As the Jews were being physically eliminated by asphyxiation in occupied Poland, the spiritual leader of the Catholic world eliminated them theologically in Rome. In Mystici Corporis Christi Pius wrote that all men regardless of race were united in the Church-if they converted. If Jews did not convert, their destiny layout of the reach of the Church because they had broken the covenant. That does not mean that when Pius heard that Jewish children and elderly Jews were being murdered he did not feel sorry for them. In Supersessionism allowed Pius XII to lapse into callousness when he secretly protected war criminals even as Jews praised him for what he had done to spare them during the Holocaust.

 Pius XII's drive to keep the Soviets out of Catholic Eastern Europe during the war is quite understandable. Here his mistrust of communism worked hand in glove with his diplomatic bent. Some contemporaries-German Jesuits Gustav Gundlach and Robert Leiber; D' Arcy Osborne; and, above all, Domenico Tardini as he wrote in his memoiries-thought that it was this diplomatic consciousness that kept Pope Pius from speaking out about the Holocaust. Not speaking out about the Holocaust after 1942 can to some extent also be explained by the pope's hope that he could be the mediator of a peace that would separate the Soviets from Western Europe. But Supersessionism-the Church comes first-dictated this priority to Pope Pius.

The life of the Church also had greater importance than allowing those who had killed the Jews to be tried for their crimes. Somehow, fighting communism justified the ratlines in the pope's mind and in his code of ethics.

In fact few outsiders knew about Pius XII's efforts to save war criminals, and those who did know had no idea of how extensive they were. When Pope Pius asked the British Foreign Office to free Ustasa war criminals, he met with indignation, rejection, and insult of a very undiplomatic tenor. To a considerable extent thus, Pius XII isolated ethical considerations from the decision-making process. Pope Pius evidently had no second thoughts about buying a blacklisted banking chain during the war that was run by fascists and catered to fascists, or, as seems likely, investing in tungsten, a high-tech war material. Pacelli as Pius XII did not divest Vatican funds in major Italian insurance companies that cheated Jews by not allowing them to cash in their policies or, as we now know, refusing to pay inheritors of the Holocaust victims life insurance benefits. These investments resulted from the popes' nonfeasance; they were not in the habit of checking their investment choices against their teachings on capitalism. But when Roman Jews thought they could buy their way out of the grasp of the Nazi death machine, the best Pius XII could do was to offer them a loan. This was not a case of nonfeasance; Pope Pius made a conscious decision. To paraphrase historian Besier, because the Church concentrates on the administration of the sacraments, it must be watchful to protect this function under all circumstances. (For this see Gerhart  Besier, Der Heilige Stuhl und Hitler-Deutschland, 2004, 314.)

Protection of that function constituted the rationale of the papacy's policy of concordats. By allowing the Germans to disrupt the sacramental life of Polish Catholics without a public outcry in order to protect its concordat with Germany (in the hope that that country would prevail against Soviet Communists), Pius XII seriously wronged the Polish people and failed to see his error in sealing a concordat with a lawless state. In this instance, Tittmann's analysis was incorrect. Pius XII's main concern was not the religious life of the Polish faithful; rather, it was international politics.

Pius XII's decision to allow war criminals to evade the bar of justice was closely related to the conduct of diplomatic affairs but clearly on the wrong side of the ethical borderline. Beginning with Ante Pavelic, the Vatican knew the identity of many of the individuals it harbored and assisted and knew that they had committed multiple murders. Others were not known by name to the Holy See but were known by name to Hudal and Draganovic, whom the Vatican had engaged to operate its emigration programs. Virtually everyone in the western world knew of the multiple crimes Germans had committed during the war. Pius himself had no doubt about this. As we have noted, the Holy See kept a list of Croatian clerics believed to have engaged in atrocities. But since the war had ended as it had with the Soviet Union on the doorstep of the west, Pius made a purely political decision to shelter the guilty from the courts of justice.

