The Ledger of Readerly Transactions

(note: This is part 3 of a series about digging into the deeper mysteries of S.)

I was queued to read Pale Fire by Nabokov at the recommendation of friend who is a retired high school literature teacher.   Then S. happened.

It's a clever text in that there are readers who will be content with the story at the surface; and there will be readers desiring to delve into its mysteries.  Either approach is possible and completely viable.  The choice that the reader is going to make is based on the interactions they will personally have with S.  No two readers are going to have the same experience.  The proliferation of blogs for this one book is a ready example of several different approaches a single reader may take.

S. is a book lover's nirvana, but the text can be unsettling and frustrating when too many synchronicities in the real world, perhaps with a touch of apophenia, make it best to step away from the text for a brief period; or when you've hit a dead end and aren't even sure you want to start anew.  I can say unequivocally that both have happened to me.

I started this blog originally to really keep track of my own thoughts.  As a result of this blog, I've had fabulous email correspondences with other readers and bloggers of S.  I've waffled several times over my enthusiastic embrace of Borges' short story The Aleph, first thinking perhaps I was too enthusiastic.  I now wonder that perhaps I was not enthusiastic enough. And quite disturbing and awesome are the times a book or another link seem to fall from the sky into my eager hand; such was the day The Gulag Archipelago showed up in a local used bookstore on the very day I had just discovered it via the internet.

I hope that my personal experiences illustrate that these are the kinds of transactions with the world that literature creates.

The Power 15 ad in the McKay's review of Ship of Theseus published by Rose & Blatt Publishing is a pretty bold reference.  Most references in S. aren't so easily found; the reader must have some familiarity with the text and the references in order to begin sussing out the clues, hints and threads the author has so cleverly hidden.

Rose & Blatt is a reference to Louise Rosenblatt, who in the 1920's met Gertrude Stein and Robert Penn Warren in Paris.  During World War 2, she work for the war department analyzing reports from or about German-occupied France.

Most importantly, to us as readers, she first advanced her transactional theory of literature in the 1930s which is considered a reader-response literary theory.  To Rosenblatt, every reader is going to have a different interaction with any given text because no two people are going to be identical in experiences and temperament.

Readers aren't just readers.  They are authors and bloggers, philosophers and professors, journalists and editors.  Each person will have a unique experience with the text they have chosen to read.

Hero with a Thousand Faces is well-documented as being a primary source for inspiration for George Lucas and his film Star Wars.  The Invention of Morel is reputed to be an inspiration for the game Myst.

These interactions are dynamic.  How often has a good book stayed in your thoughts after you've finished reading it?  Text may be panned by critics, lauded as a great new scientific theory, adapted into movies and plays, or used as a political weapon.  Authors wouldn't write pastiches or mash-ups if they weren't readers of other texts by other authors.  The opportunities for engagement with the written word are endless.

Perhaps this is what Doug Dorst wants us seekers to keep in mind as we continue to dive even deeper.

The Snot Brake, 1919, Corbeau/Durand, Ashes and Wednesdays

The Charlie Chaplin moustache sported by Vevoda (along with his Van Dyke beard) can be classified as one of those nagging things that bug me until I can't stand it anymore and ask the google.

The moustache sported by Chaplin is also known as a toothbrush moustache, and apparently was sported by several individuals in the early 20th century as a alternative to the more complicated and traditional moustache styles that required way more upkeep, included waxing and perfuming.  It should be noted that Adolph Hitler had a toothbrush, although because his was much shorter horizontally, Hitler's moustache could be better classified as a variation of the tootbrush, known as a snot brake, from the German rotzbremse. (I will never look at a moustache without thinking of that term again!) Hitler incidentally was a fan of Chaplin's movies, but by all accounts, Hitler's  'stache was not inspired by Chaplin.

Yeah, yeah... I know.  What does this have at all to do with Corbeau/Durand and Ash Wednesday?

To paraphrase a well known author, blogs are a lazy machine in which the reader must do some of the work.  You'll get there.

Oh yes, the toothbrush moustache, I came across a German who was pretty much a cipher during the Nazi Party years, but he was known to have sported the infamous configuration of facial hair below the nose called the toothbrush.  Soldier and activist, Waldemar Pabst was a supporter of far-right causes and was a staunch enemy of all things communist.  He is very well known for his counter-revolutionary activities in the years following World War 1 and for his directorship of Rheinmetall AG (auto parts and military tech) before World War 2.  Despite his warm support of Hitler early on, he did not became a Nazi Party apparatchik.

