Albert Thoms headed the Department of Precious Metals at the Reichsbank, and in this capacity he was responsible for receiving shipments of gold and other valuables stolen by the Nazis. In May 1945, the American military discovered these shipments in the salt mines at Merkers, a village in Thuringia. After his arrest, Thoms served as a witness in the Nuremberg Trials in order to escape prosecution. He provided extensive testimony and worked together with the American occupation forces to uncover the Reichsbank’s involvement in the distribution of Nazi loot.

In August 1942, Bruno Melmer, a captain in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt or WVHA], began sending the Reichsbank jewelry, foreign currency, coins, and precious metals (including gold fillings and crowns) that had been taken from Holocaust victims in Eastern Europe as part of the “Action Reinhardt” in the death camps Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. The Reichsbank kept the currency; the jewelry was sent to the Municipal Pawnshop in Berlin, and the gold was melted down. Profits from the use or sale of looted goods were directed into an SS bank account, and a large portion of the melted-down gold was sold to Swiss banks to help finance the war. According to American estimates, the total worth of the Melmer shipments equalled approximately 36 million Reichsmarks. The SS was not the only organization to deliver looted valuables to the Reichsbank—but since its shipments were accompanied by detailed documentation, these were the ones that eventually provided unassailable evidence of the Reichsbank’s involvement in the trade of personal possessions stolen from Holocaust victims.

In the 1990s, when it became known that gold looted by the Nazis could still be found in Switzerland, an investigation was launched. The investigation revealed that the registry of the Melmer deliveries, the so-called Melmer Notebooks, had apparently been destroyed during the 1970s in the Federal Republic. The investigation also revealed that most of the melted-down gold from crowns and filings had not in fact been sent to Switzerland but sold by two German banks, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.