In his postwar memoir, Bishop Alois Hudal bragged that he devoted all his charitable work after the war to helping fascists and "so-called war criminals. "1

Hudal believed that in helping Nazi criminals escape, he was in some small measure accomplishing what had eluded him during the 1930s, the marriage of Nazism and Catholicism. We have already seen the disastrous consequences of this ill-conceived dream, but the eccentric Austrian would not relinquish his fantasy. On his deathbed, one of Hudal's clients, SS officer Wachter, gave verbal expression to the bishop's dream when he told the prelate that he regretted that Hitler and the Church had not come together: "That would have broken bolshevism."2 Sending Nazis to South America would prepare for the day, Hudal believed, when fascism and bolshevism would again do battle.

What one rather quirky bishop did after the war would not much matter were it not for the degraded moral state of his clientele, the blackest of the black. Hudal was responsible for funneling top-ranking Holocaust perpetrators like Adolf Eichmann to Argentina. In carrying out this rescue work, the bishop engaged in the same effort the Vatican had taken up in Spain and Argentina-using fascists to combat Communists. For this reason we need to ask what Pope Pius knew about Hudal's work and whether Hudal received Vatican support.

When the war began, Hudal's prospects appeared exceedingly dim.

The pope was shunning him. In 1939, Pius XII gruffly withdrew papal patronage for Hudal's German National Church. "It's not a Roman custom," the Vatican told the bishop. Later that year, when Hudal sent Christmas greetings to the pope, a reply came from Maglione's office addressed to "the Aryan College" instead of to the College of the Santa Maria dell'Anima, the German national Catholic Church in Rome.3 When Hudal attempted to lead a group of German and Austrian pilgrims to St. Peter's Basilica and places in the Vatican complex that were normally off limits to visitors except when accompanied by a prelate, the Swiss guard unceremoniously blocked them and turned them away.

Out of favor with Vatican higher-ups who had once sought him out, Hudal had to find ways to operate on his own. This would not be easy, for Hudal soon found out that he was also out of favor with the American army occupying Rome. Romans knew Hudal was a notorious Nazi advocate. His wartime sermons were openly pro-Axis and his previous literary efforts had left a paper trail a mile long. Not until the last Sunday before the American occupation of Rome did Hudal voice anti-Nazi sentiments.4 Always an unconscionable opportunist of the worst stripe, Hudal feigned the transition from avid Nazi to anti-Nazi overnight.

Such was the notoriety of Hudal's Nazi sentiments that Allied security personnel wasted no time in cramping the bishop's action. Soon after the occupation of Rome early in June 1944, security agents paid an unannounced visit to the bishop's seminary and searched the premises. The pompous prelate was infuriated. The Allies understood exactly what kind of a person they were dealing with. According to an early though undated OSS report, Hudal was "a renegade in the full sense of the word, he belongs to the worst category of priests who dabble in politics, being unscrupulous [and] without character."5 This probe produced no evidence of Hudal's ratline.

The reason, clearly, is that it did not yet exist. Since the war would not end for nearly another year, Nazis had not yet become fugitives. Had Allied security personnel paid their visit a year later, they might have snared a big Nazi fish. But the visit and subsequent visits put Hudal on his guard. How and when, then, did the Hudal ratline come into existence? Before the Allies liberated the city of Rome, an informal group of Austrians, including Hudal, looked after Austrian refugees regardless of their political persuasions. It is possible, but uncertain, that a small number of Jews were also assisted. At any rate, the group did not come into conflict with German occupational authorities, with whom Bishop Hudal hobnobbed on every possible occasion. The number of Austrians in the informal group was small and overrepresented by members of the nobility, who presumably had means at their disposal. It is important to note that the Austrians had begun to assist refugees before the Americans arrived, for this would give them some semblance of credibility.

