Graham Parsons notified the U.S. State Department in
July that French ambassador Jacques Maritain had given a speech in which he had
said that the "church had to strive for peace and therefore could not
endorse a holy war against Russia."2
After the war Pius also showed more interest in using
ideologically committed fascists to fight communism than he did in bringing
those of them who had perpetrated crimes against Jews to justice. Rome launched
the attack on the war crimes trials in 1946, and German Church leaders readily
took up the cue. In that year, Cardinal von Galen published an outrageous
assault on the occupational authorities, The Sense of Justice and Questionable
Justice.3
In Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings took up von Galen's
argument in his 1946 New Year's Eve sermon. Frings couched his objections to
Nuremberg in legal jargon that hid his true intent to dismantle Allied trials
and verdicts: "The Allies had followed a 'pagan and naive' optimism for
taking it upon themselves to make judgments on guilt or innocence."4
Another example occurred when in July 1946, a boy who
had run away from home blamed Jews for his disappearance when he returned after
a few days' absence.5 The boy's tale, reminiscent of the age-old myth of blood
libel, set off a massacre which cost more than forty Jewish lives in Kielce and
many more across Poland. Pope Pius, pressed by Rabbi Philip Bernstein in a
private audience in September to hold religious anti-Semitism in Poland
accountable for the crime, put the blame for Kielce on the Communist regime
instead of on antisemitism.6
To reassure his Catholic voters and win them over to
his policy of friendship with the Soviet Union, President Roosevelt sent a
Polish-American priest, Stanislas Orlemanski, on a
mission to Russia to discuss the religious rights of Poles with Stalin. In
April 1944, Orlemanski met with Stalin, who
"confirmed both orally and in a signed document that the Soviet government
would never carry out a policy of coercion and persecution of the Catholic
Church and that he was willing to join Pius XII in the struggle against
religious persecution."7
President Roosevelt believed Stalin was sincere. Pope
Pius did not. The Vatican rejected the Orlemanski
mission out of hand. Subsequent missions sent by the American president with
similar intent met with the same response. Having chosen a hard line by
rejecting Stalin's concession, Pius XII had to formulate his own ideas for the
postwar settlement. Although these were less likely to be realized than
Stalin's promises would have been, Pius forged ahead with his own plans for the
continent's reconfiguration, which necessarily included Germany. What the pope
had in mind was the formation of a multinational Catholic state in Central
Europe that would replace the old and defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
large and multinational but Catholic state would act as a check on the Soviet
Union. In November and again in December 1944, the pope met with Prince
Ruprecht of the Wittelsbach house of Bavaria to discuss the possibility of
fusing the south German state with another German state, Saxony, and with
Austria.8
At some point the Vatican hoped to include Hungary in
the new Catholic bloc. The new entity could either be a kingdom under the
Hapsburgs or a Christian social republic.9
Elsewehere, the murderous
excesses of the puppet Ustasa regime under Ante
Pavelic had destroyed the fragile fabric of the Yugoslavia of Versailles and
opened the door to Communist partisans under Marshal Tito during the last two
years of the war. As Hitler's war fortunes collapsed, so did that of the
Catholic Church there. Tito emerged from the war as the de facto dictator of a
restored Yugoslavia and as the strongest Communist leader of any Eastern
European nation. Without help from the Soviets, Tito had purged his country of
the fascist Ustasa regime. His support among the
populace, though contested, was greater than that of any other Eastern European
Communist leader. After the war, Tito took steps to expand Yugoslavia both in
the east and west, which, in the latter case, had to come at Italy's expense.
War seemed a possibility, because no one knew that Josef Stalin had no agenda
for starting World War III.10
Although there is no
doubt that the pope sponsored the Spanish and Hudal
ratlines, an operation that reveals the direct involvement of Pius XII himself
is the ratline of Ustasa priest Krunoslav
Draganovic. Soon after the British foreign ministry
advised Pius XII in contemptuous tongue-in-cheek fashion that protecting Ustasa war criminals would not be a good way for him to
play Gregory VII (the powerful medieval pope), Ante Pavelic was basking in
"hands off" status.11
The Vatican's
connection to Krunoslav Draganovic
originally had nothing to do with a ratline. Draganovic's
impressive backers, Archbishop Stepinac (Zagreb) and Archbishop Saric
(Sarajevo), had opened doors for him at the Vatican before the war. After Draganovic finished his studies for the priesthood in
Yugoslavia, Saric sent him to Rome for graduate studies, where the young cleric
delved into the ethnology-ominously-of Balkan affairs.12 When Croatia became a
Nazi puppet state during the war, Draganovic became a
leading figure in the bureau of colonization and used the rationale of his
doctoral dissertation as the theoretical basis for forcing Orthodox Serbs to
convert to Catholicism.13 The bureau of colonization took property away from
Serbs, redistributing it, and that of murdered Serbs, to Catholic Croatians.
Besides his association with ethnic cleansing, Draganovic
also served as an army chaplain with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the
notoriously brutal Jasenovac concentration camp.14
Although Yugoslavia requested that he be extradited for war crimes after the
war, the occupational authorities in Italy never complied, and Tito soon had
bigger fish to fry. In 1943, Draganovic had a falling
out with Eugen Kvaternik, the head of Pavelic's Order
and Security Office and a pathological killer.15 He returned in the
summer of 1943 to Rome, where, as the former personal secretary to Archbishop
Saric, he provided the Vatican with valuable inside information about Croatian
church and state affairs. Draganovic wasted no time
establishing himself in Rome; soon he was the secretary of the Croat embassy in
Rome and was hobnobbing frequently with German occupational forces. U.S. agents
described him as early as 1945 as "very venal," a trait that would
only grow with time and one that American intelligence would come to exploit
during the Cold War.16
The downturn in Nazi
wartime fortunes inevitably doomed the Ustasa regime in
Croatia. At some point near the end, Draganovic
returned to his native country to take some of the ill-begotten Ustasa treasury to Rome and to prepare for dictator PaveliC's eventual arrival in the Eternal City. In Rome, Draganovic became known in intelligence circles as the very
visible alter ego of the invisible Pavelic. During this time, Draganovic also engaged in getting high churchmen who were Ustasa members out of Croatia. Bishop Rozman
(or Roxman) of Ljubljana, whom the British considered
to be a war criminal, fled to Austria; Archbishop Ivan Saric, considered a war
criminal in Yugoslavia because of his passionate support of Pavelic and the Ustasa, took cover in Vatican property in Rome. A large
number of other clerical and lay Ustasa members, many
of them War criminals, settled in the Croatian seminary near the Vatican, St.
Jerome's. As the war ended, thousands of other ethnic Croatian refugees and
fugitives-some black, but mostly gray-were penned up in displaced persons camps
in Italy.
The Vatican's
Pontifical Commission of Assistance appointed Krunoslav
Draganovic to help take care of the refugees from
Croatia. He was in his element. Still relatively young of age at 32 and very
familiar with the Roman scene, the Italian-speaking Draganovic
made his way as fluidly in American-occupied Rome as he had previously done
when the city was occupied by the Germans. The Vatican not only wanted Draganovic to care for the thousands of grays, most of whom
would return, if possible, to an ethnic Croatian state, but also to find
shelter for the Ustasa blacks who were expecting to
return to oust Marshal Tito. The scheme had worked once under Ante Pavelic and
Pope Pius hoped it would work again. Draganovic
served the Vatican as the front man in this venture, and, as one intelligence
report put it, "in many instances it [was] hard to distinguish the
activity of the church from the activity" of Draganovic.17
With hindsight it is
clear that the chances for the re-creation of an ethnic Croatian state were
minimal at best. But this was not clear in the immediate postwar years. Pius
XII, Bishop Hudal, Jose La Boos in Spain, and Krunoslav Draganovic were united
by the expectation of war between the west and the Soviets. Such an event might
have created the right circumstances for PaveliC's
return to Yugoslavia. But unlike in 1941, when Pavelic enjoyed the patronage of
Hitler, ]osip Tito held power in the Balkans with
Soviet backing. So long as that situation obtained, Ustasa
and Vatican prospects were doomed. But the dreams of Pope Pius died hard.
