Down near Lisbon's bustling dockside fish market, Transitarios Arnaudis a shipping company with a long history of hauling everything frombullion to bombs. So when the company's name cropped up in Portuguese efforts to find out what happened to gold looted by Nazi Germany in World War II, it was no surprise to managing director Ricardo Fernandes. According to Fernandes, company old timers recalled trucking crate loads of gold from the Swiss National Bank into neutral Portugal during the war. But the director, who joined the company as a youngster in1953, says there's no way of telling whether the gold was Nazi booty.''Gold doesn't talk, so I can't say where it came from,'' Fernandes said. Company archives from the era were thrown out during the 1970s,he said. The search for the truth about millions of dollars wort hof Nazi gold homed in on Lisbon after U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and Jewish leaders claimed Sunday that recently declassified U.S. documents showed Nazi Germany sent 280 truckloads of looted gold to Spain and Portugal after laundering it in Switzerland. D'Amato claimed the documents showed the gold, which was used to pay for goods provided by the Spain and Portugal, was pillaged from banks across occupied Europe or frommelted-down teeth and jewelry of concentration camp victims. Stung by accusations that, after Switzerland, Portugal received most ofthe illicit booty, the Bank of Portugal has appointed a historianto examine its archives. Neither the historian, Joaquim da Costa Leite,nor Bank of Portugal spokesman Nuno Jonet would comment on D'Amato's claims. According to the documents, the gold -- estimated to be worth between $250 million and $500 million -- was hauled in trucks bearing the Swiss national emblem and insured by Swiss companies. Fernandes said Arnaud's role in shipping the gold from the Spanish border to Bank of Portugal vaults was ''common knowledge'' within the company, according to former workers, now mostly dead. ''We had no idea ifit was Nazi gold,'' Fernandes said. ''For us it was gold of the Bank of Switzerland and, as we at the time worked for the Bank of Portugal, it was our job to transport it.'' He said other cargos shipped by the company included Swiss watch mechanisms used in the construction of bombs in wartime America and Swiss-made ''fishing articles'' that turned out to be explosives destined for guerrillas fighting the Frenchin Algeria in the 1950s. According to reports in the Portuguese newsmedia, as many as 100 tons of the gold could have ended up in the central bank's vaults. Jean-Pierre Roth, vice president of the Swiss National Bank, said Monday that his country shipped 70 truckloads of gold to Spain and Portugal -- a quarter of the amount D'Amato claims. Switzerland was neutral in World War II as was Portugal. But dictator Antonio Salazar had Nazi sympathies and Portugal exported to Germany clothing, food stuffs and tons of tungsten, vital to Hitler's war machine. At least some ofthe German payments were in gold that first passed through Switzerland, according to Antonio Louca, a historian at Lisbon's New University who is writing a thesis on the gold and Portugal's wartime trade with Nazi Germany. Bank of Portugal statistics show its gold reserves nearly quintupled between 1939 and December 1944. After the war, the Allies said Portugal had received 44 tons of Nazi gold, thought to be mainly from occupied Belgium. There was an effort to recover some of the gold and Salazar refused to pay back more than four tons. The allegation shave embarrassed Portugal, whose democratic institutions are struggling to find answers for the actions of Salazar's regime, which was toppledin 1974 by a peaceful revolution.