"The gold in the U.S. was earned by West Germany through trade surpluses in the 1950s and 1960s and was never moved out of the United States due to fear of inva

"The gold in the U.S. was earned by West Germany through trade surpluses in the 1950s and 1960s and was never moved out of the United States due to fear of invasion by the Soviet Union." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation So for a while the U.S. was saying to Germany 'thanks for those cars, machine tool and other goodies, have some gold, we will keep it in the vault safe until you need it...' and, after a while, got a bit lax about moving the piles of gold from one vault to the next. So it is not as if this gold got there due to the Germans prudently shipping it across the Atlantic for safe keeping, it is money that should have been paid in gold for goods exported by Germany to the USA. I think they were promised to be paid and no physical gold was ever moved or paid.