Baumgartner and the gold of the Banque de France

On 1 September 1939, the Banque de France held 2,800 tons of gold, the world's second-largest reserve behind the United States (4,200 tons). 1,500 tons were stockpiled at the central headquarters on the rue La Vrillière in Paris, 600 at the Châteauroux branch and 700 dispersed among 50 provincial branches; the whole was valued at 45 billion francs of the time, or 140 billion present-day dollars.

Governor Wilfrid Baumgartner, 37 — one of the youngest in the institution's history, a Finance Inspector — was worried from the moment war was declared. Was French gold safe in Paris in the face of a possible invasion? The Polish lesson was clear: the gold had to leave. The most delicate question remained — where to.

From 15 September 1939 the secret Vladimir-Boivin operation was prepared to move the gold gradually out of the capital. Three logics clashed: the colonial empire (Africa, the Antilles), which kept the gold under French sovereignty but within reach of a metropolitan collapse; the allied United Kingdom, near but vulnerable if London too should fall; and finally North America, more distant and so safer against any German interception, but beyond all direct control. The method was the stuff of a novel: armoured special trains, gendarme escorts, transhipment onto the French Navy cruisers Émile Bertin and Jeanne d'Arc, Atlantic crossings under cover aboard camouflaged civilian ships.

Baumgartner had to decide where to concentrate the gold as a priority.