The law on Foreign Exchange Control, which had been passed as early as 1931 in oder to fight the scarcity of foreign currency, was used to impede the transfer of Jewish property abroad immediately after the Nazis came to power. However, only from 1935 on, legislation on foreign currency aimed at the limitation of Jewish property transfers. After Reinhard Heydrich, in his capacity as the head of the foreign currency investigation office, intervened in the legislation from late 1936 on, the foreign currency laws in very short time were expanded into an instrument of discrimination for Jewish emigration. Even before the pogrom of November 1938, it prevented nearly every transfer of property abroad if the owners were Jewish.

This research project of the Research Institute for Social and Economic History at the University of Cologne is to clarify the process and causes of the theft of precious metals by the Nazis as well as explaining the economic utilization of the stolen property between 1938 and 1945, giving special consideration to the participation of Degussa in this process. The focus of the study is not only the plundering of Jewish gold in the German death camps, but considers all forms of the confiscation of gold, silver and platinum by German institutions in occupied Europe and the Reich. In this short overview, the sources, methods and results of the study are presented, with special regard to the Polish example.