"I had a little silver ring with a white stone, with a picture of Shirley Temple on it, all curls. Archive photos show piles of candelabra and golden trays, cutlery and other family treasures, seized and destined again to be melted down and shipped to safety.When German soldiers came to expel the Greenberg family from their wealthy, comfortable home, "We lost everything, we walked out as we stood,'' Mrs Greenberg said. Some of the booty was loaded from the vaults of various central banks, melted down, re-stamped with the German seal and exported.In a display of unspeakable greed all too well documented, the Nazis collected wedding rings and gold teeth fillings from the bodies mounting in the death camps. And the rest of the booty came as more conventional plunder, from synagogues, museums and the houses of those targeted by the Nazis - mostly Jews. Much of the Dutch gold, for example, had belonged to the country's 140,000 Jews, more than 70 per cent of whom perished in Nazi camps. But they made allowances for gold honestly owned by the Germans and concluded that, so far as the amount of stolen bullion deposited was concerned, "on the fairest assumption the amount of loot taken by the Swiss from the Germans can be estimated at $289m." To reach the value of the gold in today's money, add a nought.The Nazis plundered many sources; the list of imports recorded by the Reichsbank includes $223m worth of gold from Belgium, $168m from Holland, $46m from Austria, gold from Italy and France, Hungary and Yugoslavia and Poland, Czechoslovakia and Luxembourg.

According to Elan Steinberg, of the World Jewish Congress, one document refers to the interrogation by American agents of one Dr Landwehr, head of the foreign exchange department of the finance ministry in Berlin. He told the Americans that "the sum of German assets that passed into Switzerland amounted to at least 15bn Reichmarks", which in 1945 was equivalent to around $6bn, or pounds 1.5bn. The doctor was told that the Swiss had issued their own estimate of 1bn Reichmarks, a remark he "dismissed with an ironic smile", according to the US agent, who added: "I could not conceal my astonishment.''According to ledgers of the German central bank detailed in Allied documents, the Nazis stole $748m worth of gold in 1946, of which at least $398m was shipped to Switzerland during the war. The Allies were clearly suspicious of Swiss intentions, concluding that they "lacked good faith" and accusing banks of laundering Nazi gold through Portugal and Spain - $100m "washed through the Swiss National Bank".