In 1919, Pabst was busy dishing out reprisals for the Spartacist uprising that had occurred early-to-mid January that same year.  (Hitler also adopted his trademark moustache late in 1919.)  These reprisals took the form of executions ordered by Pabst.  One of those executions was that of the Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg who was shot and whose body was thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal.  Her birthday, March 5, was the date assigned to Ash Wedneday in 1919.

Her friend and companion in 1919, Paul Levi, survived the reprisals, became critical of the Bolsheviks and in the 1920's attacked several prominent Nazis in left-wing publications.  In 1930, he died from his injuries when he fell out of his fifth-floor window delirious from pneumonia.  (Ash Wednesday again fell on March 5 in 1930).

The year 1919, the execution, emmersion, the defenestration, Ash Wednesday, the pneumonia, the relationship between Levi and Luxemburg all echo in S. to some degree.  I've stated before my belief that Durand, Ekstrom, et al. are composites, but perhaps I'm flogging the horse at this point.  Oh, stew.

Digging Deeper into S.: Part 2 - The Importance of a Bubbling Cauldron

(This series assumes that you have read the book, have started your own inquiries, and would like to delve deeper into the text to find the hidden.  Many of the things discussed here shouldn't be a complete surprise to ongoing seekers, but if you are new, you might want to start here, first.) 

In the first post of this series, I talked about layers. For this second post, I have adapted the two posts I wrote on Burgoo.  



The Mckay's review of Ship of Theseus calls the book "a vulgar ouroboros of a novel."  Ourobos, the snake that eats its own tail. According to wikipedia,

The Ouroboros often symbolize self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished. While first emerging in Ancient Egypt, the Ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist's opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, and Hermeticism.

Based on what I have found, I suspect that almost everything in S. is a "ship of Theseus."  An unreliable narrator with subterfuge in mind and a reclusive author; both of whom seek to encrypt and misdirect.  The people, the dates, most footnotes appear to be composites of real and literary references and individuals with some intentional misdirection and fictions thrown in to obscure and muddy the waters.

Palimpsests, archaeological strata, literary references that don't quite make sense; pastiches, layers and composites join in to obscure.

The archaeological strata of literature...

That snake that eats its own tale can be a metaphor for literature that takes what came before.  Whether we like it or not, much of what is written, painted or discussed is based in part on something that came previously.  That's not to say the work can't be original and engaging, but it can't exist without history.  Works like Tristram Shandy, The King in Yellow, Finnegans Wake, Ready Player One, The Waste Land and now S. all owe a debt to history.

It's a literary genealogy that Tolkien referred to as the "cauldron of story." Sterne was inspired by Rabelais, Locke, Pope and Swift and their influence is well documented.  The King in Yellow owes a debt to Ambrose Bierce from whom Chambers appropriated Carcosa.  These works went on to inspire the likes of Lovecraft, Goethe, Marx and many, many others.  And it continues to this day, as Mystimus discovered with the Glass Bead Game.

Prehistoric pastiches...

Juan Blas Covarubbias, the Portuguese pirate is fictional. Yet the name Covarubbias is not, nor does it originate from Portugual, but Spain.   It comes from Burgos Province and some of the surrounding areas to describe the red caves found in that area; many of these same caves feature prehistoric art. Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, amateur archaeologist, discovered the Altamira cave on his property in nearby Cantabria (which used to be part of Burgos and was in 1590), but it was his young daughter who spotted the drawings on the ceiling.  Cueva de La Pasiega, also in Cantabria has sanctuaries or galleries of cave paintings from different ages not unlike the cave S and Corbeau escape through.  It was officially discovered when researchers were told by villagers in the area of its existence 1911.

The city Burgos of Spain, and located in the province of the same name, has two interesting looking museums, one for books and a museum on evolution (following the monkey, perhaps?).  Both opened in 2010, so it's possible that DD knew of their existence while he was writing S., or it could just be a happy accident.

