The official end of the European war in May 1945 was only a technicality on a calendar for Nazi officials and leaders of the German puppet governments. They had work to do: hiding billions in stolen loot. Pilfered assets were scattered all over Europe, everything from plundered museum art and real estate to missing gold reserves.1 Many saw the Vatican as a secure repository since no country would dare violate the church’s sovereignty by demanding an inspection or accounting.
Sturmbannführer Friedrich Schwend had directed Operation Bernhard, an ambitious wartime counterfeiting operation of British pounds (most of the fake money was made on printing presses by inmates at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp).2 The plan was to raise hard currency for the Reich as well as to sink British sterling by flooding the market with phony bills. In early 1945, Schwend set the groundwork for his eventual escape to South America by volunteering to become an informant for Allen Dulles’s OSS.3 To safeguard millions stashed in Swiss banks, he moved it all to the Vatican Bank. He avoided any possibility the Allies might track a wire transfer by sending the cash packed into several trucks (there are unconfirmed reports Red Cross ambulances made the journey through the war-torn countryside). Schwend’s Swiss drivers brought the money to a castle in Merano, an Italian town just over the Swiss border. Italians then drove it the rest of the way to the Vatican, where the cash disappeared. Shortly after the Schwend shipment to Rome, OSS intercepts revealed that the Vatican was exchanging large amounts of old five- and ten-pound British notes for new ones through “agents in England” (the Vatican dismisses such charges as having “no basis in reality”).4
As the war ended, the flow of suspect gold turned from a trickle to a flood. The Vatican did nothing to discourage it. U.S. intelligence had early reports after the formal truce that Ustašan leader Ante Pavelić and many of his henchmen had fled blood-soaked Croatia only after looting most of Zagreb’s banks, the Croatian state mint, and the National Bank.5 An American intelligence memo reported the Ustašan fugitives had stolen about 350 million Swiss francs of gold, most of it coins. In the weeks after the war, British troops seized about 150 million of the plunder at the Swiss-Austrian border.I The other 200 million (the 2014 equivalent of $530 million) entered the Vatican “for safe-keeping,” with unconfirmed rumors that it had “been sent to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican’s ‘pipeline.’ ”7 Giving credence to the possibility that the gold had been transferred to South America was a separate U.S. intelligence report. It concluded that German companies and banks such as the IOR may have moved upward of a stunning $450 million to Argentina.8 Emerson Bigelow, the investigating agent, suspected the Vatican was still somehow involved. He noted that the stories of the transfer to other countries might “merely [be] a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”9
William Gowen, a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officer based in Rome, monitored the Vatican to see if he could develop leads on Pavelić’s whereabouts.10 Gowen was one of the CIC’s best agents. A former Ustašan colonel told Gowen that in 1946 up to ten truckloads packed with gold traveled from Switzerland to Rome, where the precious metal was unloaded at the College of San Girolamo degli Illirici, the Croatian seminary, only a mile from the Vatican. The convoy reportedly arrived with Vatican license plates, accompanied by some men wearing stolen British military uniforms and others dressed as priests.11
Although several U.S. intelligence reports differ about the amount of gold that arrived in Rome, they agreed on a critical issue: any looted precious metal that came from Croatia ended eventually with an Ustašan Croatian priest, Krunoslav Draganović. When Gowen later interviewed Draganović, the priest admitted that the looted gold convoy had arrived in Rome under the control of an Ustašan lieutenant colonel.12
During the war Draganović had been a senior official of the Ustašan commission dedicated to the forced conversion of Serbs.13 In 1943, Pavelić had dispatched him to Rome as the secretary of San Girolamo. In addition to being a school for Croatian seminarians, San Girolamo was the center of Ustašan intelligence operations in Rome.14 Draganović was the highest-ranking Ustašan cleric in Rome and he was informally liaison to the Vatican. He cultivated connections with both Italian and Vatican intelligence agents.15
