THE Swiss authorities and secretive Swiss bankers are under mounting pressure to trace and repay the huge horde of Nazi gold deposited in their vaults before the end of the second World War.
The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Malcolm Rilkind, will raise the issue during a two day visit to Switzerland next week. This follows the publication of yesterday's British Foreign Office report confirming that less than one eighth of the gold, seized across Europe by Hitler's Germany, has ever been accounted for, recovered and paid as restitution.
The report dealing with one of the most intractable legacies of the war says the Nazis plundered more than £366 million (twice what many believed) from the reserves of occupied countries, and the assets of organisations and individuals, with the Jewish community a principal target.
At today's prices the "loot" is worth an estimated £4.6 billion.
Only 250 million Swiss francs significantly less than the £86 million requested by the Allies was paid and distributed to the countries which had suffered most.
The Foreign Office said Britain and her Allies knew that large amounts of the gold had been exported to neutral countries such as Switzerland, to pay for goods and foreign exchange. They also suspected the Nazi regime used these channels to conceal looted gold and other property.
The figures included approximately $223 million (£143 million) of Belgian gold, $193 million from Holland, and $19-24 million from Hungary.
The Labour MP, Mr Greville Janner, who had urged British ministers to search British files for details of the post war deal struck with the Swiss, said yesterday. "The Swiss, from the report, clearly behaved in a thoroughly unworthy way during the war. We call on them now to take action to seek justice. The Swiss have a responsibility now."
But the best selling author Frederick Forsyth, whose novel The Odessa File was written after he researched the Nazi transfer of looted gold, suggested the trail was now cold. Mr Forsyth said. "There is a large gap between the amounts the Allies are now saying was deposited and the amount the Swiss have disgorged. The question now has to be what happened to the rest?
"I suspect it remains under the streets of Zurich and the bankers are going to keep shtum."
Large amounts of gold were melted down and re-stamped with the Reichsbank symbol to render it untraceable. And Mr Forsyth warned. "It all happened a long time ago now. The trail has gone cold and the personal participants are dead. It would be very hard now to prove the existence of ingots or convoys of gold."
The Foreign Office report denied any British involvement in a cover up and said all the information contained in the report came from documents available to the public.
But it emerges Britain has withheld a total of £38 million earmarked for restitution to Albania because of Tirana's refusal to compensate for the mining of the Corfu channel in 1946, which destroyed one British warship and damaged another, claiming the lives of 14 people.
However the Albanian government last week indicated that this 50 year old dispute was now close to resolution.
Mr Janner, whose family suffered a number of deaths in the war, welcomed yesterday's report. "For the first time previously unpublished Bank of England documents show how British officials turned a blind eye to the transaction. How much of the gold ended up in Britain and how much stolen Nazi gold is still in British vaults?" he asked.
Mr Janner said. "Switzerland has a moral obligation to think again about the gold. I think they should be ashamed of themselves. I believe that very many Swiss are ashamed." This was "stolen property", he declared, which "should go back to the survivors of the Holocaust".