During World War II, vast amounts of gold changed hands in Europe, most of it seized by Germany, from whence it traveled on to neutral countries to pay for vital war materiel. One example is the relatively small amount of looted and state gold (worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, however, in today's money) that Ustasa fascists took to Rome, where the gold was kept in Vatican extraterritorial property or in the Vatican Bank. In either case, top Vatican personnel would have known the whereabouts of the gold.

Before the collapse of the Yugoslav government and the onset of the quisling Ustasa regime in 1941, Yugoslavia's gold was divided up for safekeeping and stashed in various locations. Some of it was hidden in a cave near Mostar, fifty cases were taken to another city, forty-four cases were taken to Herzegovina, and ninety cases remained in Niksic, the site of the original vault. During the war, the Italian government stole 184 cases of this state gold, only to have the Germans seize it.1 The Italians, however, had not been able to steal the gold that was in Croatia, the rump, fascist puppet state that remained after the collapse of Yugoslavia. This was the gold, or some portion of it, that made its way to Rome after the war.

When they are victims of grand larceny, individuals and states act very much alike; they want their money back. Tito's Yugoslavia appealed to an international committee after the war, asking that Germany return its treasury-its gold. Survivors of the Ustasa terror or their next of kin now living in California have brought a class-action lawsuit in federal court against the Vatican, charging that it profited by the gold the cronies of dictator Pavelic took from them or their families and asking for restitution.2 Specifically, Alperin v. Vatican Bank charges that the Vatican bank laundered and converted "the Ustasa treasury, making deposits in Europe and North and South America, [and] distributing the funds to exiled Ustasa leaders including Pavelic."3

In 1997, Swiss banks, after having claimed that they no longer had records of deposits made by European Jews during World War II, were caught red-handed trying to destroy the evidence. In response, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order directing all branches of the U.S. government to open their wartime records for scrutiny and pressured other countries to follow the U.S. example. Fourteen European countries and Canada and Argentina complied, appointing committees to investigate possible Holocaust assets in their homelands. One state refused to comply-the Vatican. The U.S. State Department asked the Holy See to open its bank books, but to no avai1.4 Why would the Holy See, a church-state with ideals commensurate with that standing, need to hide its financial transactions in the face of the willingness of secular states to open theirs to answer legitimate Holocaust-related questions about their finances? The answer may be that the Vatican acted during the war and the Holocaust more like a state than a church. The brief in Alperin v. Vatican Bank asks for accountability on the part of the Holy See. Unless the Vatican settles the case and makes restitution, it may be forced, at last, to reveal its wartime bank books. In Catholic moral theology, wrongful possession of another's goods has always required restitution. Lawsuit or no lawsuit, the Vatican, according to its own teaching, should make restitution if it received stolen property during the war or profited from loot that others had stolen.

The principal document state department historians used in 1998 that linked the Vatican to looted gold was the Bigelow dispatch. On October 16, 1946, Emerson Bigelow, writing from Rome, wrote the following report to Harold Glasser, director of monetary research at the U.S. Treasury Department:
The Ustascha [sic] organization (a Croatian fascist organization, headed by Ante Pavelic) removed funds from Jugoslavia estimated to total 350 million Swiss francs. The funds were largely in the form of gold coins.

Of the funds brought from the former Independent Croat State where Jews and Serbs were plundered to support the Ustascha [sic] organization in exile, an estimated 150 million Swiss francs were impounded by British authorities at the Austro-Swiss frontier; the balance of approximately 200 million Swiss francs was originally held in the Vatican for safe-keeping. According to rumor a considerable portion of this latter amount has been sent to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican's "pipeline," but it is quite possible this is merely a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository.5

Bigelow stated matter-of-factly that the Ustasa removed the gold from Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia) to Rome and the Vatican, where the treasure was used to support the organization in exile. Then Bigelow reported that there was a rumor that the gold had made its way on to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican ratline.