Disunity among the
Croatians and the Ustasa hobbled the movement as
well. In Yugoslavia, Archbishop Stepinac was reputedly organizing a resistance
movement, the Krizari, after Pavelic's abandonment of
the government. Draganovic helped by recruiting
Croats from refugee camps to return to the homeland to muster anti- Tito
forces. But the political and military leader of the Krizari
movement, Vlatko Macek, wanted to disassociate the
anti-Tito movement from the Ustasa and Pavelic.18 Macek, who favored a degree of autonomy for Croatia within Yugoc slavia through democratic
means, opposed PaveliC's effort to seek autonomy
through a bloody revolution.19
The refugee Ustasi were also disunited. Two main groups, one in Austria
and one in Italy, took their orders from different officers who seemed to lack
close coordination. Pavelic understood that a premature return to the homeland
would likely fail and sought to restrain restless refugees. Pavelic himself
could not playas active a role as he would undoubtedly have liked because of
his need to remain hidden in Vatican properties. His son-in-law, Vilko Pecnikar, assumed the
leadership, and, as we have seen, relieved Draganovic
of the looted Ustasa gold. Since no rift between Draganovic and Pavelic ever occurred, it is likely that Pecnikar took possession of the gold because of DraganoviC's venality rather than because of a disagreement
between Draganovic and Pavelic. But because of Pecnikar's close association with Pavelic and the Ustasa, Macek's anti-Tito
movement within Yugoslavia wanted nothing to do with him. This rift
reverberated through the various enclaves of exiled Ustasi,
loosening Pecnikar's political control of the Ustasa. Fewer and fewer Ustasi
associated with him.20 "Pecnikar seems more and
more alone," a U.S. agent reported. "His stauncher friends have been
slowly but steadily abandoning him."21 The shared desire of Croat refugees
to unseat Tito provided a degree of unity, but when it came to action they
splintered, some agreeing that the Ustasa should
disband and back Macek's movement and some looking
for a return of Pavelic and a revived Ustasa
government.22 Only the expectation of war kept the hopes of all alive to some
extent.
While plotters
schemed during most of 1945 and 1946, the Ustasa
remnant had to be cared for somehow, and those among them who were wanted war
criminals needed to be hidden. This became DraganoviC's
work within the Vatican's Croatian refugee support effort, a subunit of the
Pontifical Commission of Assistance. Many months before the Vincent La Vista
report for the State Department, U.S. intelligence documented Draganovic's labor for the refugees and his connection to
the Vatican. Most Ustasa fascists holed up in St.
Jerome's Croatian seminary. Draganovie obtained false
identification papers for those who were considered war criminals by
international standards, enabling them to escape Allied authorities. Boarding a
large number of Ustasa refugees required funding,
which Draganovie obtained from a number of Vatican
sources: donations from Croatian Americans, the gold that Pecnikar
took from Draganovie, and Vatican funds for
information services.23 There is no documentary evidence that Pecnikar stashed the looted gold in the Vatican bank, but
repeated reports that the Holy See funded the operation at St. Jerome's make
this seem likely.24 A Croatian priest, Dominik Mandie (also spelled Mandich in intelligence reports), served with Draganovie as the liaison between the Vatican and St.
Jerome's. A report Acting U.S. Political Advisor to the Acting Supreme
Occupational Commander Joseph N. Greene made to the political advisor of the
American ambassador to Italy also indicated Vatican financial support for
anti-Tito organizations, both for the Ustasa or for Macek's Peasant Party and the Krizari.25
Draganovic's ratline activity began soon after the end of the war,
even though most of his efforts during the immediate postwar months centered on
providing for gray and black Croat refugees. Prosecution of war criminals was a
high priority for occupation authorities, and a number of the Ustasa refugees simply could not risk idling around Rome to
see if military action in Europe would begin. Among these was Vjekoslav Vrancie, whom Hitler
himself had decorated. Father Mandie, Draganovic's
Franciscan colleague, arranged the escape of Dinko Sakie, who had run the notorious Jasenovae
concentration camp during the last months of the war.26
Uki Goiii estimates that
about 200 Ustasa war criminals escaped to Argentina
during 1945 and 1946 using visas that the Argentine dictator Peron had issued
to Draganovie. Skillfully exploiting Argentine
records, Goiii has been able to identify by name many
of these individual criminals, the nature of their war crimes, and the manner
in which Draganovie or Mandie facilitated their emigration.
Counter Intelligence
Corps agent Robert C. Mudd, whom we have met in connection with the search for
Ante Pavelic, documented the activities of the Vatican and Draganovic
on behalf of war criminals who resided in St. Jerome's and those who were
fleeing to South America. Mudd compiled a list of Ustasi
who were being "fed, clothed, and housed" in St. Jerome's. Over 100
of them were trying to get out of Europe via the ratline to Argentina that the
Argentine government and the Vatican jointly sponsoredY
Another intelligence report of Agent Mudd noted that many of the "more
prominent Ustasi war cri,minals
and quislings are living in Rome illegally, many of them under false names.
Their cells [at St. Jerome's] are maintained, their papers still published, and
their intelligence agencies still in operation."28 Draganovic
and other agents liaising with the Holy See "travel back and forth from
the Vatican several times a week in a Vatican car which cannot be stopped
because of diplomatic immunity."29 The car took them inside St. Jerome's.
Mudd concluded that Draganovic's "sponsorship of
these Croat quislings" definitely links him up with the plan of the
Vatican to shield these ex-Ustashi nationalists until
such time as they are able to procure for themselves the proper documents to
enable them to go to South America. The Vatican, undoubtedly banking on the
strong anti-communist feelings of these men, is endeavoring to infiltrate them
into South America in any way possible to counteract the spread of Red
doctrine.30
Mudd had the names of
several particular "long sought after war criminals" who also lived
in St. Jerome's. Draganovic naturally denied that the
Vatican sponsored the escape of these individuals but Mudd entertained no doubts
about the Vatican's auspices. Clearly, during the two years following the end
of the war, U.S. intelligence agents had acquired an accurate picture of what
the Ustasa refugees and the Vatican were up to both
with regard to the anti-Tito movement and to DraganoviC's
ratline. Diplomats, on the other hand, still did not know what was going on.
Had he known of the ratline activity and the Vatican's backing of it, the
French ambassador to the Holy See, Jacques Maritain, would have resigned with a
loud protest. There is nothing in the papers of Myron Taylor or his assistants,
Harold Tittmann and Franklin Gowen, that would
indicate that any of them knew. Not, that is, until the summer of 1947, shortly
after the State Department received Vincent La Vista's report, when U.S. agent
William Gowen changed his mind about arresting Ante Pavelic. This timing was
coincidental, however. Pressure on Agent Gowen came from inside the Vatican,
certainly not as a result of the La Vista report, to which we now turn.
