From Wikipedia
The
BIS was formed in 1930, the main actors in the establishment of the BIS
were the then Governor of The Bank of England, Montague Norman and his
German colleague Hjalmar Schacht, later Adolf Hitler's finance
minister. The Bank was originally intended to facilitate money
transfers arising from settling an obligation arising from a peace
treaty. After World War I, the need for the bank was suggested in 1929
by the Young Committee, as a means of transfer for German reparations
payments - see Treaty of Versailles. The plan was agreed in
August of that year at a conference at the Hague, and a charter for the
bank was drafted at the International Bankers Conference at Baden Baden
in November. The charter was adopted at a second Hague Conference on
January 20, 1930.
The original board of
directors of the BIS included two appointees of Hitler, Walter Funk a
prominent Nazi official, and SS officer Oswald Pohl, both convicted at
the Nuremberg trials after world war II, as well as Herman Schmitz the
director of IG Farben and Baron von Schroeder, the owner of the
J.H.Stein Bank, the bank that held the deposits of the Gestapo.
After
the Second World War, in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference The BIS
became the crux in a fight that broke out between the Americans, Harry
Dexter White, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and the
British delegation headed by John Maynard Keynes and Chase Bank
representative Dean Atchison, who tried to veto the dissolution of the
bank.
As a result of allegations that the
BIS had helped the Germans loot assets from occupied countries during
World War II, the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference
recommended the "liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements
at the earliest possible moment." This task, which was originally
proposed by Norway and supported by other European delegates, as well
as the United States and Morgenthau and White, was never undertaken.