The BIS was established by an intergovernmental agreement in 1930 by Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Italy, Japan, United States and Switzerland.
The Bank was originally intended to facilitate reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. The need to establish a dedicated institution for this purpose was suggested in 1929 by the Young Committee, and was agreed to in August of that year at a conference at The Hague. A charter for the bank was drafted at the International Bankers Conference at Baden Baden in November, and its charter was adopted at a second Hague Conference on January 20, 1930. According to the charter, shares in the bank could be held by individuals and non-governmental entities. The BIS was constituted as having corporate existence in Switzerland on the basis of an agreement with Switzerland acting as headquarter state for the bank. It also enjoyed immunity in all the contracting states.
Between 1933 and 1945, the board of directors of the BIS included Walter Funk, a prominent Nazi official; and Emil Puhl, who were both convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials after World War II, as well as Hermann 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. There were allegations that the BIS had helped the Germans loot assets from occupied countries during World War II.
As a result of these allegations, at the Bretton Woods Conference held in July 1944, Norway proposed the "liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements at the earliest possible moment". This resulted in the BIS being the subject of a disagreement between the American and British delegations. The liquidation of the bank was supported by other European delegates, as well as the United States (including Harry Dexter White, Secretary of the Treasury, and Henry Morgenthau),but opposed by John Maynard Keynes, head of the British delegation.
Fearing that the BIS would be dissolved by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Keynes went to Morgenthau hoping to prevent the dissolution, or have it postponed, but the next day the dissolution of the BIS was approved. However, the liquidation of the bank was never actually undertaken.In April 1945, the new U.S. president Harry S. Truman and the British government suspended the dissolution, and the decision to liquidate the BIS was officially reversed in 1948.
The BIS was originally owned by both governments and private individuals, since the United States and France had decided to sell some of their shares to private investors. BIS shares traded on stock markets, which made the bank an unusual organization: an international organization (in the technical sense of public international law), yet allowed for private shareholders. Many central banks had similarly started as such private institutions; for example, the Bank of England was privately owned until 1946. In more recent years the BIS has bought back its once publicly traded shares.It is now wholly owned by BIS members (central banks) but still operates in the private market as a counterparty, asset manager and lender for central banks and international financial institutions. Profits from its transactions are used, among other things, to fund the bank's other international activities.
As you will see it was it was the child of a committee designed to loot Germany... ie take the reparations that so destroyed the possibility of German Post World War one prosperity and which thus very strongly contributed to the development of extreme political groups in Germany, leading ultimately to that evil group, the Nazis under Hitler.