U.S. diplomat John
Moors Cabot was the key player whose memos in June 1947 to the State Department
confirmed from non-Italian sources what La Vista had disclosed the previous
month. Either by happenstance or, more likely, because of Cabot's suspicions
about how and why war criminals were finding their way to Argentina, Cabot
moved in 1947 from his diplomatic post in South America to Yugoslavia, the
reconstituted state that included the former Nazi puppet state of Croatia. In
South America, he had witnessed the influx of fascists, some of whom he had
reason to suspect were war criminals. Then, in Yugoslavia, the Tito government
showed him evidence of Ustasa war crimes that had
been committed by Croats now living in Italy or Austria. The tone of Cabot's
message to the State Department about the ratlines gives the impression that he
wanted the State Department to investigate: "I must again express to the
department my respectful but very serious concern at [the] manner in which
Yugoslav Quisling matter is being handled."31 Cabot was urging state to
take action, not confirming what state suspected and was considering
investigating. Cabot either did not know about the La Vista report or, if he
did know about it, he was urging state to take action on it.32
In presenting his
concerns to the State Department, Cabot was obviously unaware of all that U.S.
intelligence agents knew, and had known for some time, about the ratline from
Spain and about Hudal's and Draganovic's
operations. "Some arrangement," Cabot asserted vaguely, "has
been worked out with the Vatican and Argentina by which collaborationist
Yugoslavs will be helped to immigrate to Argentina." Cabot bitterly
complained to state that the United States was flouting "our own
commitments." To Cabot, ratlines constituted a moral issue, a matter of
what is right and wrong, not, as the Holy See seemed to think, a matter of
emerging international confrontation between east and west. "By our
attitude," Cabot wrote with some indignation, we are protecting those "guilty
of terrible crimes committed in Yugoslavia. "33 Basing his accusation on
materials available at the embassy in Yugoslavia, Cabot assured state that
there could be no doubt about his charges; they were, he said, "crystal
clear."
Cabot pressed on.
Intimating that the United States might be using fascists as informers, he felt
his country was not living up to its "commitments and moral
obligations." As far as he could ascertain, Cabot wrote, the United States
had not taken effective action to curtail the ratlines, had prevented the
British and Italians from do so, and was scheming with the Vatican and
Argentina in a manner that let blacks escape.34 Cabot ended with a double
warning: How can we defend this record before the UN if the Yugoslavs take it
there I do not know, and there are increasing evidences they will. As I see it
we may then be forced either to accept a humiliating decision against us or so
manipulate things as to show that we also consider UN a mere instrument of
power politics. I also trust [that] the Catholic Church realizes how extremely
damaging this affair might be to its position in [Yugoslavia].35
Cabot was nothing if
not insistent. His memos may well have been the tripwire for state to take
action on the La Vista report. Whereas U.S. intelligence agents were assigned
to certain cases, such as that of Pavelic or Hudal,
the State Department wanted La Vista to frame the whole ratline picture for
them, verifying whatever allegations the department had picked up, including,
of course, Cabot's. Consequently, much of what La Vista reported intelligence
agents already knew and had reported themselves, albeit not to state. But there
is one very important exception-Dr. Willy Nix, a German double agent whose work
for the Vatican was a cover for his work for his actual paymaster, the Soviet
Union.36 What this means is that the Vatican's covert ratline operation was all
for naught-derailed from the very beginning because Nix sent Communist agents
to South America instead of anti-Communists. This was one of La Vista's most
stunning findings.
Postwar Rome was a
city of transients. La Vista could only guess at their number, which he put at
somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million. Almost every East European and Russian
nation contributed to the floating mass of people. An indefinite number of
fascists, both Italian, German, and Austrian, mixed in with other refugees.
Unlike Eastern Europeans who fled because Communists had seized power in their
lands, black fascists fled because of their war crimes. Many Yugoslavs, of
course, and some Slovaks fled their countries for both reasons. Thousands and
thousands of Eastern European Jews, Holocaust survivors whose homes gentiles
had taken possession of, sought passage from Italy to Palestine. La Vista
encountered this sea of humanity, which was mostly gray, he knew, but which
also included a substantial number of whites and blacks.37
A number of agencies
in Rome and other Italian cities attempted to facilitate the transfer of these
hundreds of thousands of transients to new destinations abroad. Principal
emigration agencies were the Pontifical Commission of Assistance, whose
agencies made up the largest such operation in Rome, and, the American Joint
Distribution Committee, the second largest. The AJDC smuggled Jews to Palestine
but also helped thousands emigrate to North and South America, where,
ironically, Argentina took in more than any other country. The Pontifical
Commission of Assistance operated on a nationality basis; each country was
assigned a priest to deal with refugees from his land. Monsignor Baldelli
headed the pontifical commission and reported to Montini
in the Vatican secretariat. Altogether there were about twenty of these
agencies under Baldelli.38 Most of the refugees the Red Cross and papal
commission helped were heading to the western hemisphere. These agencies
obviously provided a much-needed service.
The problem, La Vista
determined, lay in the fact that pro-German (which is to say pro-Nazi and
pro-Yugoslav, which is to say pro-Croat) personnel had infiltrated the Red
Cross operation in Rome. The same situation applied to the Pontifical
Commission of Assistance, because pro-Nazi (Hudal)
and pro-Ustasi (Draganovic)
individuals had been appointed by the commission to its national units.
Compounding this unfortunate fact was the close cooperation between the Red
Cross and the national offices of the papal commission, which gave preference
to refugees who were Catholics, or at least pro-church and anti-Communist.
Thus, the two agencies' pro-fascist personnel combined their knowledge and
resources to feed the ratlines. We have already seen how this combination
worked in practice in Bishop Hudal's ratline
operation. What transpired there, La Vista determined, constituted the rule. A
person applied to the papal commission's office of his nationality, obtained a
letter of identification, and took it to a Red Cross office, which routinely
issued him their identity card. Neither the papal nor Red Cross offices
screened applicants for war criminals. Once in possession of the Red Cross
identity card, a person was eligible to apply for a visa. Nazi and Ustasa fascists beat a steady path to Rome to obtain new
identities. "In this category," La Vista wrote there has been and
still are large groups of Nazi-Germans who come into Italy for the sole purpose
of obtaining fictitious identity documents, passports, and visas, and leave
almost immediately via Genoa and Barcelona for Latin America.