When the Allied army rolled into Rome, the Austrians raised the Austrian flag over the former Austrian embassy to show, Hudal would later claim in an interview, their appreciation for the liberation. The Austrians wanted to gain official status in the eyes of the Americans and British. They promoted the denazification of Austria and the re-creation of Austria as an independent country. By no means were the Allies fooled by Hudal regarding denazification, but they had no cause to suspect other members of the Austrian circle. To cast their net as widely as possible, the organizers of the Austrian clique founded a nonpolitical association and sought to nominate people of various political sympathies as candidates for office. Hudal's past made him unacceptable as an officer, but documents establish that he was the principal force in establishing the Austrian contingent. At the initial meeting in July 1944, 163 Austrians, or "Greater Germans," showed up. Hudal began the meeting by expressing "the sincere gratitude of those present towards the Allied troops for having victoriously freed the city after years of oppression and persecutions." A moment of silence followed in memory of those killed by Nazis.6 Allied security concluded its first report on the Austrians by affirming that on the whole the group seemed well intentioned but that "the bishop is more complicated and requires a more prolonged study."7

Wanting official status, the Austrians decided to call themselves the Austrian Legation to the Italian Government and to set up shop in the former Austrian embassy. This, however, did not pan out. They were evicted from the embassy by the Swiss, who were in charge of former German property in occupied areas, and the United States refused to give them official recognition. The group moved to a room in the Majestic Hotel and decided to call themselves the Austrian Committee, but after further problems regarding their claim to authority, they settled on being simply the Austrian Office. In spite of these demotions in status, the Austrian circle grew. It hooked new members and support by issuing identity cards to refugees who were ostensibly Austrian but who in fact could be from Greater Germany, or, in other words, German. After Hitler's suicide, German and Nazi refugees would become the rule rather than the exception for this organization. To obtain the card, the applicant submitted to a cursory investigation and was asked to sign a statement acknowledging his or her endorsement of the nonpolitical Austrian Liberation Committee, which was in fact the staff of the Austrian Office. In this way, membership soon grew to 267. Most people signed the endorsement without bothering to read it.8

The official signature on the identity cards was that of Alois Hudal.9 Because the Austrian Office provided a service that the Allied occupation authorities needed and because no other group provided such services, the occupational army recognized it officially. Hudal had played his cards well. In organizing the clique that would become the Austrian Office, he emphasized that they must demonstrate to the Allied occupiers that they intended to help them. The Austrians went out of their way to do just this. According to an OSS report, "as a group they are almost pathetically anxious to do everything to please the Allies .... They eagerly clutch at any hint of Allied interest in them however lowly the quarter from which it comes." Thus, very soon after the Allied occupation of Rome, the bishop had secured for himself the niche that he needed to carryon his "charitable" work, fighting communism by merging national socialist fascism with religion in the person of a refugee. If that person happened to be a fugitive SS officer, so much the better for the cause, in Hudal's warped way of thinking. An early but undated OSS report on Hudal described the bishop and the other founders of the Austrian Committee as "a small group of idiots" but accurately predicted that they could become dangerous if they came into contact with the German military.10 Of course, only a few of the refugees pouring into Rome were fugitive SS officers.

The occupational authorities naturally wanted to know where the Austrian Office got its operating funds. They had two autos at their disposal; the cars, decked out with red-and-white flags, were hard to miss as they moved in and around Rome. Besides the cars and the scarce and costly gasoline they ran on, the Austrian Office rented a hotel room until the Allies took over the Majestic for their own offices. After their eviction, the Austrians presumably paid rent elsewhere. Then there were the expenses generated by the issuance of the identity cards. Registration papers and the cards had to be printed at a time when paper was scarce and at a premium. The busy Austrians also had signs printed up notifying refugees of their whereabouts and purpose. Those who registered for the identity cards were charged only 100 lira-just pennies. Even though several hundred or more individuals forked over the lira, their contributions could not begin to cover the expenses of the Austrian Office.

The OSS had no trouble tracing some of Hudal's support to the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Assistance. According to Vincent La Vista's investigation, some sixteen national refugee organizations operated under pontifical auspices. Hudal's Austrian Office was just one of many such agencies. Since there was nothing clandestine about the Vatican's support of the many national groups working under it, Allied security personnel had no difficulty linking Hudal with the Vatican. Early reports on the Austrian Office noted that Vatican assistance was obvious. Other reports noted that the Vatican helped out with printing materials. There was nothing objectionable about this work, of course. Indeed, Italian and occupational authorities needed the help of the Red Cross and the various national and Jewish agencies to sort out the flood of refugees in Rome.