Josip Broz Tito and his communist rebels had come to power in a unified Yugoslavia a month before the war ended. Without a church-friendly government in Belgrade, the Vatican appointed Draganović as the Apostolic Visitator for Pontifical Assistance for Croatians. That made him a Vatican official who reported directly to Monsignor Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI) in the Secretary of State’s office.16 Draganović met frequently with Montini, and the Vatican’s Pontifical Assistance Commission ensured that the Croatian had plenty of identity papers.17 When Montini learned that Gowen was snooping around looking for Pavelić and also asking about the Monsignor’s own connections to Draganović, Montini complained to Angleton about the nosy American CIC officer. The result was a CIC order by which Gowen’s team was told “hands off” when it came to Pavelić and the Croatian priests.18
An American Foreign Service officer privately told Gowen that his probe was ordered closed because he had “violated Vatican extraterritoriality.”19 (Much later, when Gowen learned that his operation was shut down the same month that Draganović began helping U.S. intelligence, Gowen came to believe that Angleton had engineered it all as a favor to Montini).20
Despite that directive, Gowen continued accumulating intelligence. He eventually concluded that Draganović had turned the Croatian gold and other loot over to the Vatican Bank, even driving some of it in a convoy to St. Peter’s Square.21 Before he shut down his probe, Gowen had interviewed not only Draganović but also half a dozen other top Ustašan officials. The IOR, he concluded, had accepted the Croatian gold since the church classified it conveniently as “a contribution from a religious organization,” and then hid its existence by “convert[ing] this without creating a record.”22
At the same time U.S. intelligence was trying to determine if the Ustašan gold might still be inside the Vatican, it also was probing whether the church had received gold of questionable provenance from a prominent Italian family. Dr. Francesco Saverio Petacci had been Pius XI’s personal physician. Petacci’s daughter, Clara, was Mussolini’s longtime mistress. And Petacci’s son, Marcello, was a fascist official who was murdered in 1945 as he tried crossing into Switzerland with crates of cash (neither the killer nor the money was ever found). Allied investigators discovered that Marcello had been the middleman brokering large deals between foreign companies and Mussolini’s fascist state. The younger Petacci had earned commissions in Spain alone that totaled a then staggering 50 million pesetas (the 2014 equivalent of $340 million).23 A substantial amount of gold that Petacci had evidently accumulated was missing. American investigators followed leads to Spain to see if the family had moved the gold there, but determined it was “not likely.” Instead, Vincent La Vista, a senior Rome-based officer in the U.S. Division of Foreign Activity Correlation, concluded, “if the Petacci family had any vast hoard of gold, it would have been, and in all probability is, put away for safekeeping in Vatican City.”24 La Vista directed Operation Safehaven, the ambitious U.S. multiagency effort to retrieve looted assets. He ran into a solid roadblock of noncooperation when he tried pushing his inquiry. An informant told him why: “Petacci had, and still has, very dear and close friends high in the inner councils of the Vatican. . . . He is personally held in very high regard by influential personages close to the Holy See.”25 La Vista closed the Petacci investigation without any resolution about the missing gold.
• • •
After the war, the Vatican and its Roman properties served as far more than a repository for wartime loot. The war was not long over before the church got swept into the frenzy of its next secular political fight, this one against communism. If Pius XII had in part stayed silent about Nazi atrocities because he considered the Germans a bulwark against godless communism, the unintended consequences of Allied victory fueled his worst fears. On their march to topple the Third Reich, Stalin’s armies had swept over half of Europe. Instead of returning to Russia when the war ended, the Soviets stayed put and replaced the Nazi puppet governments with their own lackeys. The new regimes took orders from Moscow. The Soviets were in firm control of Catholic bastions such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. Six Catholic-dominated nations that had won a temporary independence between the world wars—Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—were united under the banner of Yugoslavia and the iron-fisted rule of its communist leader, Tito. Over time, Pius worried, the Catholic populations of those countries might lose their faith under the aegis of atheistic regimes. And Germany itself, the country for which Pius had so much affection and affinity, was sliced in two. The Soviets occupied the eastern half.