The Hemingway hodgepodge

I know I've touched on Hemingway before; Hemingway is one of the handful of real persons identified in S.  In Footnote 2, F.X. Caldeira describes Ernest Hemingway, though originally an admirer, as one of "Straka's harshest critics."    In 1935, Hemingway was reputed to have given a interview to Le Monde stating his high regard for Straka.  There is no way that Le Monde could have interviewed him in 1935 since Le Monde didn't exist until 1944.  Le Monde started on December 19, 1944 using the same building, machines and masthead of its predecessor, the most circulated paper in France, Le Temps, which shut down after the liberation of France under accusations of Nazi collaboration.

David Burke, author of Writers in Paris called A Moveable Feast a hatchet job on the people Hemingway once associated with, not unlike the mythical A Swindle of Cowbirds by Guthrie MacInnes. And as Malcolm Cowley noted to the Paris Review:

"Hemingway had the bad habit of never forgiving anyone for giving him a hand up."

It is known that Hemingway could be spiteful.  I've talked about Dos Passos before, whose friend Jose Robles was most likely assassinated during the KGB purges that took place during the Spanish Civil War.

Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, among others, became targets for his spiteful behavior.  Hemingway's book, The Torrents of Spring was a parody of Anderson's Dark Laughter. Stein subsequently chided Hemingway for his rough treatment of Anderson in the parody.

Also interesting is the coded reference to the loss of Straka's valise which mirrors an incident in Hemingway's own life.  Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, accidently lost a satchel full of his writings on a train in Europe.  Hemingway was deeply upset with the loss and there has been much speculation that given Hemingway's personality, it was something he ultimately couldn't forgive.

The theft of the valise is also mirrored in Robert Ludlums, The Scarlatti Inheritance.  In Ludlum's book, the briefcase is stolen directly from Grand Central Station and the owner is subsequently poisoned by a distinguished looking, but unknown assassin in a gentlemen's club in New York.

In case you missed my earlier posts about John Dos Passos, his break from Hemingway occurred due to the murder of Dos Passos' friend, Jose Robles.  Robles was Spanish and was the one who introduced Dos Passos to bull fighting, who in turn, introduced Hemingway to the spectacle.  It was Robles who introduced Dos Passos to Spanish culture; and it was Robles who noted that the culture was static, unchanging, and stagnating.

Robles' death galvanized something in Dos Passos and marked the beginning of his political reversal into conservative politics.  Dos Passos began to understand that revolution meant nothing without civil liberties, and that communism as administered by the Russians only replaced one form of repression with another.  Dos Passos was understandably distraught from Roble's disappearance and when he sought help from Hemingway, was labelled a traitor to the communist cause by Hemingway and Gellhorn who felt that Robles was a fascist spy.

In page 6 of Ship of Theseus, Eric and Jen discuss the death of Amarante Durand, supposedly shot by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War after being thrown from a roof.  Dos Passos, Hemingway and Gellhorn are mentioned in the marginalia as having knowledge of the murder.  It is hinted that Dos Passos knew the full details of Durand's death.  It's likely though, that Dos Passos never knew the full details of Roble's murder during his lifetime.  According to the author Stephen Koch, Robles was killed because as a translator for the Soviets, he knew too much about their activities.

The Spanish Civil War is discussed again later in the marginalia by Eric and Jen, but the timelines are off from the actual events.  Page 186 discusses the events again and mentions an October 1937, photo from the Hotel Florida in Madrid.  From my research, I know that Robles disappeared in early 1937.  Dos Passos left Spain in May 1937 with Liston Oak, saving Oak's life in the process.  Hemingway and Dos Passos were both on their way back to the states later that month.   And before Dos Passos left, he had an interesting and engaging conversation with the young man later known by his pen name, George Orwell, who had been on the front lines.  Hemingway was a known admirer of Orwell, but it's very possible that the feeling was not mutual.   Hemingway seemed to have a knack for self-deception and confabulation.   Stephen Koch notes in The Breaking Point:

"He [Orwell] was not unduly impressed by the power of language to intoxicate.  It was a little too close to the original sin of language: the power to lie.  His supreme test for seriousness in any writer was whether she or he knew how to undo a lie." 

Also, it is mentioned in the marginalia on page 186 that Hemingway made a pass at Durand and she punched him out.  Interestingly, I can't find any record of a woman punching Hemingway, although several men had the opportunity throughout the years, including the poet, Charles Wallace Stevens.  Hemingway did return to Spain with Gellhorn a few months later and finished his play, The Fifth Column, in December 1937.