Draganovic's ratline also flourished nicely in the cozy
relationship between the Red Cross and the papal commission. As La Vista put
it, "the Yugoslav movement in this picture is of particular interest since
there appear to be altogether too many refugees in Italy who are apparently
anti- Tito."39
The emigration services
of the various agencies could not function without host countries to accept
refugees. The pontifical commission was successful because of the ability of
the Vatican to put pressure on predominantly Roman Catholic countries in South
America to open their doors to anti-Communist displaced persons. We have seen
that the Holy See began doing this early on, well before the end of the war,
with Argentina, which took in the largest number of refugees, followed by
Mexico and Cuba. Other Latin American countries participated as well. La Vista
wrote: This appeared to be an inexplicable situation but further investigation
indicated that in those Latin American countries where the church is a
controlling or dominating factor, the Vatican has brought pressure to bear
which has resulted in the foreign missions of those countries taking an
attitude almost favoring the entry into their country of former Nazi and former
fascists or other political groups, so long as they are anti
communist. That in fact is the practice in effect in the Latin American
consulates and missions in Rome at the present time.40
For the most part,
the priests who headed up the various national agencies under the Pontifical
Commission of Assistance did not misuse their authority to benefit war
criminals. The exceptions were Bishop Hudal, who
eagerly sought out Nazis, Draganovic at St. Jerome's,
and the German priest Anton Weber. Father Carlos (or Karl) Bayer, who ran the
German office out of the former German embassy and worked as secretary to
Monsignor Baldelli, told historian Gitta Sereny that
he and others knew that war criminals passed through their agencies, but that
it was not possible to check peoples' stories because of the sheer number of
refugees.41 Some priests acted out of naivete. "Fr. Gallov
who runs the Hungarian welfare agency ... innocently believes any story and
issues the bona fide for the person to take to the Red Cross to get a legit
passport."42 One did not have to be in charge of one of the national
agencies of the papal commission to benefit from the Vatican's support for
indiscriminate refugee assistance. Father Anton Weber, mentioned above in
connection with the Spanish ratlines, admitted to Gitta Sereny
that he helped SS Nazis emigrate when they applied to his St. Raphael Society's
office in Rome. Weber said that Vatican funds were used for this service.43
Neither Krunoslav Draganovic
nor Willy Nix headed national agencies affiliated with the Holy See, yet both
enjoyed papal support and protection. Intelligence agents were not able to
penetrate the ratlines of either Draganovic or Nix,
but Nix's work came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1947, at which time he
mysteriously vanished.
From the moment the
Allies occupied Rome late in the war, Willy Nix successfully pulled the wool
over the eyes of U.S. intelligence agents. Nix ran the office in Rome of the
"Free German Committee," whose phony but lofty avowed purpose was to
rid Germany of Nazis and reeducate Germans along peaceful and democratic lines.
On a more practical level, Nix promised that he would help the Allies identify
German Nazis. Nix told intelligence agents a yarn about his persecution at the
hands of the Gestapo, who, he said, took everything from him but his life. He
said that he had spent two to three years in Sachsenhausen and other
concentration camps before escaping and making his way to Rome, where the
Vatican gave him funds to assist Allied soldiers who had fled POW camps. In
reality, of course, he used the money to help Nazis escape to South America. U.S.
intelligence agents downplayed Nix and his efforts. He was said to have
dominated his small association of Germans in Rome like a "little
Hitler." Other Germans did not particularly like him.44 U.S. intelligence
agents concluded that "the group does not have much going for it."
Having sold the
Allies his cover story and convinced them of his unimportance, Nix managed to
help Nazis escape from the end of the war to the summer of 1947. Suddenly, just
at the time of La Vista's sojourn in Rome, Nix's luck ran out when it was
discovered that a number of people escaped from a camp in Italy and made
their way to the office of Dr. Willy Nix in Rome who is the head of the Free
German Committee. Nix then furnished them with id [sic] papers even though he knew
that they were wanted. They then made contact with others, including Fr. Bayer,
who made arrangements for their hiding until time of departure. Further
checking suggests that Dr. Nix serves both underground Nazis and Russia in
spiriting people out of Europe.45
Further investigation
showed that the Vatican's emigration network was so sophisticated that it could
find jobs in South America for escaped refugees. Based on this information, the
Italian government issued warrants for Nix's arrest, but minutes before his
capture, he was tipped off and fled to Vatican City. "It has always been
thought," La Vista wrote in his memo to state, "that Dr. Nix was
operating under the benevolent protection of the Vatican," and his flight
there proved it.46
This was shocking news
for the U.S. State Department. Not only was the Vatican helping suspected war
criminals escape, but worse, Soviet agents had infiltrated Nix's operation and
had used it to place their people in South American countries. Just how many
Russians found their way to the western hemisphere La Vista could not say, but
he estimated that as many as 10 percent of all refugees in Italy were Russian.
Using his speculation about the number of refugees-1 00,000 to one million-this
would mean as few as 10,000 and as many as 100,000 Russians in Italy, numbers
that appear preposterously high. Even making allowance for exaggeration about
the numbers, the State Department had reason to be alarmed.
The question of who
blew the whistle on Nix has not been answered. Interestingly, La Vista never
mentioned Krunoslav Draganovic
in his rather detailed report, although he was the secretary of the Croat
national unit of the Pontifical Commission of Assistant for refugees. Other
operatives-Hudal, Bayer, Weber, Gallov-working
under the Vatican are mentioned by name. None of them controlled emigration
operations that were as well known as Draganovic's at
St. Jerome's. Add to this the fact that Draganovic
was a known entity in Rome-known personally even by U.S. intelligence
agents-and La Vista's omission seems curious. How did it happen that Nix's
career ended precisely at the time of La Vista's stay in Rome? How did La Vista
manage to put the finger on Nix when he had eluded any number of intelligence
agents? How did it happen that he discovered Nix's Soviet connections when
intelligence agents could not? Krunoslav Draganovic might be the answer to these questions. The
whole purpose of the Vatican's ratline operations was to infiltrate South
America with anti-Communists. "Knowing this, and knowing the methods of
operation of Catholic agencies which are sponsoring the emigration of anti Communists to these [Central and Latin American]
countries, the Communists are using these very agencies for the purpose of
sending their own agents to these same countries," La Vista wrote.47 DraganoviC's ratline depended on the Vatican's intention to
infiltrate Latin America. By catering to Communist agents, Nix sabotaged the
Holy See's efforts. It is plausible that Draganovic
tipped La Vista off to Nix's operation in exchange for being left out of the
report that would be sent to the State Department. Unfortunately, no
documentary evidence has come to light to substantiate this speculation. And
the question of why the Vatican would take Nix in, given the nature of the
allegation against him, must somehow find an answer. Attempting to solve the
Willy Nix riddle is only an interesting distraction. The important fact is that
the Vatican believed that Nix worked the ratline for them and when he got in
trouble the Holy See opened its doors to him. Nix stepped inside and
disappeared from history.
When Herbert J.
Cummings of the U.S. State Department received La Vista's second memo in July
1947, he reacted immediately, calling a large meeting to discuss what the
government should do.48 Before letting the Vatican know that its ratline
operation had been exposed, the State Department wanted some verification of
the La Vista report and instructed Graham Parsons of the U.S. mission to the
Holy See to check into the matter. Parsons confirmed La Vista's facts.
"Known or wanted war criminals [have] reached Italy illegally and applied
and received these [identity] documents under assumed names and have to date
successfully evaded apprehension."49 Anyone, Parsons wrote, could obtain
these documents through the "assistance of persons operating under the
protection of the Vatican." All a war criminal had to do was to contact
one of the national agencies working "under the protective custody of the
Vatican [the Pontifical Commission of Assistance] or Dr. Nix's "Free
Austrian Committee."50 Anyone, Parsons continued, can secure a letter of
recommendation ... to any Welfare Group under the protection of the Vatican,
stating that his name is so, and his nationality is such, and that he desires
an International IRed Cross Identity Document . . . .