Stalin had taunted the Pope in 1944 and early 1945 by sentencing a dozen priests to death and imprisoning hundreds in Siberia. In response to being told by Churchill that the Vatican opposed Soviet policies, Stalin shrugged and asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?”26 Pius told Myron Taylor in 1945 that he feared the Russians were infiltrating the Italian army “so it could join with the Russian army in overtaking all of Europe.”27 (As late as 1947, Pius and Monsignors Tardini and Montini believed the Soviets were about to invade northern Italy. They often asked incredulous American diplomats about whether there was news of any Russian troop movements and a pending invasion.)
Italy was home to Europe’s largest postwar communist movement, led by a charismatic leader who Pius believed was a Soviet agent.28 When Mussolini had outlawed the Bolsheviks they went underground, and many fought with the resistance. Italy had paid a price for being on the losing side of the war. Most ordinary Italians were sick of a system they blamed for creating such a terrible mess, and were willing at least to consider what the communists offered. They were the only political party that had stood firmly against fascism. Only three months after the end of the war (and six months after FDR’s death), the OSS intercepted Pius’s order to Father Norbert de Boynes, the Vicar General of the Jesuits, to dispatch his priests to uncover “documentary proof of orders given by and financial aid furnished by the Soviet Union to Italian Communists.”29 Pius watched with alarm as some Italian Catholics spoke of developing a Christian leftist government.30
Adding to the Vatican’s high agitation, Western Europe was flooded with millions of refugees. Most were displaced from ravaged Eastern Europe. A million streamed into Italy alone.31 The Vatican had prepared itself since late 1943 for what it knew would be a human tidal wave.32 Most, as expected, were innocent civilians forced to abandon their homes in the war’s violent closing months. Pius gave Monsignor Montini full authority to run the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza (Pontifical Commission for Assistance), which oversaw all the Vatican’s humanitarian efforts. And the Pope appointed Monsignor Ferdinando Baldelli, Sister Pascalina, and Otto Faller, a German Jesuit, to help Montini cope with the enormous numbers who clamored for shelter, food, and other assistance.33
Blending in anonymously in the swarm of refugees were some Nazi fugitives. Some had either worked in the extermination camps, others had run the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, and a few were high-ranking officials responsible for the Third Reich’s ruinous war. They had shed their military uniforms, donned civilian clothes, and were frantically trying to avoid the American and British military police searching for them.34 The Allied Nazi hunters had no idea then that a handful of Catholic clerics in Rome anxiously awaited the Nazis. The church provided those fugitives not only a place to sleep and some food, but something far more valuable: false travel documents as well as a ticket by boat to a welcoming foreign country.35
Helping fleeing Nazis was not a policy established by Pius XII. The Vatican became a mandatory postwar stop for many war criminals fleeing Europe for a hodgepodge of reasons. Some prelates believed that the new communist regimes—particularly Yugoslavia with its demands for the return of all Ustašan leaders—were incapable of providing fair trials. Church officials felt that returning the wanted men was as good as killing them. Others were deluded by a notion that the fugitives might reunite and rally in a war to drive out the communists. And still others were fascist sympathizers or even dedicated National Socialists who wanted to do whatever they could to help the Nazis escape.36
Since the church had been silent during the Holocaust, on which there was a flood of grisly evidence since the end of the war, it was reasonable to wonder if Pius and his advisors felt any moral duty to unequivocally prohibit clerics from assisting criminals involved in that mass killing. There was no such policy. Pius, Montini, and Tardini never uttered a word in opposition to the priests who helped the fugitives. If the Pope’s silence during the war had fostered an environment in which otherwise dutiful Catholics could participate in mass murder and not fear excommunication or eternal damnation, after the war his approach to Nazi criminals created an atmosphere in which Catholics were free of any responsibility for the Holocaust. Instead, sympathetic prelates were emboldened to help murderers evade justice.