After a few months of nosing about, however, the OSS turned up another source of support for Hudal's group-expatriated Germans or Austrians in Argentina. Specifically, OSS agents linked the Austrian Office to Prince Ernst Rudiger Starhemberg, the vice-chancellor of Austria in the Dollfuss administration and a noted antisemite and hard-nosed fascist. At this time, September 1944, American security agents were probably not yet aware of Vatican links to the Argentine military strongman, soon to be president, Juan Domingo Peron. Thus, the triangle of the Vatican, the Austrian Office, and Peron would not have been apparent. But the connection of the Hudal group to Starhemberg was troubling in itself. The OSS knew that for all of the Austrian Office's protestations of anti-Nazism, most of the founding members were fascists. Bishop Hudal, pretending to be a turncoat anti-Nazi, lied through his teeth to Allied security agents, but other Austrians such as Bishop Graf Carlo Trautmannsdorf-Weinsberg set them straight regarding the rector of the German National Church.11

How did the links between Hudal and the Vatican and between Hudal and Argentine fascists come about? Hudal wrote in his memoir that Montini himself came to the German seminary and asked the bishop to take over Jewish refugee work as an agent of the American Joint Distribution Committee. Hudal declined the offer on the grounds that sequestering Jews along with German fascists would endanger his operation. In other words, sooner or later a Jewish survivor would recognize one of the Germans as an atrocity perpetrator.12 Hudal wrote that this meeting took place in 1939, which, of course, is unthinkable. At that early date there were few if any Jewish refugees and no fascist refugees whatever. The date worked well in Hudal's story; 1939 was the year the Vatican began rebuffing him. On the other hand, it is believable that Montini would try to get Hudal to take on work for the AJDC. That would mean that the Jewish refugees would be funneled to South America rather than to Palestine. According to La Vista, next to the Vatican the AJDC ran the most ambitious emigration service in Rome. (The AJDC's emigration program actually had LST-type landing craft to ferry people across the Mediterranean from Italy to Palestine.) It was run by Padre Maria Benedetto, the French Capuchin priest who, working for Delasem, had rescued so many Jews during the German occupation of Italy. 13 Since Pius XII opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, it makes sense that Montini would have approached Hudal about South America.

Montini, one of Pius XII's closest advisors, knew that Hudal ran the Austrian refugee program, knew that fascists of every stripe would flow through it, and knew that Bishop Hudal, known in Rome for his over-the-top pro-Nazi views, could and would facilitate the escape of war criminals. A likely scenario is that the pesky bishop organized the little band of Austrian "idiots" and from this base built a much larger program, within which he could take over the critical work of producing identification papers for black refugees. In other words, whether the Vatican liked it or not, Hudal was running the Austrian refugee program. But what did it matter to the Vatican if Holocaust perpetrators were benefiting from the Austrian refugee program under the Holy See's umbrella when, at the same time as Hudal was running his ratline from the German Santa Maria dell' Anima seminary, the Vatican itself was colluding in harboring Ustasa Croatian war criminals across town in the San Girolamo degli Illirici, the Croatian seminary of St. Jerome, and underwriting the vast Spanish ratline? The bottom line is that the Vatican made no effort to remove Bishop Hudal from the Austrian refugee program under the Pontifical Commission of Assistance until 1952, at which time all, or almost all, of the perpetrators of World War II atrocities who had not been apprehended had made good their escape.

