Peter Boehringer hates the word “conspiracy.” It implies something crazy, and if you spend even a little time with the 45-year-old German, it becomes clear he’s driven by a desire for order. On a recent morning in Munich, he’s dressed in a cobalt blue shirt that matches his blue tie and blue eyes.His black hair is cropped close. In his gray Volkswagen minivan, the cup holder contains two identical water bottles, each filled to the same level. At the end of a daylong interview, for which Boehringer has arranged an hour-by-hour itinerary, he sends a follow-up email with a numbered summation of points he’s made. No. 2 says that the crusade he’s been waging for the last three years is simply about transparency. “Questions,” he writes, “by definition cannot be ‘conspiracy theories.’”Boehringer is a gold bug, a member of the impassioned tribe of investors and academics who distrust central banks and paper money, unless the governments that print it will exchange the cash for gold or silver from their vaults. He has an asset management firm that invests his money and that of clients in gold, silver and mining stocks, and he’s a founder of the non-profit German Precious Metal Society, which educates the public about “the craziness of unbacked monetary systems.” Which is why he set out to make sure the gold that Germany and other nations say they have actually exists.Almost half of Germany’s gold resides at 33 Liberty St., the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 80 feet below street level in a vault that sits on Manhattan’s bedrock. In 2012, Boehringer started a campaign on his blog to bring it home. He argued the gold should be shipped to the German central bank in Frankfurt. The hoard, amassed during Germany’s postwar boom, had never been subject to a published bar-bybar physical review by its owners.That lack of accounting had become an insatiable itch for Boehringer. As the volunteer chairman of a private storage company for silver and gold investors based in Gerstetten, Germany, Boehringer personally counts the holdings each year by lugging metal valued at some 140 million ($161 million) from one end of the vault to the other, just to make sure it’s all there. His blog became a hub for precious metal fans. As gold prices peaked in 2011, the Taxpayers Association of Europe asked him to draft a letter to the Deutsche Bundesbank seeking to know precisely where the central bank’s gold was. So in February 2012 he started the “Repatriate Our Gold” campaign.Because it doesn’t react with air or water, gold always glitters, even in shipwrecks lost for centuries. It’s so dense—19.3 times heavier than water—that when you lift an ingot, the disconnect between what your eyes see and your hands feel produces an odd sensation, as if you’re on a planet with a stronger gravitational pull. A standard central bank gold bar is a bit smaller than two soda cans stuck together end-to-end but weighs about 27 pounds. Less than 175,000 metric tonnes (386 million pounds) of gold have been mined in all human history, according to the World Gold Council.Boehringer cites an anecdote from almost a century ago to argue that Germany has failed to zealously protect its gold holdings. In the 1920s the president of the German central bank, Hjalmar Schacht, paid a visit to the New York Fed and its founding president, Benjamin Strong. In an episode recounted in his 1955 autobiography, Schacht wrote, “Strong was proud to be able to show us the vaults which were situated in the deepest cellar of the building and remarked: ‘Now, Herr Schacht, you shall see where the Reichsbank gold is kept.’”The two bankers waited as New York Fed staff sought the German stash. “At length we were told: ‘Mr Strong, we can’t find the Reichsbank gold.’” Schacht comforted the flabbergasted Fed banker: “Never mind; I believe you when you say the gold is there. Even if it weren’t, you are good for its replacement.” The men left without the German seeing his bars, instead accepting their existence as a matter of trust.After the war, global trade revolved around the US dollar, which was backed by gold. Under the arrangement, any nation could cash in its greenbacks for ingots at any time. As West Germany’s economy took off, the nation ran a trade surplus during the 1950s and ’60s. German companies exchanged their dollars for deutsche marks, filling the new Deutsche Bundesbank with US currency.The central bank, in turn, switched the dollars for gold at the New York Fed, swelling its stores under Liberty Street. That ended in 1971 when President Richard Nixon suspended gold conversions, making the dollar a “fiat currency,” backed by nothing but the public’s confidence in the US. During the Cold War, it made sense to keep the gold in Manhattan rather than Frankfurt, 75 miles from the Iron Curtain, just in case the Soviets invaded. Yet even after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the gold remained in New York.The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s left Boehringer without a job.That’s when he got to thinking about how the global economy works. “Some things didn’t add up,” he says, especially the trust-based monetary system. “I saw how destructive paper money could become.” Concluding that precious metals were a reliable store of wealth, he became a gold evangelist, blogging and starting his money-management business in 2003. Three years later he founded the German Precious Metal Society, which organises conferences and speeches on topics such as gold price manipulation and trends in gold demand in Asia. It was through his activism that the Taxpayers Association of Europe found Boehringer, and they started their campaign.The first breakthrough occurred in September 2012, when Germany’s Audit Court followed Boehringer with similar demands. The court, which is a branch of the federal government that examines federal financial management, asked the Bundesbank to say how much gold it had and where it was located and to physically inspect the bars.The Bundesbank responded a month later, revealing that at the end of 2011 it had 271,265 bars weighing 3,396 tonnes—today worth about $140 billion. They were stored in Frankfurt and at the New York Fed, the Bank of England in London, and the Bank of France in Paris. “Every year, these central banks provide the Bundesbank with confirmation of its holdings of gold,” the German bank said. “The integrity, reputation, and security of these foreign depositories are beyond reproach.