“They wanted to sell them at 10 to 20 percent below fair-market value and to sell them very fast.”
The stones — sapphires, rubies and emeralds — came with written appraisals from gemologists in Germany in 1994 and France last April, the dealer said.
“I believe they were hidden by a former Nazi in East Germany who is now trying to cash in his retirement fund, or perhaps it’s the next generation that is now trying to unload it.”
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said the dealer’s account sounded “conceivable” because it is known that East Germans tried to “locate and exploit looted Nazi assets.
“They wanted to get these assets out to the West and the scenario [of the dealer] sounds plausible to me,” Steinberg said.
The gem dealer’s story “fits in perfectly” with revelations the past few months that Swiss banks hid Jewish money the Nazis stole, and that looted Jewish gold went to Switzerland and then the U.S. Treasury in New York, Steinberg said.
“Only in the last few months did we know that $7 billion in looted Nazi gold went to Switzerland. And who could have imagined that, as we speak, two tons of Nazi gold sits right here in Manhattan? To learn that looted jewels are still at large is shocking but no longer surprising,” he said.
The dealer said the proposal made him “suspicious, given the quantity [of the gems] and the fact that they were shipped from Germany to a vault in Paris.”
He believes the gems left Germany recently, and that someone was trying to sell them in the United States shows “Europe is too hot” because of the recent Swiss-Nazi collaboration charges.
The aborted transaction came even as State Department documents, declassified at the request of U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) and the World Jewish Congress, provide new details of the extent to which the Nazis looted the diamonds of France, Holland and Belgium to help finance the Axis war effort.
A document dated July 1945 from American officials in Stockholm reported that at the time there was “considerable trade” in smuggled diamonds and precious stones by a silver-plate dealer in the Swedish capital who had no knowledge or experience in those items and was selling them “at very low prices.”
The officials said there were rumors that another Stockholm firm also was “engaged heavily in selling smuggled diamonds from Holland and other countries.”
The document pointed out that because Germany was not a producer of raw diamonds, it bought or obtained diamonds primarily from Belgium, Holland and France and established a “tremendous diamond industry comprised chiefly of cutters, dealers and jewelry manufacturers.”
The diamond supply dried up with the outbreak of war, however, and the Nazis sought to replenish it to finance the war.
“There seemed to the Nazis one obvious source: Jewish jewelry,” said the document. “Before the diamonds could be made available to the industry for reprocessing and selling in world markets, they had to be obtained from the Jews. Apparently, the Jews were forced by German decree to turn in their jewelry to a government-owned pawnshop. The persecuted people were either told that they would be paid later or were given a paltry sum.”
As proof of the token prices paid to the Jews, the document quoted one official as saying on Sept. 20, 1940, “I am amazed that export needs to be supported since the pawnshop has paid such low prices for the purchases of the Jews.”
The document said that in the beginning of 1939, the Nazis began “virtually confiscating Jewish jewelry” and that the diamond industry — dealers and manufacturers — “shared in this diabolical scheme.”