STUDY SAYS NAZIS STOLE MORE GOLD THAN ESTIMATED.

Byline: Alan Cowell The New York Times

Swiss historians said Monday that the amount of gold stolen from concentration camp prisoners and other victims of Nazi Germany was much higher than previously assumed by other experts - totaling some $146 million at 1945 prices.

The Swiss study, which came on the eve of the first major international conference on the Nazi gold affair, was said by its authors to be the first to trace gold transactions by the Nazi central bank, or Reichsbank. No previous study had given a figure, which amounts to $1.3 billion today.

The report said a much larger proportion of the gold that went through Nazi coffers during World War II - around one-sixth - was so-called victim gold, as opposed to gold looted from central banks or acquired from Germany's own reserves.

It also said Swiss private banks had received three times more Nazi bullion - some $61.2 million at wartime values, or $550 million in today's terms - than they previously had acknowledged. But it did not say how that gold was used or what became of it.

The 23-page Swiss report, issued in Bern and made available in London, was researched by a commission of historians appointed last year under international pressure to study the entire range of Switzerland's relationships with Nazi Germany.

The disclosures are certain to strengthen assertions by American Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors that efforts over the past year to provide restitution have produced far smaller sums than Hitler's victims lost. The new figures also are likely to revive criticism that Swiss bankers showed no scruples in dealing with Nazi Germany in gold known to have been stolen.

Similar assertions concerning so-called victim gold were made in May in a U.S. study overseen by Stuart Eizenstat, the leading State Department official involved in hunting down the looted gold and using it to benefit Holocaust survivors.

But while the Eizenstat report spoke of victim gold melted down and traded as bullion from the German central bank, it did not quantify the amount, U.S. officials said.

Eizenstat told reporters in London on Monday that the Swiss disclosure ``goes beyond what was in our report'' and showed the seriousness of recent Swiss efforts to confront a wartime past that was long hidden behind a national myth of hostility to Nazi Germany.

The 41-nation London conference, which will start today, represents a milestone in almost two years of efforts by Jewish groups and the Clinton administration to trace Nazi gold so that restitution finally can be paid to the hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors - particularly in Eastern Europe - who have so far received no financial acknowledgment of their suffering.

At the gathering, a new fund based on gold still held by the United States, France and Britain is expected to be announced, in addition to a $190 million fund for Holocaust survivors set up by Switzerland this year.

The Swiss National Bank acknowledged more than a decade ago that its officers must have known they were dealing in gold looted by the Nazis from central banks, but Swiss officials have bridled at suggestions that Switzerland knowingly dealt in gold, including dental fillings, stolen from Jews sent to death camps.

The Swiss commission was created after years of stinging criticism, particularly from the World Jewish Congress in New York, that Switzerland should acknowledge its wartime financial practices that some American specialists believe helped prolong the war.

The conference is a result of U.S. and British pressure on other countries to provide their own accounting of their wartime behavior by declassifying archives and answering some questions evoked by the Swiss report: Where and how did Nazi Germany obtain its gold, and what did it do with it?

Part of that answer is already known. In 1946, the United States, Britain and France formed the Tripartite Gold Commission, which gathered some 335 tons of Nazi gold from Germany and those parts of Europe that Hitler had conquered.

Most of that gold has been returned to European central banks - even though it included gold stolen from Holocaust victims, other individuals and businesses, according to recently declassified documents in the U.S. National Archives.