Forty-six million 1946 dollars' worth of gold is an enormous quantity, $474 million in 2006 dollars. How reliable was the Bigelow dispatch? What was the source of his information? Bigelow was not an intelligence agent; his area of competence centered entirely on monetary issues. Because he specialized in just this one area, his report deserves our consideration. Bigelow sent many reports to the Treasury Department during the postwar years on monetary developments worldwide, including one in the summer of 1946 that dealt with a large amount of gold that a Ustasa official had taken to Switzerland. But unfortunately, Bigelow was not in the habit of mentioning the source of his information. And although he seemed confident about what he told Glasser, except for the whereabouts of the gold, his report was filed fourteen months after the time the Ustasa left the Balkans in May 1945.

Bigelow's dispatch gains some credibility from independent concurring testimony. A onetime OSS agent, William Gowen, whom we will have occasion to discuss extensively in the next chapter, has given a deposition as an expert witness in the Alperin us. the Vatican Bank case, asserting that while in Rome in 1947 he learned that in 1946, a Colonel Ivan Babic had transported ten truckloads of gold from Switzerland to the College of San Girolamo Degli Illirici (the Croatian seminary) in Rome near the Vatican. Ten truckloads! The time of the reported transportation coincides with the date of Bigelow's report-October 1946.

For the Ustasa to have taken such a huge shipment from Switzerland presupposes prior gold exchanges between Pavelic's Croatia and Swiss banks. That this happened is entirely credible. An independent commission of experts, the Bergier Commission, Jinked Swiss banks with Croatian gold transactions during the war.6 Furthermore, Agent Gowen testified that the Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganovic, who is mentioned repeatedly in documents bearing on the Ustasa treasury, bragged to him about the delivery of gold from Switzerland. How credible is Gowen's testimony? He was, after all, recalling an incident that occurred a full half-century earlier to which he was not an eyewitness. On the other hand, a ten-truck convoy headed to Saint Jerome's seminary would certainly have been an unusual sight in 1946. Gowen was on the scene less than a year after the presumed transfer of the gold, and it was his responsibility as an intelligence agent to gather any and all information he could pertaining to the exiled Ustasi living in the college of St. Jerome's, where the gold had supposedly been delivered.

The state department historians who drafted the Eizenstat monograph and pressed the Vatican for its bank data knew that their archival research was incomplete.? To encourage other governments to open their books, state department historians quickly sifted through millions of pages of newly released federal documents that had been made available by government offices as a result of President Clinton's executive order. The u.S. records, it was thought, might indicate the whereabouts of transferred gold that was stolen during the war. When the researchers came across the Bigelow report, which identified the Vatican as a state that possessed stolen gold, they included it in the Eizenstat report. This and other information in the monograph was intended to induce all World War II neutral nations, including explicitly the Vatican, to "take up a moral and political task" that would allow them to "come to terms with [their] own history and responsibility." It took another eight years for a team of historians to work their way through and catalogue the millions of pages of documents. As a result of their work, we have other sources besides the Bigelow report to rely on.

Early on in his storied career as a U.S. spy, Strategic Services Unit agent James Angelton filed a report considerably earlier than that of Bigelow regarding the theft of gold in Croatia. Writing in January 1946, Angelton reported that a large number of Ustasi had fled their country, traveling northward through Klagenfurt, Austria. Angelton does not say when they fled, but we know from other sources that it was in May 1945. Thus, the Angelton report is much closer to the event than Bigelow's. It is important to note that Angelton mentioned the priest Krunoslav Draganovic (and no one else by name) in connection with the transport of the gold. Intelligence agents repeatedly mentioned Draganovic in connection with the gold, as we will see in this chapter and subsequent ones. Emerson Bigelow did not get his information about the gold from Angelton's report because the latter merely states that the gold was contained in two boxes and did not assign any monetary value to it.8 Furthermore, Bigelow's 1946 report could not have had any connection with Angelton's earlier report because Angelton spoke of two boxes, whereas BigelowGowen spoke of ten truckloads. Of course, we may be dealing with two shipments to Rome that took place at separate times and independently of each other. But on the face of it, two boxes seem more credible than ten truckloads. The Ustasa priest, Draganovic, is named in connection with both shipments.