And Hemingway's perception of the war is distorted in For Whom the Bell Tolls according to Arturo Barea, who himself lived through the events in Spain (via The New Yorker),

“I find myself awkwardly alone in the conviction that, as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”

The Guardian reported that Hemingway was a failed KGB spy according to Stalin-era archives.   Hemingway was a volatile braggart who Gellhorn called "...the biggest liar since Munchausen."

Dates are off, perceptions are skewed, at times MacInnes seems to be analog for Hemingway with his A Swindle of Cowbirds, as is Amarante Durand for Jose Robles.  But then MacInnes is listed separately from Hemingway and in his own context, and seems to include echoes of Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound with their love lives.  The timing for Amarante Durand's murder is off from the death of Jose Robles, who was a translator, professor, and revolutionary.  Robles was from the Spanish aristocracy, but Durand was French.  And there was the conversation that Mystimus and I had regarding Vonnegut.

And so we go back to burgoo.  As we fall and rise through the layers like a game of snakes and ladders, people, events, books, and places get mixed up, combined into a "mish-mashia" of words.

It should be no surprise then, that at some point, amazon.com added another genre classification to S. The genre classification added was "mash-up."  Typically a mash-up takes a book in the public domain (so the author does not need to worry about potential copyright issues) and adds his own writing to create a plot (usually) involving vampires, zombies, werewolves, and/or monsters).  It's not apparent, thought, that Dorst has taken a single book for his mash-up as everything seems to be a composite, a mix of layers, a stew of several texts and historical events.  Do the clues that Dorst himself has given, 19 and 42 having any bearing here?  Perhaps, but even I'm still not sure.

You must fall and rise and be puzzled.  You will hit dead ends; you may find something that we bloggers have missed.  Don't be afraid to dive deep into the cauldron of story awhile to see what might be found.

Part 2: Spinning Compasses, Associations of Evil and Three Volumes, Footnote 1, page 415

In Footnote 1, page 415:

Straka’s phrasing here is no accident; though the characters have a map to the Vévoda estate, they still must view the location through the fog. As the essayist Norman Bergen discussed in the third volume of his Spinning Compass series, there is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)—even though this is impossible. The boundaries of evil, Bergen argued, are blurry and porous, if they can be said to exist at all.

Part One discussed Montagu Norman's complicit involvement in the Nazi theft of Czechoslovakian gold in the days leading up to British entry into World War 2.  He is certainly the reference in the name "Norman Bergen."  It was Norman's actions in support of the Nazis that proved "the boundaries of evil...blurry and porous..."

So who or what does Bergen in "Norman Bergen" reference.  The clue is again found in the footnote,

...there is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)...

The "specific, bounded" place is the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp founded by the Nazis in 1940 in northern Germany.  In this instance, however, the apparent human "need to locate evil" needs little help in doing so.  Bergen-Belsen is the camp where Anne Frank and the Czech author, Josef Capek lost their lives.  Also of note, Jews from Salonika accused certain members of their community of being Nazi collaborators during the Rosenberg Commission.  In a lawsuit filed by the Salonika Jews, Bergen-Belsen was allegedly the camp where the collaborators were sent to live in relative safety for betraying their community to the Nazis.

It was an evil, filthy place, a hell on Earth.

The extensive documentation, filmed footage, and photographic evidence made at Bergen-Belsen made it clear to the world the extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.  The British military ordered the location to be made into a permanent memorial, but the site languished until 1960 when the German government began a series of upgrades to improve the site.  Permanent buildings were erected and in the 1980s a permanent scientific staff was put in place.  Changes and improvements continue through to the present day.

It's not a stretch then, that the Nazi symbol, the swastika, is the "Spinning Compass" referred to in the footnote above.  It's hard to imagine that there was a time that the swastika was not associated with an ultimate evil as embodied by the Nazis under Hitler.  Prior to the swastika's adoption by the Nazis, the swastika was a popular symbol and often represented good luck; it was a common lucky charm for airplane pilots in the early days of manned flight.  It's origins trace back to ancient history and several cultures; it is symbol found all over the world. One possible interpretation is that the swastika is a symbolic representation of the sun.
The reference to three volumes would then be a reference to the three empires of Germany, an idea conceived by conservative German author, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, from one of his novels.  The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and The German Empire of 1871-1918 being the First and Second Empires.  The Third Reich (or Drittes Reich) was the term famously used as a label for Nazi Germany under Hitler's control to add legitimacy to their power by trying to place it in a historical context of past German influence and power.  By 1939, the Nazis had banned the use of term, Drittes Reich, in Germany and had provided several alternatives for the German press and government to use.

