locate a depository farther back in the SHAEF zone and supervise the moving. (Under the Big Three arrangements, the part of Germany containing Merkers would be taken over by the Soviets for military government control after the fighting ended.) Bernstein and Barrett spent Tuesday looking for a site and finally settled on the Reichsbank building in Frankfurt. Disposal According to a late-1990s study for the U.S. Department of State led by American diplomat and attorney Stuart E. Eizenstat, gold looted from occupied countries and stolen from individuals was transferred to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to finance its war effort. Some gold was taken from Holocaust victims, though Eizenstat points out there is no evidence the SNB knew of this as the gold had been molded into bars. A Swiss commission headed by historian and economist Jean-François Bergier estimated that the SNB received $440m ($8b 2020) in gold from Nazi sources, of which $316m ($5.8b in 2020) is estimated to have been looted. Further, the Bergier commission found that the SNB's governing board knew at an early point that the gold was being looted from other countries. The U.S. study further found that Germany transferred over $300m (2.6b 1998)—about $240m of which was looted—to neutral countries Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey (all of which aided Germany through non-military exchanges), mostly using the SNB. Much of the gold was not recovered by the Allies, with only $18.5m of the looted $240m the neutral countries (excluding Switzerland) received in trade returned to the Tripartite Gold Commission; almost $15 million of this was from Sweden. That country separately provided about $66m of $100m provided by it, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, of about $480m sought for Europe overall. Eizenstat notes that although there were Argentine sympathies to the Axis, it was still unknown whether the country received any actual looted gold. He also recounts that after the war, the U.S. held that nations only had to return looted gold if they had purchased it directly from the Reichsbank, allowing the U.S. to accept such material as collateral for private loans to Spain. The present whereabouts of the Nazi gold that disappeared into European banking institutions in 1945 has been the subject of several books, conspiracy theories, and a civil lawsuit brought in January 2000 in California against the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order and other defendants. The suit against the Vatican Bank