He may be directed to Father Gallov, [the] Hungarian
Catholic priest, in temporary control of welfare units operating under the
protection of the Vatican. Fr. Gallov will either
direct subject by letter to his personal contact in the International Red Cross
or to Dr. Vida ... stating in effect that he has known subject for some time
and assistance will be appreciated ... to enable him to secure an IRC Identity
document. This letter will bear the S an official stamp of the Vatican. UFFICIO
ASSISTENZA RELICIOSA PER UNGAREAL IN URBO.51
At that point,
Parsons explained, the suspected war criminal could remain in Italy without
fear of being detained by the police until he received a visa from a South or
Central American country. Next, Parsons checked out the other end of the
ratline. At the Panama consulate, he was told that Panama admitted some
immigrants as long as they were not Communists. "For this reason persons
possessing a fascist background are favorably considered," Parsons wrote.52
All of the national units under the Vatican processed refugees in this manner,
"assisting persons from their native countries to escape prosecution
regardless of the country attempting to apprehend these persons." In
short, Parsons, verified everything that La Vista had reported and added new
details in some instances. Given these assurances, the State Department
directed Parsons to bring the matter of the ratlines to the attention of the
Holy See and sent him an airgram detailing the
substance of the discussion that Cummings had convened.53
Given Parsons'
assurances of the reliability of La Vista's memo, Cummings relayed the decisions
state had reached to Parsons and embassy personnel stationed in Europe and
South America. These were to notify the U.S. minister in Bern to contact the
European headquarters of the International Red Cross in Bern about the fact
that the Rome branch of the Red Cross was issuing bogus passports; second, they
were to bring the entire ratline issue to the attention of London; third, they
were to call attention of the American Joint Distribution Committee to the
matter of their involvement; and finally, they were to notify "our
consular officers to beware of the fraudulent practices outlined in the [La
Vista] report. In this connection, consideration is also being given to the
best means of seeking the cooperation of Latin American governments in preventing
persons with fraudulent documents from entering this hemisphere."54
Parsons was instructed to take the matter up with the Vatican and notify the
Italian police.
Any field agent who
had been working in U.S. intelligence for the previous two years would have
been astonished that the State Department was so out of touch. The data on the
Vatican's Spanish and Roman ratlines that intelligence agents had collected
over this period of time had never been passed on to the State Department, or,
if it had, it had become lost in state's paper shuffle. After the war, U.S.
intelligence had been downsized and gone through several reorganizations, from
the Office of Secret Service to the Strategic Services Unit to the Central
Intelligence Group.55 Intelligence agents' reports had been duly filed and
collected, but the information that startled Cummings in the summer of 1947 had
not found its way to his desk before that time. Ambassador Cabot's memo finally
woke everyone up, even though, as we have seen, in 1946 memos about the fact
that fugitives from justice were emigrating to Argentina had reached the State
Department from diplomat Hiram Bingham IV.
The State Department
felt that the ratline matter had to be brought immediately to the attention of
the British Foreign Office. Ironically, the British had known about DraganoviC's activity, if not the entire ratline operation,
for more than a year. Because Ustasa fugitives were
subject to British, not U.S., control, the British evidently saw no need to
notify the State Department. State was third man out-the British knew, U.S.
intelligence knew, but state did not know.
The Argentine author
of The Real Odessa, Uki Goiii,
understood that the papers of the British Foreign Office would be critical in
searching for links between DraganoviC's ratline and
the Vatican and used them extensively in his research.56 One of the editors of
the Vatican's World War II documents, American Jesuit Robert Graham, denied
that any such link existed. A second editor of the documents, German Jesuit
Burkhart Schneider, emphatically denied that Vatican money was used to help
fugitive Nazis when Gitta Sereny pressed him on this pointY Graham, Schneider, and the other two editors of Actes et Documents left out all of the documents dealing
with the origin, development, and operation of the Holy See's emigration work,
some of which had taken place during the war years. Uncovering document after
document in which the Holy See attempted to protect war criminals from British
authorities, Goiii has thwarted these attempts to
cover up the operation once and for all.
As a result, two
independent sources attest to the Holy See's ratline operations: the reports of
1945 to 1948 of U.S. intelligence agents and the papers of the British Foreign
Office.
A standoff between
the Vatican and England began soon after the war in August of 1945, when the
Holy See asked that the British not extradite the 600 Ustasi
being held in a Naples POW camp. Dissatisfied with the reply, the Vatican sent
a second message, this time in the name of Pius XII. According to the Vatican
secretariat, the Ustasi holed up in St. Jerome's had
sent an urgent appeal to the Holy Father on behalf of the detained Croatians,
particularly those in POW camp 215.58 Telling the British Foreign Office that
the Croats at St. Jerome's had asked the pope to intercede for them was the
Vatican secretariat of state's roundabout way of saying-without actually saying
it-that the pope was pleading for the detained Ustasa
prisoners. Actually, at this time the voice of the Vatican secretariat of state
was the voice of Pope Pius XII himself because he had not appointed anyone to
succeed Cardinal Maglione after his death in 1944.
Nevertheless, despite the pope's direct appeal, the British refused, telling
him that they would not protect war criminals.
Yugoslavia
subsequently pressed the Allies to arrest and extradite five Ustasa officers who were hiding out in the Oriental
Institute, a Vatican extraterritorial building. Milan Nedic,
Hitler's puppet ruler of Serbia, the first area in Europe that had been
declared "free of]ews," was among the
group.59 London instructed D' Arcy Osborne to tell
Vatican authorities that the likes of Nedic and
Pavelic were not Thomas a Beckets (the martyred twelfth-century archbishop of
Canterbury).60 Yugoslavia claimed rightly that by protecting suspected war
criminals the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Assistance was in violation of
the United Nations' order to return criminals to the place where their crimes
had been committed. Osborne reported to the Foreign Office that there was no
way Pope Pius would turn over the war criminals to the Communist Tito. The
standoff continued.61
The next
confrontation came in April 1947. It concerned fifteen Nazi collaborators who
were being detained in the Regina Elena prison in Rome. Among the group was
General Moskov, whom the British had arrested in Venice, confiscating 3,200
looted gold coins and 75 diamonds from him. In its appeal, the Vatican called
the prisoners "humanitarians." Astounded, the British gave Osborne
"icy instructions" to let the Vatican secretariat know that those
"who worked for the Pavelic Ustasa government
were giving their support and approval to a regime which flouted humanitarian
principles and which condoned atrocities unsurpassed in any period of human
history."62 While the Holy See appealed to Great Britain, Draganovic appealed on behalf of the war criminals to the
United States. The Vatican would not let up, and the British Foreign Office was
in no mood to give in. Victor Perowne, D' Arcy Osborne's successor at the British mission to the Holy
See, felt the Vatican's pressure, but London told Perowne
in no uncertain terms that the Ustasa was a
"wholly undesirable organization [which] has not only been collectively
responsible for vile atrocities on an immense scale during the war but has ever
since its inception made use of murder as a normal political weapon."63
These exchanges between the Vatican and the British Foreign Office clearly
establish the fact that Pius XII himself was protecting the fugitives in St. jerome's. A CIA report indicating the Vatican secretariat's
disapproval of DraganoviC's work was filed in 1952,
some years after the standoff between the pope and the British.64 By this time,
the ratline had fulfilled the Holy See's purposes and the Vatican's hopes that
Pavelic would overthrow Tito had been dashed. After that failure, Draganovic's motivations had become more purely venal.