As the months passed in 1946, intelligence agents tracked the Ustasa, a rogue government during the war and an illegal movement after the war, and the gold various Croat fascists had at their disposal. In October, the same month of the Bigelow dispatch, British authorities arrested the Ustasa's General Moskov in Venice and "confiscated 3,200 gold coins and 75 diamonds."9 Gold coins and loose diamonds equates unmistakably with victim loot. We may deduce, further, from the arrest in Venice that when the Ustasi fled Croatia they divided up the gold among them. But whether this was the same cache of gold as that of the priest Draganovic cannot be said.

Germany stole or seized so much state and looted gold during the war that afterward the United States, France, and Great Britain set up a commission, called the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, in an effort to return national treasuries to their rightful states. Much of the ill-begotten gold had flowed from Germany through Swiss banks and on to Spain and Portugal to pay for the wolfram ore or tungsten that Germany needed to produce steel for modern armaments. Salazar had purchased millions in foreign currencies with the gold Portugal realized from exports to Germany. Clearly, these transactions amounted to multiple millions of dollars, indeed billions in today's currencies. The small quantities of precious metal Croatian fascists stole from their countrymen and their nation were part of these transactions. Yugoslavia, a state once again after the war, if not a nation-state, claimed the Ustasa loot, and its Communist dictator, Josip Tito, wanted the gold returned.

In May 1947, almost two years to the day after the Ustasa regime fled, Yugoslavia brought its claim to the Tripartite Commission, alleging that the Croatian fascists had stolen over 117 kilograms of fine gold that was worth $176,250 in 1940 currency. The presumed theft had occurred in 1941, at the time of the collapse of Yugoslavia. In addition, the Yugoslavs claimed that "the Croatian bank purchased gold looted by the Ustasha from Serbs, Jews and others or took it from their corpses. Several hundreds of thousands were killed by Ante Pavelich. "10 This gold, the claimants limply pleaded, must have been handed over to the Germans or to Allied authorities because of its weight. Does this claim imply that the plundered gold went north to Germany instead of south to Rome? The question has obvious implications for the U.S. State Department's challenge to the Vatican. If ten truckloads of stolen Yugoslav gold were delivered from Switzerland to Rome in 1946, as Bigelow claimed and Gowen recalled, why did Tito not ask the Tripartite Commission to investigate such an immense stash of gold instead of the minute (in comparison) 117 kilograms in German hands?

Basing his opinion on records of the German Reichsbank, U.S. army officer William G. Brey asserted in October 1947 that the Yugoslav claim could not be substantiatedY Nevertheless, the Tripartite Commission decided to hear the case that year. Attempting to bolster its suit, in 1948 Yugoslavia produced a witness to the theft. Mato Crnek, a bank official, saw the gold being taken from the bank, or so the Yugoslavs claimed. The story had to be changed later when it became known that Crnek was in the service throughout the war and not in the bank. Crnek mustered out of the army on April 30, 1945, and headed northward toward Austria on May 8. This is what Crnek said he witnessed:

I saw a lorry being driven byVutuc [a Ustasa officer] himself .... Vutuc provoked often incidents on the way being awfully rude, he was menacing with a revolver in his hand everywhere. At a crossing not far from our frontier, the column stopped and the driver said to me that Vutuc [had] provoked an incident again. Being inquisitive, I went forward and at that moment I saw that four German officers (or noncommissioned officers) [his emphasis] were aiming at Vutuc with their revolvers and forced him to turn aside from the road into a meadow. I continued on my way further.12

There, out of Crnek's sight in the meadow, the Germans supposedly relieved Vutuc of the Ustasa's gold.

