This Montreal lawyer accused his former business partner of profiting off Nazi gold

This story begins in 1983 in the office of Montreal lawyer Glenn (Joseph) Feldman.

According to Feldman, his business partner and his partner's father came to see him. 

They said their Uncle Ludwig was at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital. He was dying and wanted to leave them his estate. Feldman told them they'd need a will.

After Ludwig died, they returned with a will apparently signed by him, but missing the signature of a witness. They asked Feldman to be the witness. 

"I said, 'I can't do it,'" Feldman said in the documentary Gold Bars. "I never met this guy. I never saw this guy sign anything. How do I know this will's signed by Uncle Ludwig?" 

But they begged Feldman and reminded him that when his father had died, the partner's father had helped Feldman through that time. "They played on my sensitivity," Feldman said.

In a moment of weakness, Feldman agreed to witness the will. "I witnessed a signature of a person who I never met — never saw — that I wasn't present when he signed," Feldman said. "You can't witness something that you didn't witness. That's illegal."

Days later, they asked Feldman to visit Ludwig's home to do an inventory of the estate. Feldman said that's where he first saw what he believed was $3.6 billion worth of gold bars — and a photo of Ludwig in a Nazi uniform. 

Gold Bars follows Feldman's DIY investigation into what he believed was gold stolen from Holocaust victims by the Nazis. 

When Feldman publicly accused his former business partner of living off the gold, he was hit with a multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit, which threatened to bankrupt him and destroy his career.

As Feldman's profile grew, his 28-year-old daughter, Alex, started to worry about him. She works in film and reluctantly agreed to help with and document his investigation. 

Alex was drawn into a web of conflicting evidence, reluctant witnesses and increasingly implausible theories. Feldman's primary evidence was collected in a document he called the Long-Form Summary, a meticulous account of his findings, which attempted to connect his former partner's family to a high-ranking Nazi SS officer who fled to Canada using a forged Jewish identity. 

While the story is bizarre, Feldman insisted it was true and that justice demanded that the stolen fortune be returned to Holocaust survivors.

However, Alex soon realized some of her father's claims didn't add up. 

Several of the people Feldman had approached were unwilling or unable to confirm aspects of his account, and some disputed his interpretations of events. Others expressed reluctance to become involved in a dispute they saw as contentious and potentially damaging to those connected with it.

As Alex pieced together an alternate narrative, she saw that her father's investigation might have been compromised by his biases, his obsession with exposing his former partner, and his guilt for unwittingly facilitating the alleged conspiracy decades earlier.

At the heart of the investigation lay a deeper, more personal story about Feldman's tumultuous relationship with Alex. 

For Alex, the investigation into Nazi gold was not only about her father's quest for justice, but also how she had enabled his behaviour.

With the lawsuit looming and Feldman's reputation — and sanity — at risk, Alex had to navigate the line between supporting her father and holding him accountable for the damage he had caused. She discovered the search for the truth involves questioning not only the facts, but also the motivations and morality of those pursuing it.

Watch Gold Bars on CBC Gem.

Update: In a judgment rendered on June 16, 2025, the Superior Court of Québec found that the story and claims made by Glenn (Joseph) Feldman, as depicted in this documentary, were false, defamatory, and made in bad faith, and ordered him to pay nearly one million dollars in damages plus legal costs.