Argentine writer Uki Goiii has documented a case that illustrates that the Vatican not only allowed Hudal to run the Austrian emigration program but also made use of it. Montini headed the Pontifical Commission of Assistance as part of his work in the papal secretariat. Pope Pius himself would have appointed Montini to head the commission. A German priest, Bruno Wiistenberg, who worked in the secretary of state office, was approached by the fugitive Nazi Bernhard Heilig for help. The convicted war criminal asked for money for a visa and transportation to South America. Wiistenberg refused to help but directed Heilig to Hudal's emigration program. There the Nazi fugitive got the assistance he needed; in 1951, he was employed in the same firm as Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.14

German writer Ernst Klee, who benefited from a rare chance to examine Hudal's papers in the archives of the Santa Maria dell' Anima seminary, found that Montini on one occasion sent Hudal 30,000 lira, presumably for the operation of the seminary. In fact, Hudal could use the money however he pleased. Thirty thousand lira was not a lot of money; ship passage to Argentina in those days could cost three times that amount. The Vatican's donation nevertheless confirms what Father Karl Bayer told writer Gitta Sereny, namely that "the pope did provide money [for Hudal's work]; "in driblets at times, but it did come."15 Some of the money U.S. bishops raised for Pius XII's emigration bureau ended up in Hudal's pocket. We know this as result of the Argentine CEANA commission's research of Hudal's papers.16 But as we will see, the bishop had other sources of support. Thus, he was able to pay for ship passage for at least some Nazi fugitives. But he did not have the funds to pay for passage for all of the war criminals that needed to get out of Europe to avoid prosecution. He would have done so, of course, had he been able to, but he was also responsible for providing food, shelter, false identification, and, when necessary, concealment. Reinhard Kops, for example, had to come up with 100,000 lira on his own to book passage to Argentina.

Kops, a former Nazi intelligence officer, is of special interest because of his association with Bishop Hudal. Writing under his Argentine name of Juan Maler, Kops provides us with an account of how the bishop's ratline functionedY After arriving in Rome, evidently sometime in 1947, Kops ate at the papal mess hall which was open to any and all of the refugees in Rome. There he met other German-speaking refugees, some of whom, like Kops, were subject to extradition to Germany and court trial. From these birds of a feather, who, Kops assures us, were well educated and from "the best homes," he learned the ropes, and he found his way to Hudal and the Santa Maria dell' Anima through the intermediary, "Aunt Paula." Direct approach to the seminary was chancy because a certain Father Heinemann had to be avoided for some reason, although he, too, was engaged in service for war criminals. Once he was in touch with Bishop Hudal, the "great and good friend" who sheltered the SS, Kops found safety and a new destiny far from Germany and Allied tribunals of justice.18

Because the seminary had been raided by U.S. intelligence officers, it was not a possible hiding place for refugees. Hudal placed Kops in a residence of an unidentified religious order whose house was but a short distance from the Vatican on the via Conciliazione leading to St. Peter's Basilica. A good number of refugees fleeing the law lived at this house. They slept on mats in a large hall. At Christmas 1947, some 200 hundred fugitives assembled in the house on the via Conciliazione, some from other hiding places, for a festive meal. After Bishop Hudal welcomed them, the superior of the religious house assured the "pilgrims" that the police would never find them there.19

Kops ran the library of the religious order, but he soon learned to run Hudal's ratline, or at least one of them. Hudal recognized that the gregarious north German would function well in his clandestine illegal emigration service. Kops could mix easily in the legitimate world and could bamboozle and beguile. Although a Protestant, he was friendly with the Swiss guards, got himself invited to their mess hall, played cards with them, and avoided Italian and Allied security by using the papal mail service. Soon Kops played the same role at the religious house on the Conciliazione as "Aunt Paula" did for the Santa Maria dell'Anima. He screened new arrivals who were supposed to come to the building in the early evening. Kops checked each one out: what sort of German accent did they have, did it correspond to their story, why did they need a secure shelter?

Franz Rufinengo, an experienced ratline operative, taught Kops how to run Hudal's line.20 Nazi fugitives could obtain an identity card from Hudal and then apply to the office of the International Red Cross to obtain a passport. If, however, the fugitive Nazi had functioned in some capacity in the murder of the Jews, then an intermediary would have to be sent to the Red Cross office to obtain the needed documents, because there were dozens of Jews at that office every day who also sought the papers that would allow them to emigrate. The danger was acute that a Jewish survivor could recognize a former concentration camp official like Franz Stangl or doctor like Josef Mengele or a lower-ranking guard. Red Cross personnel dealt with thousands and thousands of refugees and could not possibly check out the bona fides of each and everyone.