While all the
conflict between the Holy See and the British Foreign Office took place, Draganovic, Hudal, and others
worked their ratlines. German priest Karl Bayer, who operated the German
national refugee office under the pope's Pontifical Commission of Assistance,
remembered Draganovic well when Gitta Sereny interviewed him decades later. "He was the
chief administrator of the Vatican escape route through Genoa," he
recalled.65 U.S. intelligence noted that in 1946 Draganovic
sent fifty Ustasi to Argentina via Barcelona. After
1946, his fugitives departed from Genoa. The Argentine government's
investigation determined that about fifty Ustasa
leaders reached their country and that overall possibly 115 did SO.66 But Gofii has found evidence in Argentina that pushes the
number of escaped Croatian war criminals much higher. Late in 1946 Draganovic received 250 landing permits from the Peron
government. Additional immigration papers show that well over 1,000 Croatian
refugees, some gray and some black, reached Argentina via the Draganovic ratline.67 At the Genoa port of embarkation, Draganovic's fugitives, as well as hundreds of other
supposedly anti-Communist fascist or Catholic refugees, were assisted by the
archbishop of the city, Giuseppe Siri.68 The archbishop had created two Church
committees, U.S. intelligence determined, whose purpose it was to help
refugees, including fugitives. Karl Bayer confirmed this independently:
"Yes, it's quite likely that [Draganovic]
received support from Cardinal Siri who is now archbishop of Genoa; there
again, you see, one's obligation was simply to help people who were in need of
help."69 Ante Pavelic himself escaped through the Genoa ratline, as well
as other major Ustasa war criminals such as Mile Starcevic, Stjepan Hefer, and Vjekoslav Vrancic.70
Pope Pius paid for
the passage of many of the Ustasa criminals, using
funds that came to him through the NCWC. American bishops became involved with
the Croatian refugee situation in Italy immediately after the war. An NCWC
study found about 40,000 refugees who were afraid to go back to Yugoslavia.
This implies that many of them were actually refugee fugitives from justice. In
March, the Holy See asked Cardinal Samuel Stritch of Chicago, who was visiting
Rome, to press the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to
work on behalf of 1,000 refugees in the Eternal City "whose plight is
grave."71 It referred specifically to the Ustasi
holed up in the Croatian seminary in Rome, "San Girolanio
Degli Illirci [sic],"
St. Jerome's. We now know that "grave" meant that they were suspected
war criminals, but to Stritch the language meant that they were potential
victims of Yugoslav Communists. Shortly after this, the NCWC began doing the
work in South America to ease the flow of Eastern European refugees into their
countries.
In the fall of 1946
Ante Doshen, whose identity as a convicted felon the
American bishops had not yet learned, contacted cardinals Francis Spellman and
Samuel Stritch to tell them that Croatian refugees in Rome were being sent back
to Yugoslavia against their will. This was happening, he said, because
"the interpreters with American military government are largely Communists
or fellow-travelers."72 This was the usual pitch to the Americans. That
fall also marked the first time that Monsignor Montini
contacted the U.S. hierarchy about the Croatian "problem." This
likely means that Doshen had a connection to the Ustasi refugees in Rome and the Vatican, because in October
the apostolic delegate to the United States informed U.S. bishops that
"the Holy See has expressed the desire that the American hierarchy
undertake to help these unfortunate victims of the war," among whom, of
course, were the Ustasa war criminals.73
Pius XII repeatedly
asked the British Foreign Office to remove Ustasi war
criminals in POW and displaced persons camps and at the Croatian seminary of
St. Jerome's from the list of those to be returned to Yugoslavia, as we have
seen. While he was pressing the British, Pope Pius enlisted the financial
support of U.S. bishops, especially Cardinal Stritch. Why did he single out Stritch?
His Chicago diocese was home to one of the largest congregations of Croatians
in the United States-St. Jerome's Croatian Catholic Church, located in the
city's South Side. The finances of this parish improved so much during the war
years that the Franciscan Croatians who staffed the church were able to payoff all its debts.74 Cardinal Stritch collected funds on
his own to add to the funds of the NCWC for the "refugees" in
Rome-$5,OOO in 1949.75 These funds were very likely collected annually from 1946
on from Catholics in St. Jerome's parish in Chicago for the Ustasi
war criminals holed up in St. Jerome's seminary in Rome. A substantial number
of Croatian Americans were Ustasa and Pavelic
sympathizers.
The Holy See and the
United States began the postwar era in totally divergent positions regarding
fugitive refugees, but by the summer of 1947 they had converged onto the same
course. To begin with, the U.S. Congress passed immigration legislation
allowing a limited number of refugees to enter the country so long as they were
not war criminals. During the postwar period, the Vatican was promoting
emigration of any anti-Communists in Spain and Italy regardless of crimes some
may have committed during the war. In 1943, the Allies signed the Moscow Declaration,
promising to return suspected war criminals to the country where their alleged
crimes had been committed to be tried there in a court of justice. The Big
Three agreed in Potsdam to try war criminals at Nuremberg, although they were
sorely tempted to summarily shoot them by firing squad.76 A list of some 70,000
suspected war criminals was compiled and as new suspects emerged, they were to
be added to the list, which would be updated and circulated among the national
authorities of the Allies.77 Although from the beginning, the United States
violated the agreement by harboring Nazi scientists, Operation Paperclip, at
times it rejected some whose "usefulness was compromised by their wartime
pasts."78 As a rule, the United States dutifully complied with the Moscow
Declaration, as the hunt for Pavelic and other war criminals demonstrated. The
Vatican's postwar practice, on the other hand, protected war criminals as
fascist anti-Communists, allowing them to hide out in extraterritorial
properties in Rome or in Vatican City and helped them escape to South American
countries. Thus, at the outset of the postwar era the policies of Pius XII and
the Allies regarding war criminals contradicted each other in theory and in
practice (for the most part).
But it was difficult for the Allies to enforce the Moscow Declaration to the
letter for several reasons. The quality of U.S. intelligence limited the
ability of the United States to comply. When an intelligence agent responsible
for Hungary was criticized for the low quality of his reports, he shot back to
his superior officers saying that they could expect no better when they sent
him "Iowa farm boys" who knew nothing of Eastern European politics
and could not speak Hungarian.79 U.S. and British intelligence personnel used
refugees to fill the gap. Agent Mudd infiltrated a Croat national into St.
Jerome's to collect data on war criminals. Colonel G. F. Blunda,
assistant director of intelligence for the Mediterranean theater of operations,
used a number of Croat nationals as agents'.80 The British lacked the personnel
to guard and administer the huge displaced persons camps in which grays and
blacks intermingled, so they employed Croatian nationals as security.81 Draganovic, who helped care for these displaced persons,
had easy access to the criminals among them. More important, by 1946 England
and the United States were increasingly reluctant to return possible war
criminals to countries whose postwar political circumstances practically
guaranteed an unfair trial. The U.S. State Department declared that in
Yugoslavia, "there is no justice ... in our sense of the term. Accused
often has no access to counsel, courtroom crowd is hostile, judges prejudiced
and in attitude indistinguishable from prosecutor, defense prevented from
introducing documents or witnesses."82 Although this analysis resembled
the attitude the Holy See had adopted immediately after the war, the Allies and
the Vatican chose different responses. The Americans and British returned Ustasa war criminals whenever Yugoslavia could produce
prima facie evidence of guilt. But the Vatican was not swayed even by that kind
of evidence.
As we have seen, the
Allies did not waver in trying to locate and extradite Pavelic. Not, that is,
until the middle of 1947, the point of convergence for the United States and
the Holy See regarding refugee war criminals. Pope Pius kept the ratlines going
until the dawn of the Cold War, when the United States joined in the effort to
use fascists to fight communism. The British, while returning bona fide war
criminals to Yugoslavia, used very undiplomatic language to shame the Holy See
into releasing those it harbored. This, to no avail. By the end of 1947 the
British Foreign Office had given up trying to use moral persuasion to pry loose
fugitives being protected by the Holy See. In March 1947, President Harry
Truman asked Americans to make a global commitment against communism, a
landmark speech that became known as the Truman Doctrine. "The clearest
dividing point" marking the beginning of the Cold War, "was [George]
Marshall's return from Moscow" to tell President Truman in April that
diplomacy would not work with the Soviets.83 In July 1947, the Central
Intelligence Agency came into existence. U.S. intelligence personnel, who were
not up to the task of infiltrating Communist countries, began to employ
fascists, including Krunoslav Draganovic.
