# Bank for International Settlements ### Banked and facilitated trade for the Nazis Once again [[Alex Gladstein]] Crazy story about how the Bank for International Settlements ([@BIS_org](https://mobile.twitter.com/BIS_org)) acted an "ATM" for the Nazis in 1939, helping them loot 23 tons of Prague's gold (even after it was held abroad for safekeeping) after they invaded Czechoslovakia: https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/tower-institutional-corruption Despite some high hurdles, LeBor succeeds at peeling away at least some of the BIS’s facade to reveal a great deal of how it operates. Its founding statutes call for the BIS to “promote the cooperation of central banks and to provide additional facilities for international financial operations,” LeBor writes. That benign sounding mission would later become the justification for participating in some of the most horrendous crimes in human history. What is most shocking in LeBor’s book is the moral blindness of BIS officials. Their goal was, apparently, to simply grease the wheels of global commerce. Their eyes were shut to the horrors in front of them. Clearly, the BIS is far from the only institution shown to have been, at best, indifferent to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews and the Nazis’ other crimes against humanity. As a story in The New York Times recently noted: “The list of institutions and industries that have been accused of whitewashing their links to the Third Reich is long, including various governments, the Vatican, Swiss banks and American corporations like IBM, General Motors and DuPont.”