Once the fugitives had identification they could safely venture out of the house to one of the soup kitchens run by the Vatican, the Red Cross, or the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Association. Kops said that those lacking a birth or baptismal certificate could get by with two witnesses. In other words, the process could be abused by anyone who needed to do so. Inside the residence on the via Conciliazione, the German fascists plotted against Italian Communists. During the spring 1948 national elections-a most fearful day for Pope Pius, as we have seen, because of the strength of the Communist Party-the fugitives from justice ran a distribution center for the Christian Democratic Party, archenemy of the reds. Flyers and campaign literature was stockpiled in the house of the religious order, from whence it was distributed by the Germanspeaking illegals to the country's cities and countryside. Hudal's dream of the 1930s had come true.21

This is how Kops and other fugitives came into contact with the setup in Genoa, from where ocean liners departed for Argentina and other Latin American countries. Carrying campaign literature of the Christian Democratic Party gave the refugees some cover for their trip to Genoa. Of course, Hudal had long known how to dodge the perils that wanted fugitives faced at the port city. At one point, Hudal struck an arrangement with the Italian police whereby they were to return refugees, whether they were suspected criminals or not, to the place of residence shown on their identity cards. German or Austrian refugees and Croats were supposed to be turned over to the Allies by the Italian police for screening and possible extradition. But many in the Italian police force were former fascists of some sort or other and none of them were Communists. They sympathized with Hudal's work. After functioning well for some (indefinite) period of time, the Hudal arrangement abruptly ended when over 100 Germans mocked the Italian police as their ship cast off from land in Genoa.22

Once a fugitive made his way to Genoa with the necessary documents in hand, he sought out the office of the Pontifical Commission of Assistance or the diocesan office for emigrants of Archbishop Giuseppe Siri, both of which had facilities in the Genoa railroad station. Kops worked with these agencies and with a third, the Delegation of Argentine Immigration in Europe that Peron had established to promote emigration to his country. In 1948, Bishop Hudal wrote to President Peron asking for 5,000 Argentine visas.23 It was at this same time that the American Monsignor O'Grady, thinking his Latin American mission had finally met some success, reported to U.S. bishops that Peron had issued 5,000 visas. How was it possible for Hudal's letter to win notice in Argentina? Pierre Daye, the Nazi collaborator who had helped run the Spanish ratline, escaped from Spain early on to go to Argentina, where he made close contacts with the highest echelon of Peron's circle. He also visited many fugitive fascists, including Ante Pavelic. Among his acquaintances was Prince Ernst Rudiger Starhemberg, the onetime leader of the Austrian fascist party. Starhemberg, U.S. intelligence suspected, funded Hudal's ratline operation, and he was the bishop's connection to Peron.24 Many of those who used the visas that Hudal had obtained were undoubtedly war criminals such as Eduard Roschmann and Adolf Eichmann, both of whom had been clients of Hudal's ratline, and Josef Mengele.25 1948 marked the year of peak emigration of refugees to Argentina. When they reached Buenos Aires, the Nazi fugitive applicants for residence were processed by former immigrants, who were often themselves war criminals.26 Kops himself emigrated in 1948. We see then that Monsignor O'Grady's work may have been superfluous.

The identity of some of those the Hudal ratline aided is known. Most prominent among them would be Adolf Eichmann, the top expert in the branch of Reinhard Heydrich's intelligence service that dealt with Jewish affairs-the person who orchestrated deportations to the death camps in occupied Poland. After the January 1942 meeting at the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the construction of the death camps, Eichmann was put in charge of implementing the murder of European Jews. Ten years after Eichmann emigrated to Argentina, Israeli agents kidnapped him. He was put on trial in 1961, found guilty, condemned to death, and hung in 1962.

Josef Mengele was a second highly prominent beneficiary of Hudal's ratline. Known as the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, Mengele selected tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jews, sending them to their deaths in the modernized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. With Hudal's help, the mass murderer immigrated to Argentina. He eventually died in South America in 1978 and never had to answer for his horrendous role in the Holocaust.

