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The movie Dunkirk, opening today, is a big budget Christopher Nolan epic about Operation Dynamo, the miraculous 1940 evacuation of 300,000 troops to England as the German Blitzkrieg overran France.

The evacuation also marked the beginning of the most perilous period in modern British history. Just as soon as they secured France’s surrender, German troops quickly began laying plans for an invasion and subjugation of the British Isles.

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The invasion, known as Operation Sealion never happened. But deep in European archives still lie the chilling plans for how it would have played out.

Photo by CNW Group/Bentall Kennedy

Most of Britain’s gold was already stashed in Canada

If the Nazis had gotten their hands on England, one of their first steps would have been to commence wholesale looting of the country’s gold reserves. And they would have found the vaults empty because the United Kingdom had managed to secretly smuggle the modern equivalent of more than $60 billion in gold to Canada — the largest single transfer of wealth in history. Unbeknownst to wartime Montreal, a good chunk of the accumulated wealth of the British Empire was under the Sun Life Building for the entire war. The Crown Jewels, however, remained in England, where they were reportedly stashed under a trap door in Windsor Castle.