Ian Sayer has already found two golds bars worth £2.4m which were stolen by the Nazis and stamped with swastikas – now he wants the US President to release documents to help him trace more
A real-life Indiana Jones wants Donald Trump to declassify all federal documents relating to Hitler’s evil regime’s war crimes so he can track down more stolen Nazi gold.
An 18-year probe by Ian Sayer, 80, helped recover two Nazi gold bars worth £2.4m in 1996 which had been hidden in the German central bank.
Now he wants all US Government records under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act made public so he can find looted gems worth millions that remain unaccounted for – just like action movie hero Jones played by Harrison Ford
Ian said the gold belonged to the victims of the Nazi regime – not governments. “I have spent nearly 50 years tracking Nazi war criminals and searching for looted Nazi gold,” he said. “In that time I have learned one thing above all others. “The obstacle is hardly ever that the evidence was destroyed. It is that it remains closed.”
“I am the last person to have established the location of missing Nazi gold – two bars traced to Germany and finally accounted for.
“The United States searched for those two bars in the years after the war and failed to find them. Detailed investigations were called for and never carried out.
“The reasons have never been explained and I believe the explanation lies in files that are still classified. On the evidence of the last 50 years I am confident that it would pay dividends. Some of those dividends would be paid, at last, to the people who are owed them.”
The former truck driver became an independent gold hunter in 1978.
He told the US Government two bars of Belgian gold looted by the Nazis had disappeared from American custody in Munich in 1945.
Ian gave them the bar numbers, date of deposit, bank and account details.
But it took five years and eight months to persuade them to look.
When the State Department finally approached Germany the Bundesbank admitted it held the bars which are stamped with swastikas.
They were surrendered in 1996, transferred to the Bank of England’s vaults and sold as metal.
Ian said it remains the only looted Nazi gold ever recovered through the work of a private investigator.
President Trump has already agreed to open up the US’s real life X-Files.
Now Ian is backing a campaign by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley for the declassification of Nazi records which the Brit believes will contain information that will help the recovery of more missing looted gold.
“Declassification does not produce dramatic revelations to order,” he said.
“It produces the dull and specific documents – a deposit slip, a receipt, an internal memorandum, a ledger entry – that turn a suspicion into a traceable asset.
“And assets that can be traced can be returned.
“I have proved that this works and I proved it as a private individual with no powers, no budget and no access beyond what any member of the public may see.
“If one man could establish the fate of two bars of gold from the open record a government with the National Archives behind it can establish the fate of a great deal more.
“Senator Grassley is asking for that machinery to be switched on.
“That is why I support his request to President Trump for an executive order declassifying the federal records relating to Nazi war crimes.”