OK. So watching Monuments Men last week, and now re-sparked by this post I got to wondering about this. One of the more infamous occurrences at the concentration/extermination camps were the collection of gold fillings, wedding bands and other jewelry and so on.

Now obviously some of this was melted down by the Germans and made into gold bars. From what I have been able to find, there was controversy over some of the captured bullion for this reason, as some of it was of suspicious origin, but this fact was ignored, and it was sent off to the various powers who received the former German gold as reparations.

It points out that 1,625 bars of "non-recognized" origin weighing 307,528 fine grams, were included amongst the bars shipped from the Reichsbank to Merkers These made up approximately 18% of the total gold held in the salt mine. The Allies decided that recovered Nazi gold would be returned to claimant nations in equal proportion to their losses - i.e. that approximately 64 per cent of all claims would be met - and hence identifying whether a gold bar belonged to a specific treasury was unnecessary.

But what happened to the gold that the Nazis hadn't melted down? Plenty was recovered still in the form of fillings or rings. In theory, maybe some of the jewelry could be reunited with the former owners, but that seems to be rather hard to do. And it seems crass to the extreme to think that this would have later been melted down, the jewelry of course, but especially the fillings.

---

So anyways, what I'm wondering is, was any concerted attempt made to reunite jewelry with the original owner or their heirs, and if so, how successful was this?

In the case of gold that couldn't be reunited with the owner, or in the case of items like gold fillings, what was done with them? Were the melted into bullion? Removed from circulation? Or are they all distributed among Holocaust Museums now...?