Yugoslavia's claim before the Tripartite Commission totaled 117.55623 kilograms consisting of 84.80352 kilograms of fine gold, 28.63436 kilograms of sundry gold coins, and 4.11475 kilograms of gold scrap and shavings. The commission accepted Crnek's testimony, not because of his alleged banking past but because as an army veteran he would have known the difference between the uniforms of the Allies and the Germans: "Furthermore," the commission wrote in its final statement, "Mr. Mato Crnek who, since 10 April, 1941, must have been subjected to the German and Italian military administration . . . and must have been familiar with the uniforms of the Axis armies, stated, on oath, that they were four German officers" who had detained Vutuc and relieved him of the gold.13 Of the 117 -plus kilograms of gold, the commission decided that 109.34773 kilograms undoubtedly belonged to the Yugoslav bank and had been stolen by the illegal Ustasa regime. The remaining 8.20490 kilograms of gold did not belong to the national bank but consisted of gold the Ustasi had looted from its victims and from corpses.

The deliberations of the Tripartite Commission took place after Emerson Bigelow's October 1946 dispatch, but there is no indication that the commission took Bigelow's statement into account in its decision. Since Bigelow's report was made to the Treasury Department, not to the U.S. intelligence service, it may not have been readily available to the commission. If the commission was cognizant of it (and there is no evidence it was), the members would not have seen it as relevant to the removal of the gold on the nights of the 7th and 8th of May 1945 from the vault in the Croatian bank, where the Ustasi had stashed it, presumably in 1941. In other words, the commission did not think in either-or terms-that the gold had gone either to Germany or to Rome. In this they were unquestionably right, because, as we will see, the amount of gold taken to Rome exceeded by far the 117-plus kilograms the German soldiers supposedly seized. Furthermore, as the report of the arrest in Venice of a Ustasa fugitive with a stash of gold and diamonds, the report of the gold taken during the war to Switzerland, and the report of the two boxes of gold in Father DraganoviC's possession all suggest, a number of different fascist runaways helped themselves to gold, whether in the form of looted coins or bank bars. In a word, the decision of the Tripartite Commission does not invalidate the reliability of the Bigelow dispatch.

Simultaneous with the publication of the State Department's Eizenstat monograph that challenged the Vatican regarding the Ustasa gold, the Croatian Historical Institute in Zagreb published its own account of the stolen gold. State department historians were unaware of the Croat publication, but subsequently one of the department's historians, Ron Neitzke, reviewed it and found reason to be critical of the Eizenstat monograph. "The Bigelow report [contained in the monograph] is at such variance with other credible sources that it must be regarded with extreme skepticism," Neitzke wrote.14 The well-documented Croat study shows that the Ustasi took 287.710 kilograms of gold in bars and coins, which comes to over 431,550 in 1946 dollars and well over 4 million in today's currency. Neitzke did not question whether the gold was brought to Rome but how much gold was brought there. The 287 kilograms the Croat study reported weighed more. than 600 pounds-too much for Agent Angelton's two boxes but a load that would not tax one truck, let alone the ten trucks Bigelow and Gowen reported. Thus, the Croatian study shows that the Ustasi got away with a considerable amount of gold, some of which made its way to Rome.

The Croatian Historical Institute's research reinforces the evidence in the U.S. national archives that various Ustasa personnel dipped into the looted and stolen gold. Two trunks of gold were carried over the Slovenian-Austrian border, one trunk was broken into near Wolfs berg, Austria, by lower-ranking Ustasa officers, and two trunks went to Rome. In addition, an unknown quantity of gold coins was passed around to a number of Ustasa fascists as they made ready to flee their homeland on May 7, 1945. There is some evidence that British occupational authorities also acquired part of the loot.15

The Croatian record backs up the accuracy of Angelton's 1946 report: both identify Krunoslav Draganovic as the person who took the gold to Rome. Angelton, however, did not know how much gold Draganovic carried away in the two boxes. The Croat study puts the amount at about 45 kilograms, worth a little more than $67,500 dollars (about $697,846 in 2006 dollars). Two boxes or two trunks could easily transport 45 kilograms-99 pounds-of gold. At any rate, 45 kilograms was the amount Draganovic had in his possession in Rome. Whether other Ustasa fugitives had additional portions of the 287-plus total kilograms of gold that were taken cannot be said, but it is not unlikely.16