Yet another blackest of the black fugitives, Franz Stangl, commandant of the death camps at Sobibor and Treblinka, found refuge and escape through the Hudal ratline. Gitta Sereny, who interviewed Stangl in prison, learned that Hudal gave him a place to stay in Rome, a Red Cross passport, pocket money, ship money to Damascus, and a job in Damascus.27 Eventually tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal, Stangl was extradited from Brazil after sixteen years of freedom and put on trial in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the death penalty had been abolished. A German court sentenced Stangl, who was directly responsible for the murder of approximately 950,000 Jews, to life imprisonment.

Eduard Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga; Walter Rauff, gas van murderer-the list goes on. We will never know just how many of the more or less 60,000 Nazis who emigrated to Argentina did so through the Hudal ratline. The number would doubtless be in the hundreds. Nor will we ever know how many of the 1,000 SS officers who found their way to that country had Hudal to thank for their new lives. Black fugitives found their way to Hudal because he had a "long-time relationship with Himmler's SD [intelligence] espionage service" and kept up contact with many Nazis during the war.28 The American intelligence officer, who dubbed the early pre-ratline Hudal circle "a little band of idiots," thought that the group would be dangerous if it made contact with German military personnel. Of course, that contact already existed. But in the final analysis, Hudal was more infamous than dangerous.

The Vatican appointed Hudal, the most notorious pro-Nazi bishop in the entire Catholic Church, to head the Austrian branch of the Pontifical Commission of Assistance. No doubt, Pius and Montini held their noses as they picked Hudal for the Austrian division of the commission, but they did not do it contre-coeur. They knew exactly what they were getting; Hudal's dalliance with Hitler during the 1930s was a fresh memory in the Vatican. The pope's close advisor, Jesuit Robert Leiber, had written to Hudal at the time of German invasion of the Soviet Union, as noted above, telling him that in some sense he could look upon it as a crusade, in this way reviving the Austrian bishop's illusions.29 As a history professor at the Jesuit Gregorian University, Leiber had no authority to write such a message to Hudal. Leiber's role as one of Pius XII's closest confidantes allowed the German Jesuit to act as the pope's intermediary and messenger. Vatican officials knew that they could rely on Hudal to do what they themselves were doing, providing fascists, whether gray or black, with passage to South America, where, supposedly, they would be needed to combat Communists. Hudal succeeded to such an extent that he became a magnet for the blackest Nazis. Once these notorious criminals crossed the Alps, they knew they had to locate Bishop Hudal in order to slink out of Europe via his ratline.

After a time, Bishop Hudal became a little too public and a little too obnoxious with his "charitable" aid for Nazi fugitives. In 1949, Hudal wrote an article, "Ein GriiiS iibers Meer" (An Oversees Greeting) for Der Weg, an Argentine magazine edited by Hudal's old crony Reinhard Kops. The journal circulated widely in Argentina and in Germany among unreconstructed Nazis. The article offered readers the usual Hudal pabulum-love of Germanness and the Church-but the Vatican, disliking this kind of publicity, reprimanded Hudal for his effort. After 1949, the flood of refugees had subsided in Italy and the ratlines had begun to dry up. But Hudal persisted, keeping up a running correspondence with Kops and sending him money from time to time for immigrant cransactions. Kops and Hudal even discussed plans to expand their operation for Nazi immigration into Colombia.30

As the number of Nazi fugitives dwindled steadily, Hudal's zeal for the ratline's cause remained high. Pius XII's patience wore thin. In 1952, he fired Hudal, forcing him to resign from his post as head of the Santa Maria dell' Anima. Hudal allowed his bitterness to bleed through the brief memoir he wrote in 1976,31 According to German writer Hansjakob Stehle, Hudal took his revenge by providing playwright Rolf Hochhuth, author of The Deputy, with the image of a cold and heartless Pope Pius.32 So ended a nearly 30-year relationship between the Austrian bishop and the Vatican. The degree of influence Hudal managed to exert over top Vatican officials during the 1930s and Pope Pius's use of him in the immediate postwar era is a comment on the ineptness of pontifical governance and its flawed judgment.

