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This certificate bears a U.S. Treasury Department
Seal and is sporadically found attached to bonds (and occasionally
stocks). The certificates encountered so far seem
to date from 1941 to 1943.
A correspondent finally helped solve this long-running
mystery by directing me to a huge page of the Presidential
Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.
One of those pages explains, in detail, the issues involved
in freezing assets of Germany and its conquered nations
during World War II.
Similar to the freezing of terrorist assets in
today's world, the U.S. attempted to prevent hostile interests
from trading securities and thereby funding war efforts.
Of course, that action also inadvertently blocked the securities of victims from those same countries.
It turns out that TFEL-2 was a form that allowed friendly, non-hostile
foreign nationals to trade American securities during the war. Quoting
Chapter
III, Assets in the United States, this curious form, TFEL-2,
was
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attached
to securities "if the owners could prove that they were
free from any blocked interest." The Treasury Department
addressed many of these problems through certification, an expedient
somewhat similar to the European practice of affixing tax stamps
to legitimately acquired securities. Treasury's certification
(using Form TFEL-2) could be attached to securities "if
the owners could prove that they were free from any blocked
interest." |
(Thanks to Neal Greenberg for helping solve this problem.)
Example of TFEL-2 stapled to $500 Northern Pacific Railway Company
bond,
(I do NOT track occurrences of TFEL-2, so there is no need
to report them to me.)
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