Beyond any doubt Ustasa gold came to Rome. What happened to it after it reached Rome? Where was it kept? The Croatian Historical Institute provides the following account. From June 1945 until January 1946, Father Krunoslav Draganovic kept the 45 kilograms of gold in his possession in Rome, not at the Vatican and not in the Croatian seminary of St. Jerome's, where almost all of the Ustasa fugitives and refugees had their board and room. Approximately half of what Draganovic took out of Croatia was in the form of gold coins, most of which had been looted from Jewish and Serbian victims of the Ustasa terror. During the latter months of 1945, Draganovic spent about 10 percent of the gold, whether on himself or to support other Ustasa fugitives is not known. At any rate, in January 1946 Vilko Pecnikar, a former general in the Croatian army, relieved Draganovic of the remaining gold at gunpoint.17

Looking back, we can see that we have two absurdly different accounts of just how much gold traveled to Rome via the Ustasa exiles. Was it ten truckloads or two boxes? This discrepancy is little cause for wonder when we reflect on the situation in wartime Europe. Faced with the Ustasa treachery, the Yugoslav regime divided up its gold and hid it in a number of locations, some of which we have identified. But was that all of them? Then the Italians stole much of the hidden treasury. But how much? Not all of it, in all likelihood. Evidence indicates that a good many other thefts took place that can no longer be reliably traced, either with regard to where and when the theft occurred or with regard to the eventual whereabouts of the loot. Whatever the Italians had seized, the Germans, in turn, seized from them. This might have been the gold that the Tripartite Commission returned to Yugoslavia. Had ten truckloads of gold been taken in 1946 from Switzerland to Rome, Tito would surely have demanded the return of this gold first, since it exceeded the value of what the Germans had taken by billions and billions of dollars. In the end, the study of the contemporary Croatian historians is more credible by far than the reports of Bigelow and Gowen. That Vilko Pecnikar might have relieved Draganovic of two boxes of gold can easily be imagined; that he took ten truckloads from him cannot.

The supposition here is that Draganovie was misusing the gold, which caused Pecnikar to take it from him. The Ustasa removed the gold from Croatia to fund a conspiracy to overthrow Tito. One cannot rule out personal gain, of course, but the dream of a return to glory and power gripped the Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelie, whenever he was in exile. As we will see in the following chapter, Pavelie found a secure hideout in Rome in Vatican properties after the war. There he plotted his dreamed of triumphant return. It may be supposed that either because he did not agree with how Draganovic was using the gold reserve or because he wanted to control it himself, he sent Pecnikar, his son-in-law, to wrest the remaining gold from the priest. Even though Draganovic lost hands-on control of the Ustasa loot, he and the Franciscan Dominik Mandie continued to disburse the funds for the immediate needs of the exiled Ustasi living in the St. Jerome seminary and elsewhere in Italy.

What did Pecnikar do with the loot? Taking it to an Italian state bank for safekeeping was out of the question. It would have resulted in questioning by Italian and Allied authorities and a report to the Tripartite Commission. Bigelow believed the gold found its way to the Vatican. Whether or not this occurred, the Vatican certainly knew about the gold but failed to report it to the commission. The Vatican's lawyers in Alperin v. Vatican Bank argue that the Holy See had no obligation to return the Ustasa loot to Yugoslavia in 1946 because the country was ruled by a hostile Communist regime in the Cold War era.

The decision by a sovereign instrumentality to give the funds to a foreign antiCommunist political movement rather than to a Communist regime, at the time where the Cold War was beginning in earnest in Europe, is not a "commercial" act; it is jure imperii, a deeply sovereign act.

The argument is completely without merit. The Tripartite Commission, which consisted of western non-Communist nationals, accepted Yugo slavia's claim to stolen gold late in 1947, even as the East and West were indeed slipping into the Cold War confrontation. Except for in the mind of Pius XII, no Cold War existed yet in 1946. Retaining stolen gold was not therefore a sovereign act.

