English source-aligned edition
Emil Puhl
Emil Puhl served as Reichsbank vice-president responsible for implementing arrangements with the SS concerning stolen valuables. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Berlin, Nazi Germany and occupied Poland through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- From 1939 to the end of the war, Puhl was vice-president of the Reichsbank, as he confirmed in a sworn statement made at Nuremberg in 1946.
- In that statement, he described arrangements under which the Reichsbank accepted dental gold, jewellery, currency and other valuables taken by the SS from camp victims, and under which details were agreed with Oswald Pohl.
- Research by the Deutsche Bundesbank indicates that from 1942 valuables from Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka reached the Reichsbank and that Puhl participated in settling the details of that operation.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Puhl shows the final financial stage in a chain of crime: accepting, securing, accounting for and using valuables taken from people deported and murdered. The profile separates this documented agency from decisions on deportation, camp management and direct killing.
Key events and mechanisms
- Reichsbank and SS arrangements for accepting valuables in 1942
- the Reichsbank's receipt of the first consignment of valuables from Operation Reinhard in August 1942
- Nuremberg proceedings and his sworn statement in 1946
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
In the Nuremberg Ministries Trial, Puhl was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for war crimes. He died in 1962.
Limits of the evidence
Surviving sources document the arrangements and flow of valuables very well, but do not allow Puhl to be assigned every specific delivery or its value without a risk of duplication. The profile does not construct a ranking of stolen property or victims.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.