*Our reference that 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" comes from Laurence Schram, the director of research at the Kazerne Dossin museum in Mechelen/Belgium. She is the one that received access and researched the personal papers of the WWII Archbishop of Belgium in Mechelen, and reported to us that his secretary was told to give the same answer to all who wrote to him for help in regards to disappearing relatives in the case of Jewish residents of Belgium, or/and concerned Christians, that the Church had no responsibility and that he could not act in relation to such matters. Nevertheless it should be said that quit a few Belgian Christians did hide local Jewish children, so they would not be taken.

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.

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.

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. Alois C. Hudal, Romische Tagebuecher. Lebensbeicht eines alten Bischofs (Graz, 1976),21.

2.  Ibid., 298.

3.Ibid., 294-295. One hardly knows whether or not to believe Hudal's story about the misaddressed envelope, although the bishop repeated it twice in his memoir.

4. ass interviews of August 24,1944; June 24,1944; and September 18, 1944, Entry 210, Box 259, RG 226, location 250/64/25/04, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

5. Entry 210, Box 236, File 4, RG 226, location 250/64/26/01, NARA. The report, unfortunately, does not give a date for the visit to the seminary, but it is clear from the context that it took place sometime in the early fall of 1944.

6. ass account of the first meeting of the Austrians in Rome, July 2, 1944, Entry 210, Box 259, RG 226, location 250/64/25/04, NARA.

7.  Ibid.

8.  Ibid.

9. Report of Oliver Rockhill and Lt. Frederic Burkhardt, Rome, June 10 and 20, 1944, Entry 210, Box 259, RG 226, location 250/64/25/04, NARA.

10.  RG 226 Entry 210, Box 236, location 250/64/26/01, NARA.

11.ass reports of June and September 1944 provide the links to the Vatican and Argentina; see Entry 210, Box 259, RG 226, location 250/64/25/04, NARA.

12.  Hudal, Romische Tagebiicher, 201.

13. La Vista report, May 15, 1947, Box 4080, RG 59, location 250/36/29/02, NARA.

14. Dki Gofii, The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina (London: Granta, 2002), 249.

15. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983),315.

16. Gofii, The Real Odessa, 230-231. CEANA stands for Comisi6n de Esclarecimiento de Actividades Nazis en la Argentina, a commission set up by the government to investigate Argentina's ties to war criminals in 1997.

17. Juan Maler, Frieden, Krieg, und "Frieden" (printed in Europe: self published, 1987),321ff.

18.  Ibid., 322.

19.  Ibid., 326.

20.  Gofii, The Real Odessa, 231.

21.  Maler, Frieden, Krieg, und "Frieden," 327.

22.   Ibid., 328.

23.The source for this information is the Hudal archive at the Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome. CEANA was given permission to research the Hudal papers. See Goni, The Real Odessa, chapter 10, "Criminal Ways." The information, valuable as it is, is nevertheless incomplete. CEANA used the services of Professor Matteo Sanfilippo, an Argentine teaching at an Italian university, to do the research of the Hudal papers. Uki Goni suspects, with reason, that Sanfilippo could not have exhausted the material in the archive since he is not a specialist in the questions posed by postwar emigration and the ratline. I learned of Sanfilippo's limitations from Goni, with whom I corresponded on January 13, 2005.

24. Francis Kalnay, Chief X-2 branch, report on the Austrians in Rome, September 26, 1944, Entry 210, Box 259, location 250/64/25/04, RG 226.

25.Goni, The Real Odessa, 284-285.

26.Ibid., chapter 10.

27. Sereny, Into That Darkness, 289.

28. Goni, unpublished portions of chapter 16, "A Roman Sanctuary," of Into That Darkness.

29. Hansjakob Stehle, Geheimdiplomatie im Vatikan. Die Piipste und die Kommunisten (Zurich: Benzig, 1993). 198.

30. Goni, The Real Odessa, 328, based on records found by Seanna.

31. Hudal, Romische Tagebucher.

32. Stehle, Geheimdiplomatie im Vatikan, 203.

 

 

Bibliography and Works Cited

 

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