There is no reason to doubt that the Ustasa gold ended up as a deposit in the Vatican Bank-not, of course, ten truckloads but something like the much smaller estimate of the Croatian Historical Institute. As the postwar years rolled by, the deposited gold had to be "laundered" or changed into various currencies to finance an evolving sequence of tasks. The immediate need was for upkeep for many dozens of Ustasa exiles. As pressure mounted for war criminals to be expatriated, false identity papers had to be fabricated. As the day when Pavelie would decide the time was ripe to invade Yugoslavia and overthrow Tito became ever more distant, some of the funds from the Vatican bank had to be used for the ratline-paying for passage for war criminals who dared not linger any longer in Europe. Alperin v. Vatican Bank alleges that in 1952 Pavelie withdrew 5 million Swiss francs-over $1 million in the currency of the day-from a Vatican Swiss bank account into which the Vatican bank had previously laundered and deposited 2,400 kilograms of the Ustasa's looted gold. Lawyers for the plaintiffs seemed to have pulled this sum out of thin air. It further alleges that the Franciscan who had been managing the Ustasa's funds in Rome, Dominik Mandie, emigrated to the United States. There he settled in Chicago, working out of St. Jerome's parish, which was run by the same branch of Franciscans that had so notoriously tarnished the name of the order during the Ustasa genocide in Croatia. Mandie had ample funds at his disposal that he used to publish ethnically racist literature for the Croat-speaking colony in the United States and for other projects.19

The sums of money at the disposal of the exiled Pavelie and Mandie far exceed the modest amount the Croatian historians estimated that the Ustasa took to Rome after the war. On the other hand, they amount to only a small fraction of the ten-truckload report of Bigelow and Gowen. If such an amount ever came into the Vatican bank, today there are still billions of dollars that have not, and probably cannot, be accounted for. As we have seen, significant skepticism surrounds the story of a convoy of trucks laden with gold.

The papal defense team in Alperin v. Vatican Bank has not contested the allegation that an immense shipment of gold arrived by truck in Rome in 1946. Vatican lawyers content themselves with the blanket assertion that the plaintiffs' case put forward conclusory "facts" -bald assertions which the court need not credit.20 This approach considerably weakens the defense, whose principal argument is that there is no evidentiary connection between the losses of the plaintiffs and the gold deposited in the Vatican bank.21 Losses, such as stolen gold commemorative coins, currency, and jewelry, cannot be traced. Property losses that occurred in wartime well over half a century ago may not be traceable. In Alperin v. Vatican Bank, what the plaintiffs lost was not like artwork (identifiable objects of record), nor were they like insurance policies (whose holders are a matter of record). Thus, the Vatican's lawyers would have had a considerable advantage if they had pointed out that besides the alleged ten truckloads of gold, Yugoslav gold ended up in Germany and in the pockets of a good many individual Ustasi. Given this wide dispersion of Yugoslav gold, it would be impossible to demonstrate-and, indeed, impossible for the plaintiffs' lawyers to argue-that the portion that ended up in the Vatican bank originated with their clients rather than with other victims.

If the case against the Holy See were to be decided on the basis of moral law and historical fact, the Vatican would be hard put to it to defend itself. Mass murder and theft on the part of a regime Pius XII favored undeniably took place. A portion of the stolen loot undeniably found its way to Rome. Once there, the pope and other high Vatican persons certainly knew about it but made no effort to see that it was returned to rightful owners or their next of kin. In all probability, the Vatican bank laundered the stolen property and oversaw its dispersion worldwide. But whether or not the Vatican must answer for its actions will be determined not by the reconstruction of historical events or by moral law but by the laws of the United States. In this domain, the Vatican's lawyers may prove to have the upper hand.

