Snow Treasure

A number of countries that were either under the threat of German invasion, or had already been invaded (including Norway) chose to safeguard their supplies of gold in America; being safely across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States was far enough away from the European theater of war to be an excellent place to safeguard the threatened countries’ wealth. Unlike Norway and its neighbors, the United States was not threatened with annexation as so many other countries were at this time. During 1940 and 1941, gold arrived in America from Norway, England, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

Historical records of the alleged role of Norwegian children in smuggling gold out of Norway to America are mixed. According to McSwigan, on June 28, 1940, a Norwegian freighter called the Bomma arrived in Baltimore, laden with a cargo of gold bullion worth $9,000,000 USD. The Bomma’s captain allegedly told a group of American police, who were escorting the bullion to safety, that the gold was smuggled out of Norway with the help of Norwegian children who transported the gold past Nazi sentries under the guise of playing on their sleds; the children had conveyed the gold to a freighter hidden in a fiord on Norway’s coast. Preferring to protect the identities of the children, the captain of the Bomma was reluctant to reveal the name of the location of the specific town and fiord in which the scheme allegedly took place (McSwigan, Marie. “Snow Treasure: Foreword: Did this story really happen?” Scholastic, 1942).

Despite this account, there is no documented evidence that these events ever took place. Odd Conrad Holm, a Norwegian Merchant Mariner who transported Allied supplies during the war, addressed the issue of these rumors and asserted, “[M]any think the story is true. It is not” (Rasmussen, Frederick N. “Story Tells of Gold Shipping During WWII.” The Baltimore Sun, 2001). According to Holm, who was involved in the transportation of Norway’s gold bullion, the gold was loaded onto trains by workers from the Bank of Norway, and these trains then transported the gold to waiting English vessels via a circuitous route to avoid Nazi bombing and Nazi detection. The gold was then transported over sea to England, and then onward to America on 14 ships, of which the Bomma was one. However, Holm’s account does not mention the involvement of children—nor does any other account outside of McSwigan’s (Rasmussen, Frederick N. “Story Tells of Gold Shipping During WWII.” The Baltimore Sun, 2001).