THE AMERICAN CONGRESS AND CZECHOSLOVAK MONETARY GOLD, 1980-1981

The history of the Czechoslovak monetary gold began to be written at the end of the 1930s at the time of the mutilation and break up of the Czechoslovak Republic. The gold was forcibly and illegally seized by Nazi Germany. At the end of the Second World War, the American army of occupation found it in salt mines at Merkers in Germany with gold from other countries. It was only in 1982 that an adequate part was returned to the vaults of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia in Prague. Soon after the Second World War, the USA, Great Britain and France established the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold on the basis of decisions by the Paris Reparations Conference. Its task was to secure the just and proportional return of recovered gold to all the affected countries including Czechoslovakia. During the following decades of the Cold War, gold was a regular subject of conflict, dispute and negotiations, especially between Washington and Prague. The agreements reached were cancelled by one side or the other, and they repeatedly went back to the beginning. This study is directed towards the period 1980-1981, when the United States Congress significantly intervened in the question of the return of the Czechoslovak gold.