The mindset of American agents regarding suspected war criminals changed. As
one agent put it, "any SOB who was against the Russians was our SOB."84
In the summer of 1947, the new program code-named National Interest came into
existence and Project Paperclip was phased out. The latter had had a narrow
focus regarding immigration candidates, but National Interest offered U.S.
protection to anyone who was anti-Communist. "Under the protective blanket
of Cold War philosophy, no plot or person was too unsavory to bring into the
fold," historian Linda Hunt wrote.85 On July 22, 1947, Secretary of State
George Marshall agreed that thirty-six Ustasi,
including some accused of deporting Croatian and Serbian Jews to death camps
and of "Jew hunting," should be sent from captivity in Italy, where
they were awaiting deportation to Yugoslavia, to zonal Germany and the custody
of the British and the United States.86 Not by accident did Ante Pavelic gain
"hands off" status in July 1947, the date that marks the year and
month of U.S. and papal convergence regarding war criminals.
For the
ever-more-venal Draganovic, the ensuing years were
golden. For each Croat fascist for whom he arranged emigration, he received
25,000 lire from the American Catholic Church through its agency, the NCWC. In
1954, the World Council of Churches gave Draganovic
186,000 lire to assist refugees, money which he used only for Croat fascists.87
He was also in the pay of the CIA, which gave him 1,400 dollars for each
emigrant. In this capacity, Draganovic arranged for
the emigration in 1950 of Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," where
he had served as chief of the Gestapo. Barbie ruthlessly deported Jews to their
deaths, including, shortly before the liberation of Lyons, forty-one children
from the Izieu children's home. Barbie enjoyed more
than thirty years of freedom before having to stand trial in France for his
World War II crimes.88
The cases of Klaus
Barbie and Ante Pavelic aptly illustrate the convergence of U.S. and Vatican
policy regarding war criminals by the middle of 1947. Pavelic, protected by the
Holy See, eventually escaped to Argentina through the complicity of the United
States when it suddenly switched to a "hands off" policy for him.
Barbie was protected by U.S. intelligence but escaped because of Vatican
complicity. Both men escaped through the Holy See's ratline operated by Draganovic. The Holy See could claim, of course, that Pope
Pius did not know about Barbie's crimes, but would it have mattered? It
certainly did not matter in PaveliC's case; Pius was
well aware of his crimes. Both Barbie and Pavelic were wanted for murder by
France. After Barbie's eventual extradition from Bolivia to face justice in
France, the United States finally admitted its guilt in protecting and
secreting him out of Europe. In 1983, the United States apologized to the
government of France.89 Neither Pius XII nor his successors have apologized for
protecting Pavelic, who, in the eyes of Pius XII "was a militant Catholic
who yesterday fought the Orthodox church and today is fighting communist
atheism."90
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.
First mentioned in
our From Belgium to Kosovo Research, we also will present the final information regarding
among others, Ante Pavelic and so on. The Ustasa's
gold: The Vatican’s War P.4.
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.
1. Patrick McNamara,
A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American
Anticommunism, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005,152.
2. J. G. Parsons,
memo of a conversation with Maritain, July 25,1947, Entry 1068, Box 15, RG 59,
location 250/48/29/01-05, NARA.
3. Clemens August Graf von Galen, Rechtsbewusstsein und
Rechtsunsicherheit, Rome, 1946.
4. Buscher, The U. S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 93.
5. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 180-181.
6. Kent, The Lonely
Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 187-190.
7. Peter C. Kent,
"Toward the Reconstruction of Christian Europe: The War Aims of the
Papacy, 1938-1945," in FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in
America, 1933-1945, ed. David B. Woolner and Richard
G. Kurial (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),169.
8. OSS memo, Caserta,
Italy, November 25, 1944, Box 469, Entry 210, RG 226, location 250/64/30/6,
NARA.
9. OSS report, Box
236, Entry 210, File 3, RG 226, location 250/ 64/26/01, NARA.
10. See Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, chapter 5,
"The Coming of the Cold War."
11. Uki Goiii, The Real Odessa:
Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina (London: Granta,
2002), Afterword.
12. U.S. Army Counter
Intelligence Corps report on Draganovic, February 12,
1947, Entry A1-86, Box 12, RG 262, NARA.
13. Norman J. W. Gada, "The Ustasa: Murder
and Espionage," in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, ed. Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Gada,
Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe (Washington, D. c.: National Archives Trust
Fund Board for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Groups, 2004), 211.
14. Ibid.
15. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 203-204.
16. Intelligence
report, May 10, 1945, Entry Al-86, Box 12, RG 262 NARA. This box contains a
collection of memos compiled by CIA forerunners.
17. U.S. Army Counter
Intelligence Corps report on Draganovic, February 12,
1947.
18. U.S. Strategic
Services Unit dispatch of June 22, 1946, signed by Agent Angelton,
Entry 210, Box 457, RG 226, location 250/64/30/04, NARA.
19. Goda, "The Ustasa: Murder
and Espionage," 206-208.
20. U.S. intelligence
report, n.d., n.p., Entry 211, Box 48, RG 226,
location 250/64/33/4, NARA.
21. Ibid.
22. Report of Joseph
N. Greene, political advisor, Trieste, to Alexander C. Kirk, political advisor,
U.S. embassy in Rome, April 22, 1946, Entry 2799, Box 109, RG 84, location
350/62/10/3, NARA.
23. Intelligence
reports of February and October 1946, Entry Al-86, Box 12, RG 262, NARA.
24. The Bigelow
report, discussed above, suggests that the gold reached the Vatican but does
not say that Pecnikar delivered it there.
25. Greene to Kirk,
April 22, 1946, Entry 2799, Box 109, RG 84, location 350/62/10/3, NARA.
26. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 214-219.
27. Report of Special
Agent Robert C. Mudd, September 5, 1947, Entry 134B, RG 319, NARA.
28. Report of Special
Agent Robert C. Mudd, n.d., n.p. Entry Al-86, Box 12,
RG 262, NARA.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid. See Goda, "The Ustasa: Murder
and Espionage," 212, for a more detailed account of Agent Mudd's activity.
Goda notes that the CIA was unable to penetrate DraganoviC's operation sufficiently to identify all of the
war criminals who escaped to Argentina. Through his work with Argentine
documents, Uki Gofii has
filled in this gap in the record.
31. John Moors Cabot
to U.S. State Department, June 11, 1947, Box 3623, RG 59, location 250/36/19/6,
NARA.
32. La Vista's first
report on the Vatican ratlines came in May 1947 and did not seem to elicit much
response from state. Cabot filed his report in June. La Vista then filed a
second report to the department of state in July, which jolted department
officials to action.
33. Cabot to State
Department, June 11, 1947.
34. England was in
charge of postwar matters relating to Yugoslavia; hence, Ustasa
war criminals were its responsibility.
35. Cabot to State
Department, June 11, 1947.
36. The first writers
to exploit the La Vista report were John Loftus and Mark Aarons in Unholy
Trinity, in 1992. Only Loftus had access to the La Vista papers. Their book was
shocking to say the least, especially the disclosure that Dr. Nix was a double
agent. But because no one could verify their account and because of the
authors' exaggerations and sensationalism, their work found a mostly general,
not scholarly, audience. A number of years passed before the La Vista papers
became available for general use at the National Archives and Records
Administration in College Park. It is now evident that beneath their
sensational account, Loftus and Aaron told a tale that was mostly accurate.