Part 1: Stolen Czech Gold & The British Banker, Footnote 1, page 415

In Footnote 1, page 415:

Straka’s phrasing here is no accident; though the characters have a map to the Vévoda estate, they still must view the location through the fog. As the essayist Norman Bergen discussed in the third volume of his Spinning Compass series, there is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)—even though this is impossible. The boundaries of evil, Bergen argued, are blurry and porous, if they can be said to exist at all.

The direct actions of one man may have increased the length of a World War by years.  It stems from his direct involvement in the disposition of Czech gold that physically resided in accounts in the United Kingdom in 1939.

This man wasn't a general, prime minister or spy; he was Montagu Norman (the Norman in "Norman Bergen"), the Governor of the Bank of England.  Norman was a known eccentric, his temper tantrums were legend, he was known for dodging journalists, and had a penchant for long cruises under the name Professor Clarence Walker.  Quirks and all, in 1939, he was one of the most powerful men in the world, having been one of a handful who had rewritten monetary policy after the first world war and created a system of central banks.  And through him I was able to link items in the footnote above to events, places, and players during World War 2.

Directors from the Czech national bank had transferred the country's gold to the Bank of England via the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in the 1930s before Germany's successful invasion in 1939.  The Germans, having completed a successful invasion and anxious to use the gold to fuel their war machine ordered the directors to transfer the money back with two transfer requests.

Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England since 1920, honored the first order and transferred over five million pounds sterling from the BIS Czech account to a BIS Reichsbank account held at the Bank of England.  After news of the transfer was leaked, Norman told the British government that the Bank could not have possibly known who the owners were due to the international banking protocols followed by the BIS.  This was a lie, as the governor of the French national bank had personally asked Norman to join with France in refusing any transfer of Czech gold to the Nazis until the next BIS board meeting as a protest to current BIS leadership.  If the French were reasonably certain as to the ownership of the BIS accounts, Norman probably was, too.  The call from the French came the same day the transfer was requested and subsequently completed by Norman. The second request, which asked for the transfer of gold held in accounts directly owned by the national bank of Czechoslovakia at the Bank of England to a BIS gold account appeared to have been attempted by Norman.  Because the originating account was not affiliated with the BIS, the British government could successfully block the attempted transfer from taking place.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer had issued an order effectively blocking the transfer of all Czechoslovakia assets.

I realize it might be a bit confusing how the British could block one transfer from occurring, but not both. It's because the BIS is a unique and independent financial institution protected by international treaties.
The BIS was founded in 1930, initially to facilitate the war reparations owed by Germany and in successive years become an international organization and bank for central banks.  As such, the BIS was and is subject to different rules, which allowed Norman to complete transfers between BIS managed accounts.  In fact, it is this justification that the Bank of England gives in its official history of this period.

...comments by the chancellor to the House of Commons in June 1939, when he stated that Law Officers had advised him that the British government was precluded by protocols from preventing the BoE from obeying instructions given to it by the BIS to transfer the gold.

 Even more unfortunate, the very international treaties protecting the BIS and its neutrality probably made it an attractive target for the Germans.  Between 1933 and 1945, powerful Germans were on the board; Nazi Party members, industrialists and bankers, all of them movers and shakers.

During the war the BIS proclaimed that it was neutral, a view supported by the Bank of England. In fact the BIS was so entwined with the Nazi economy that it helped keep the Third Reich in business. It carried out foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank; it accepted looted Nazi gold; it recognised the puppet regimes installed in occupied countries, which, together with the Third Reich, soon controlled the majority of the bank’s shares.

...Indeed, the BIS was so useful for the Nazis that Emil Puhl, the vice-president of the Reichsbank and BIS director, referred to the BIS as the Reichsbank’s only “foreign branch.