The federal court in California may decide to dismiss the Alperin case because it does not have jurisdiction over the subject matter. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state. The Holy See therefore falls under the protection of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.22 On this ground alone, the plaintiffs' case may miscarry. Alternately, the court may decide to hear the case under the commercial activity exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act. If that happens, the Vatican's lawyers, asserting that the exception is mere use of semantics by the plaintiffs' counsels, will be able to point to a recent court decision that somewhat resembles the Alperin case. In March 2006, the Second Federal Court of California used the essence-of-complaint rule in deciding against the plaintiff in Garb vs. the Republic of Poland. In that case, the court did not uphold the commercial activity argument as an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.23 We see here that what is at issue concerns civil, not moral, law. Thus, whether the Holy See was party to stolen goods is not the question, but rather whether the stolen goods-in this case, liquid assets-constitute "tangible" property according to the commercial activity exception.24 They do not. In another case similar to Alperin, the courts ruled against a "ripple effect," meaning that if illegally obtained liquid assets lead to additional commercial activity at some point down the road, the court will not hear the case. Here, the legal question is not whether the Vatican bank acted to distribute stolen funds but whether the fact that it distributed the funds in 1952 to benefit Mandie's Chicago enterprises six years after the alleged theft constitutes a commercial ripple effect. A final illustration culled from many the lawyers use against the claims of the plaintiffs in Alperin: the case has no standing at bar, they say, because the Vatican was only a third party to the plaintiff's injury. Once again, the question here is not whether the Vatican bank facilitated the use of stolen property but only whether according to U.S. law it committed the crime or whether the Ustasa did so.25

Clearly, the question of looted gold and the Vatican as it would be decided in the historian's court or in the theologian's court will little resemble whatever is decided in civil court. In view of the fact that European countries opened their World War II bank books for review at the request of the U.S. State Department after the Swiss bank scandal, the Vatican's unwillingness to do so suggests that it has something hide. Ultimately, what the Holy See does not wish to disclose is the disastrous web of mistakes pertaining to Yugoslavia that entrapped Pius XII throughout his papacy. The pope's first entanglement came early in his tenure when he preferred the Nazi puppet state of Croatia over the Yugoslavia the Treaty of Trianon created after World War I, even though the new entity was ruled by a convicted murderer, Ante Pavelic. After receiving the papal blessing in 1941, Pavelic and his Ustasa lieutenants unleashed an unspeakable genocide in their new country. But Pius XII refused to cut his ties with Catholic Croatia and in 1943 once again imparted the papal blessing on Pavelie, who by that time was a genocidal killer. We will never know what words of moderation and caution, if any, the pope imparted to the dictator on that occasion. When the fascists lost World War II, the fascist experiment in Croatia was over. But it was not over for Pope Pius. Compounding his earlier missteps, the pope sheltered Pave lie and other Ustasa war criminals, hoping that they might yet succeed in a triumphal return to the land they had so badly bloodied. Might not the looted gold that the Ustasi brought with them to St. Jerome's Croatian seminary make such a return to glory possible? We turn in the next chapter to Pavelie in hiding in postwar Rome.

By adding English language sources, underneath we ad to the content of Pope and Devil (Papst und Teufel) by Herbert Wolf and "Nazis auf der Flucht" by Gerald Steinacher about the Nazi flight and its Vatican connection. The Vatican’s War P.1.

Where on 11 October 2007 the BBC reported 'Dirty War' trial puts spotlight on Church; we instead will be able to point out why an ideological affinity with Hitler became possible, and in the case of the Vatican-- had to do with political self interest. The Vatican’s War P.2.

In Mystici Corporis Christi of 1943, the Vatican indicated that if Jews did not convert, their destiny layout of the reach of the Church because they had broken the covenant. Thus when the Archbishop of Belgium was asked to "pls.say something" in regards to the more than twenty five thousand Jews that were incarcerated around the corner from his own palace, in order to be gassed in Auschwitz; that this was "not the Church's business".* The Vatican’s War P.3.

In 1942 Pius XII counting on a envisioned a postwar Eastern Europe anchored by a bloc of countries-a constellation like that of the AustroHungarian Empire, which earlier in the century had embraced Croatia. Hungarians, Austrians, and Croats had once been the bulwark of Europe that held off the infidel Muslim. Might not they now form a bulwark against the new infidel-the atheist Soviets? The Vatican’s War P.5.

During the years after World War II, Pius XII believed that a military showdown between the Soviet Union and the west would occur. If that were to happen, it would have his blessing. The Nazi/Vatican Connection P.6.

 

1. Office of Military Government U.S. financial records, file on Yugoslavian gold, Box 442, RG 226, location 390/35/13/7, NARA.