… There is no possibility of confusion or commingling with the holdings of other parties.” The single biggest slice of the German reserves, at 45%, was in Lower Manhattan: 122,597 bars weighing about 1,536 tonnes, dwarfing the 1,036 tonnes held in Germany itself. The Bundesbank told the German parliament it was in talks to gain access and that the New York Fed was receptive.Bundesbank executive board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele, who testified to the parliament’s budget committee, added, “We’re in negotiations with our partner central bank to develop auditing rights.” For Boehringer, the disclosure that it would take negotiations to access the gold felt like proof he was on the right track. The limited transparency he’d won had made plain that Germany didn’t necessarily have the right to thoroughly examine the single largest stash of its own gold. In October 2012, as part of a compromise with the audit court, the Bundesbank said it would start bringing home some of the reserves.At first, the bank said it would move 150 tonnes of gold from New York to its own vaults over three years. On Christmas Eve 2013, the central bank announced the firstyear tally in Bild under a front-page headline, “Today Only Good News.” “At last! The Bundesbank gets its gold treasure back,” the story said. But only 32 tonnes came from the Bank of France, and 5 tonnes from New York.“Why so little material?” Boehringer recalls wondering. “Something smelled fishy.” The article quoted Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann saying the repatriation had been “a huge logistical challenge.” Yet one tonne of gold, formed into a cube, is just larger than a plastic milk crate. Five tonnes of gold bars can fit into the back of a pickup truck, assuming the truck’s suspension can handle it.In a statement, the Bundesbank’s Thiele said four weeks later that some bars in New York had to be melted and recast. To Boehringer that meant any trace of original serial numbers had been wiped out. “Their untouched existence since the 1960s is no longer provable,” he says. The Bundesbank explained that it recast the bars because they hadn’t met the “London good delivery” standard. Such gold is at least 99.5% pure and comes in bars of roughly 400 troy ounces, or 12.44 kilograms. They must bear certain marks, such as year of manufacture, and have sides that measure within specified dimensions. The gold in American vaults is a mix of London good delivery and lower-quality bars.Boehringer did some quick math on the Bundesbank’s own numbers, dividing the total weight it had disclosed for New York holdings by the number of bars it listed. It came out to about 12.5 kilograms per bar—same as London good delivery. If the central bank’s published numbers were right, Boehringer says, “There would not be a reason to melt them, but they did.”Boehringer asks, “why, of all the possible bars —120,000 —it chose to repatriate, did it choose bars that were nonconforming?” He also questions why the Bundesbank doesn’t publish lists of bar numbers, which would allow other depositors to see if there’s any double counting of the same gold under multiple owners. The Bundesbank says it has such lists for all the gold it keeps in custody at the New York Fed but that “security reasons” prevent it from making those lists public.Boehringer speculates that individual bars may have several owners, perhaps as the result of bars being leased, sold or subject to complicated financial arrangements. “I can’t prove it,” he adds, saying the onus of proof should be on the central bankers, not him. He isn’t alone. John Hathaway, co-manager of the $1.3 billion Tocqueville Gold Fund, says Germany might need the slow, seven-year repatriation window to unwind complex financial arrangements by which the gold was loaned out, perhaps several times. The German central bank says that’s not the case. “The Deutsche Bundesbank has never loaned gold bars held in custody at the New York Fed into the market or to other central banks,” the bank said.The New York Fed says it isn’t party to any transactions that the gold in its custody may be involved in. It says all gold bars on deposit are present at the 33 Liberty St. vault and that the bank doesn’t recognise any third-party rights or interests other than those of the account holder.In May 2014, the Bank of Italy, which has the third-biggest gold reserves after the US and Germany, ended years of secrecy by disclosing the locations of its holdings. The central bank said about half its gold is in Rome and most of the rest is beneath the New York Fed.Then in November, the Dutch central bank announced it had secretly moved 122.5 tonnes of gold from New York to Amsterdam. In apparently just months, the Dutch had shipped almost 25 times the gold that Germany moved in all of 2013. Soon after, the leader of France’s anti-euro, anti-immigration National Front party, Marine Le Pen, asked the Bank of France for an independent audit of its gold.On January 19, the Bundesbank delivered its own surprise, publishing a tally of its 2014 gold repatriations. During the year, the German central bank had shipped 85 tonnes from New York to Frankfurt, blowing away the mere 5 tonnes from 2013 and setting a pace at which the Bundesbank would easily meet its target of 300 tonnes returned by 2020.Even if the world’s biggest central banks did explain away his gold bug speculations, Boehringer had triumphed. But for him, and his sense of order, the itch is never scratched. There were still 1,447 tonnes of German gold under Manhattan at year’s end, and he wants all of it back in Frankfurt. At the current rate it would take more than 30 years for all German gold stored abroad to return, he says.