37. La Vista, report
titled "Illegal Emigration Movements in and through Italy" to Herbert
J. Cummings, July 14, 1947, Box 4080, RG 59, location 250/36/29/2, NARA. The
May 15 memo, also to Cummings, carries the same title and is also located in
Box 4080, RG 59, location 250/36/29/02, NARA.
38. In one account
(La Vista to Cummings, July 14, 1947), La Vista put the number at sixteen
agencies, but in the other account (La Vista to Cummings, May 15, 1947), he
said it was twenty-two. Monsignor Baldelli is identified in a memo of J. Graham
Parsons, May 12, 1948 (presumably to the State Department, regarding the La
Vista investigation), Entry 1068 or 1069, Box 22, RG 59, location 250/48/29/05,
NARA.
39. Parsons to State
Department[?], May 12, 1948.
40. Ibid.
41. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1983),
310-315.
42. La Vista to
Cummings, July 14,1947 and May 15, 1947.
43. Sereny, Into That Darkness, 320.
44. OSS report on the
German group in Rome, July 12, 1944, Entry 210, Box 217, RG 226, location
250/64/25/04, NARA.
45. La Vista to
Cummings, July 14, 1947 and May 15, 1947.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. U.S. State
Department, Washington, D. c., to J. Graham Parsons, July 28, 1947, Entry 1068,
Box 17, Folder marked "Political General 1947," RG 59, location
250/48/29/01-05, NARA.
49. J. Graham
Parsons, Vatican City, to Walter Red Dowling, August 13, 1947, Box 4080, RG 59,
location 250/36/29/02, NARA.
50. Actually, the
Free German Committee.
51. Parsons to
Dowling, August 13, 1947. "Ungareal" is the
Latin for Hungary, the native country of Father Gallov.
In this document, Parsons was actually retrieving information from a document
that could have been written as early as December 1946. Parson's document, like
the earlier of the two La Vista reports, floated around State Department
offices without triggering a response.
52. Ibid.
53.The airgram is missing from boxes 31-32 of Entry lOn, RG 59, location 250/48/29/6, NARA, which is where it
should be. I have not found any response from Parsons to state giving the
results of his discussion of DraganoviC's work with
Vatican officials.
54. U.S. State
Department, outgoing airgram A-392, July 25,1947, to
embassy, Rome, Box 40n, Central Files 1945--49, 800.012817-2547 top secret, RG
59, location 250/36/29/1, NARA.
55. The General
Accounting Office reported to Congress that "the fear that was generated
by General Clay's March 1948 'war is imminent' telegram was due in large part
to the lack of intelligence the U.S. had on Soviet intentions"; see
Comptroller General of the United States, Nazis and Axis Collaborators Were
Used to Further U.S. Anti-Communist Objectives in Europe-Some Immigrated to the
U.S. (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 1985). It seems likely that
intelligence was collected but was not passed on to the executive branch of
government, as it should have been.
56. After the
publication of the first edition of The Real Odessa, the well-known British
Catholic journal The Tablet praised Gofii's work but
felt that he had exaggerated the Vatican's connection to DraganoviC's
ratline. This criticism spurred Gofii to return to
the British archives and painstakingly work through them to find the essential
links. See Gofii, The Real Odessa, 326.
57. Sereny, Into That Darkness, 315f£.
58. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 329, based on WO 204/11333, folios
51 and 51D, PRO.
59. On Nedic, see Christopher R. Browning with Jürgen Matthaus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution
of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004), 336-337. Serbia's Jews were murdered by an Austrian
regiment serving in Hitler's army; see Walter Manoschek,
Serbien ist Judenfrei (Munich: Oldenburg, 1993).
60. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 331.
61. Ibid., based on
Foreign Office 371/67371 R1769, PRO.
62.The Vatican appeal
may be found in Foreign Office 371/67376 R6058, PRO.
The British rejection of the appeal is found in WO 204/11133. There is a
misprint in Gofii, The Real Odessa, 336, where the
final "3" is omitted from 11133.
63. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 339.
64. See Goda, "The Ustasa: Murder
and Espionage," 216. DraganoviC's storied career
took several more intriguing twists. According to a CIA report, his eventual
kidnapping by Yugoslav agents was actually set up by the Vatican; see Goda, 216f£.
65. Sereny, Into That Darkness, 309.
66. Goda, "The Ustasa: Murder
and Espionage," 211.
67. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 213-214.
68. Ibid., 235.
69. Sereny, Into That Darkness, 309.
70. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 214. In the final chapter of the
second edition of The Real Odessa, Gofii identifies
many Ustasa war criminals by name.
71. General secretary
of NCWC to Monsignor Patrick A. O'Boyle of WRS of the NCWC, March 15, 1946,
10/36/34, NCWC Records, ACUA.
72. John F. Cronin,
S.S., to Monsignor Carroll, November 13, 1946, NCWC interoffice memo, 10/36/35,
NCWC Records, ACUA.
73. Apostolic
Delegate to the United States Cicognani to Francis
Cardinal Spellman, October 23, 1946, 10/36/35, NCWC Records, ACUA.
74. See the Web site
of the St. Jerome Croatian Catholic Church of Chicago at
www.stjeromecroatian.org.
75. NCWC bishops' war
emergency and relief fund statement of disbursements from October 16, 1949 to
April 15, 1950, 10/3/6, NCWC Records, ACUA.
76. MichaelR. Marrus, The Nuremberg
War Crimes Trial, 1945-1946: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford Books,
1997),23-24.
77. Comptroller
General, Nazis and Axis Collaborators, chapter 2.
78. Ibid., 23.
79. This exchange was
extracted from a document by national archives archivist Greg Bradsher in his compilation of NARA records:
"Holocaust-Era Assets: A Finding Aid to Records at the National Archives
at College Park," National Archives and Records Administration, 1999.
80. Lt. Col. G. F. Blunda, Headquarters, Mediterranean Theater of Operations,
to Col. Carl Fritzsche, Assistant Deputy Director of
Intelligence, November 8, 1947, Box 173, File IRR XEOOll09 Pavelic, RG 319, location
270/84/1/4, NARA.
81. U.S. Strategic
Services Unit report, Rome, February 28, 1946, Entry 210, Box 457, RG 226,
location 20/64/30/04, NARA.
82. Comptroller
General, Nazis and Axis Collaborators, 12.
83. David McCullough,
Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 582.
84. Comptroller
General, Nazis and Axis Collaborators, chapter 2.
85. Linda Hunt,
Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project
Paperclip, 1945-1980 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 125 and 264.
86. Outgoing airgram from Secretary of State George Marshall,
Washington, D.C., July 27,1947, Box 3623, RG 59, location 250/36/19/6, NARA.
87. Counter
Intelligence Corps report filed by Agent Robert Mudd, September 5,1949, Dossier
AA766849WJ, RG 319, NARA.
88. Norman J. W. Goda, "Manhunts: The Official Search for Notorious
Nazis," in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, ed. Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda,
Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe (Washington, D.C.: National Archives Trust
Fund Board for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Groups, 2004), 426-430.
89. Ibid., 430.
90. Agents William
Gowen and Louis Caniglia, Rome, memo for the officer in charge, August 29,1947,
Entry 134B, Box 173, RG 319, NARA.
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