2. Briefs of the plaintiff's lawyers in Emil Alperin, et at. v. the Instituto per Ie Opere di Religione [Institute of Religious Works, aka the Vatican Bank] and the Order of the Friars Minor, Case 3:99-cr-04941-MMC, Document 262, filed 02/14/06 at U.S. District Court, Northern District of California. This case is hereafter referred to as Alperin v. Vatican Bank.

3.  Ibid.

4.Stuart Eizenstat, U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations with Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns about the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury (Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1998). William Slany, assisted by a team of researchers, wrote the report, which was published in house in the State Department under the name of Eizenstat, who was undersecretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs in 1998. In a briefing, Eizenstat said that the State Department had asked the Vatican to open its records. Vatican officials, Eizenstat said, were "open in their discussions with him" but that they lacked the personnel to produce the bank data.

5. Bigelow, n.p., to Glasser, July 19, 1946, Entry 183, Box 27, RG 226, location 190/9/22/05, NARA. This gold has nothing to do with the gold that Bigelow later reported going to Rome.

6. Alperin v. Vatican Bank, document 262, 24-25.

7. Eizenstat, U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations.

The quote in the paragraph is from page x of the preliminary report.

8. U.S. Strategic Services Unit report of James Angelton, January 22,1946, Entry 210, Box 6, RG 226, location 250/64/28/02, NARA. Agent Angelton would later become the victim of a hoax which led him to file fraudulent reports. These concerned internal Vatican affairs and only those. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Angelton's other reports in general and of this one in particular.

9. Gofii, The Real Odessa, see the afterword; source for the information is Foreign Office 371/67398 R2394 and Foreign Office 371/67376 R5965, Public Record Office, National Archives, London (hereafter PRO).

10. National Bank of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, to the Tripartite Commission for Restitution of Monetary Funds [sic], September 29,1947, Entry 21131., Box 7, RG 84, location 350/49/265/7, NARA.

11. See Brey's report based on records of the Precious Metals Department and the Reichsbank, October 9,1947, Office of Military Government, U.S. Finance Division, Box 442, RG 226, location 390/35/13/7, NARA.

12. Department of State, Office of Financial Operations, Records Relating to the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, Entry 1068, Box 14, File 840.4; and NN3-59-96-59, Lot 62DD115, Box 13, RG 59, location 250/ 48/29/30, NARA.

13. Source for the quote is NN3-59-96-59, Lot 62DDl15, Box 13, RG 59, location 250/48/29/30, NARA.

14. Ron Neitzke, Office of the Historian, Department of State, "Ustasha Gold: Sources, Amount, and Disposition. U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations With Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury," unpublished paper in author's possession, April 1999, 2. Neitzke relied on the Croatian publication by Zlato 1. Novae, Nezavisne Drzave Hrvatske izneseni u inozemstvo 1944 i 1945 (Gold and Money of the Independent State of Croatia Moved Abroad 1944 and 1945) (Zagreb: Croatian Historical Institute, 1997).

15. Neitzke, "Ustasha Gold," 4-6.

16. For a different account of how the Ustasa secured the gold and then divided it, see Gofii, The Real Odessa, 209. Gofii's source in endnote 347 is to Box 107, File ZF010183 IRR case files, Impersonal Files, RG 319, location 270/84/22/03, NARA, which holds no pertinent data on the Ustasa gold question. His other reference is to John Loftus and Mark Aarons, Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), no page cited. Unholy Trinity is not a reliable account in many instances. Gofii's account and mine agree about the detail that Draganovie took two boxes of gold to Rome.

17.  Neitzke, "Ustasha Gold," 3.

18. Brief of the defendant's lawyers in Alperin v. Vatican Bank, document 272-1, filed 02120/06 at U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.

19. In Chicago, Mandie founded the Croatian Publishing House and the Croatian Historical Institute with funds that originated with the looted Ustasa treasury.

20.  Alperin v. Vatican Bank, document 272-1,4,34, and 45.

21.  Ibid., 47.

22.  Ibid., 4.

23.  Ibid., 11-12.

24.  Ibid., 18.

25.  Ibid., 32.

 

 

Bibliography and Works Cited

 

For updates click homepage here