Despite the uproar caused by the original transfer, Norman again transferred gold worth 860,000 pounds sterling to the Nazis in June of 1939 and sold about half that gold on behalf of the German government.  No wonder allegations of BIS complicity in Nazi looting occurred after the war.  After the war the decision was made to liquidate BIS, but the order was rescinded in 1948 as the BIS became one of the tools necessary to rebuild a Europe devastated by the war.

So was Norman a Nazi sympathizer or a man trying to create a scenario in which central banks ran the world?  From the information available online, I suspect the truth is a little more complex.

(image from the Bank of England archives)

In 2013, the Bank of England made the unpublished bank history for World War 2 available online, although Norman's role in the theft had been long suspected.  According to the history, Norman was primarily concerned with maintaining the neutrality accorded to BIS.

The bank [led by Montagu Norman] was wedded to a view of international finance and central bank co-operation. It was too concerned about maintaining London's status as an international financial centre – and clung to the need to maintain sterling's convertibility long after it was wise to continue with this policy.

Initially the whole purpose of the BIS was to facilitate war reparation payments owed by Germany under the Treaty of Versailles (which was registered on October 21, 1919 by the way).  Germany's seizure of the Czechoslovakian gold to fund a war machine ran contrary to the original intent of the BIS.

Norman continued to emphasize the neutrality of the BIS to British officials, but the documents online in the Bank of England archive make it very clear the bank was reasonably certain as to the ownership of the accounts involved in the Czech gold theft.   It is clear that Norman felt he had done nothing wrong and even cited the 1930 Hague Rules and the 1936 Brussels Protocols to British officials as he fought  for transactions relating to the BIS.

But it isn't clear if member banks through the BIS had any obligation to fulfill German requests as Germany had clearly broken international law; Germany had violated the 1938 Treaty of Munich by invading the remaining portion of Czechoslovakia and previously violated the Treaty of Versailles through rearmament in 1935.

Norman was equally contemptuous of British attempts to block BIS transactions involving Germany.  Later in 1939, he attempted two more transfers, after the U.K. had declared war with Germany, both of which were successfully blocked by the British authorities.

Norman's Nazi sympathies are a little more tenuous.  His primary exposure to Germany was through his friend and colleague to Hjalmar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank, and initial Hitler supporter, who was the architect of the German economy under Hitler.  Early in Hitler's rise, Norman had even made enthusiatic comments about his friend and Hitler, calling them both "bulwarks" of Germany.  But Schacht quickly broke with Hitler over Nazi plans for rearmament and violence against Jews, by 1937 all his influence was gone.  In January 1939, Norman had come to Germany for the christening of Schacht's grandson, who was also to become Norman's godson.  That same month, Schacht was dismissed from the Reichsbank by Hitler.  Schacht was already involved in the fringes of the German Resistance, he'd been in contact with various individuals since 1934.  In 1941, Schacht was imprisoned, and was eventually sent to Dachau and Tyrol.  Of the five (yes, I said five) Germans involved with the BIS and/or the Reichsbank, he was the only one acquitted at Nuremberg.

It also possible that Norman's motives were a little more prosaic and his actions were an attempt to shore up the British banking system.

Monty Norman and the leading merchant banks in the City were up to their necks in helping to prop up the German financial system. The Germans owed a lot of money to British banks.

By giving to gold to the Nazis, Norman had ensured that Germany would continue to fulfill its debt obligations to the British banks at least for a time.  It also possible that Norman, in continuing to transact business for Germany, was trying to hedge his bets in the event of a German invasion of England.  I find it highly likely he was playing odds with several scenarios to ensure his continued influence within the central banks and the BIS regardless of outcomes of the war.

One of the most powerful men of the early 20th century has faded into obscurity.  He retired from the Bank of England in 1944 and died in 1950.  Although known to British authorities, his possible involvement in shady dealings with the Germans did not come to light publicly until later in the last century.  The BIS, in response to questions of Nazi activities involving the BIS, opened the majority of its archives to researchers in 1998, but it was not until the Bank of England release of documents that his true role in events became known in 2013.

Significantly, shortly before the revelations of Norman's involvement with the stolen gold came to light, his portrait had already been removed from the Bank of England's boardroom.  What is clear, that in his tunnel vision to maintain the important influence of the central banks and the BIS, he played a direct part in prolonging a war that contributed to the suffering and deaths of millions.