions were frequent aggressive acts, but beyond these interventions by force, specific institutions were created to gain control over the occupied economies as a whole. An appropriate institutional setting was also crucial to give incentives to the companies in the occupied countries to produce munitions for the aggressors. The book explains the main fields of war exploitation (organisation and control, war financing and workforce recruitment). It substantiates these aspects in case studies of occupied countries and gives examples of the business policy of multinational companies under war conditions. The book also provides an account of differences and similarities of the two occupation systems. Economies under Occupation will interest researchers specialising in the history of economic thought as well as in economic theory and philosophy. It will also engage readers concerned with regional European and Japanese studies and imperial histories.

The first comprehensive account of the impact of Japanese occupation on Southeast Asian economies and societies during World War II.

War is a costly business and in 1939, Germany was almost broke with its economy overheating and heading for runaway inflation. Hitler needed hard foreign currency to pay for his war machine and the only way he could get this was by selling gold that he looted from the national banks of Austria, Czechoslovakia and all the countries that were occupied after September 1939. Another source of gold was the theft of personal gold especially from the Jews, most grotesquely, the haul of dental gold which came out of the concentration camps. No neutral country would accept Reichsmarks so the gold had to be laundered through Swiss banks. The story of Swiss complicity in German war crimes is still a subject of controversy, and lawsuits. There are also questions about the parts played by other countries, particularly Portugal, in laundering stolen gold for the Nazis. The Vatican’s dealings with Hitler have often been seen as ambiguous and this book investigates the Holy See’s role in helping ship Nazi gold to South America, and how that gold might have been used to re-create the German Reich. After the war a commission was set up to recover as much gold as possible and restore it to those from whom it was stolen. This, of course, was beset by huge problems especially with regards to gold that was looted from Holocaust victims. Enormous quantities of gold and other treasures were hidden in a mine at Merkers in Thuringia which was found by the US 3rd Army in 1945, but much gold remains unaccounted for, and attempts are still ongoing to uncover supposed hidden caches, the most recent in Poland where four tons are believed to have been found by the Silesian Bridge Foundation in May of 2022. The whereabouts and disposal of the remaining stolen gold has led to numerous investigations and countless conspiracy theories. In Hitler’s Gold the author analyzes these and uncovers many of the mysteries surrounding this continuing search for the missing millions.

Paying for Hitler's War is a comparative economic study of twelve Nazi-occupied countries during World War II.

As a businessman, financier, diplomat, minister, and first Managing Director of the IMF, Camille Gutt (1884–1971) was involved in all the important financial negotiations between the 1920s and the 1950s. Using Gutt’s personal archives as his starting point, Crombois examines the rise and fall of financial diplomacy as a largely private enterprise.

Explains the extent, necessity and importance of black-market activity in France during the Second World War.