Pius stubbornly resisted any effort to apologize for the Vatican’s wartime inaction (such an apology would not come for nearly fifty years, under Pope John Paul II).37 He expressed public anger over the convictions of half a dozen Croatian Catholic priests by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission.38 The Pope believed those trials were not about delivering justice for wartime atrocities but were propaganda intended to embarrass the church. The same tribunal convicted Bishop Stepinac, but only after he had refused Yugoslavia’s offer of safe passage to Rome. Pius was so infuriated that he made the imprisoned Stepinac a cardinal (John Paul II beatified him in 1998, the first step toward sainthood).39
The Pope’s passion—more than he ever demonstrated over wartime reports of the massacres of Jews—did not stop with a handful of Croatian Catholic prelates. He urged the commutation of death sentences for some of the most notorious Catholic Nazi criminals. U.S. Military Governor of Germany General Lucius Clay rejected Pius’s personal plea for clemency for SS officer Otto Ohlendorf, an infamous chief of an Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing) squad in Russia.40 The Pope’s request for leniency for Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser, who earned a reputation as a merciless ethnic cleanser, raised a fury in Poland, the country where Greiser had been a regional governor. Polish officials rejected the Pope’s appeal and newspapers condemned the Pontiff’s “flirtation . . . and defense [of] Germany.”41 That did not stop Pius from also asking for clemency for Hans Frank, the lawyer turned Governor General who oversaw the Holocaust in occupied Poland, as well as Oswald Pohl, one of the chief administrators for all Nazi concentration camps.42 Despite Pius’s interventions, all the men were hanged.
The Pope’s clemency appeals encouraged a similar outpouring of pleas from German priests.43 Cardinal von Faulhaber decried denazification—the Allied effort to prevent hard-core Nazis from returning to postwar German industry and politics—as “unnecessary.” Other bishops denounced the Nuremberg trials as illegal, and even managed to win a commutation of death sentences for some of the Catholic defendants in the “doctors’ trials,” including the debauched concentration camp physician Hans Eisele.44 In December 1945, Bishop Aloisius Muench, the Vatican emissary to the U.S. Military Governor in Germany, wrote a pastoral letter that compared the Nazi murder of millions to the Allied rationing of food after the war. Other bishops used their pulpits to mythologize Catholic resistance to the war and to assure German Catholics that “collective guilt” was not applicable to Germans and the Holocaust. Pius thought that if ordinary Germans were burdened with too much guilt over what happened to the Jews, they might be distracted from concentrating on the Russian red menace.45
Given this atmosphere, some inside the church felt secure enough to help the fugitive Nazis by using some of the questionable gold that had arrived at the Vatican. Part of that gold may have paid for food and board for the fugitives, fake paperwork, travel money, and sometimes even work in a foreign safe haven.46 Some money might have even come from the Pope.47 The Vatican classified large untraceable payments as “information services” to Vilo Pečnikar, Pavelić’s son-in-law. U.S. intelligence had numerous reports that Papal payments funded the Croatian escape network, with Franciscan priest Dominic Mandić acting as the official liaison between the Vatican and the ratline.48,II In April 1947, the British detained suspected Vatican-ratline middleman, Croatian General Ante Moskov. He had 3,200 plundered gold coins and seventy-five diamonds. The Pope personally appealed to the British, in vain, to release Moskov and fourteen other Ustašan officers.49
Pavelić, the number-one-wanted Croatian, stayed in Rome and evaded a CIC manhunt for more than two years.50 Even before U.S. authorities ordered Gowen to stand down in his search, the former Croat leader had moved between several Vatican-owned properties to avoid detection, including St. Anselmo’s, a Benedictine seminary, and Santa Sabina, a Dominican basilica.51 Most of the time, however, he was in San Girolamo under Draganović’s protection.52 By that time, San Girolamo had become a seminary like no other. All visitors were searched for weapons. Casual callers were questioned about how they had learned about it. Passwords were required to enter any locked room.53
A 1947 British Foreign Office report concluded that Pavelić had left San Girolamo and might instead be living “within Vatican City.”54 Gowen thought that the Vatican’s protection of Pavelić was so strong that the only way to get him might be to seize him from the church properties, but the idea of violating Vatican sovereignty was a nonstarter in Washington.55 The Vatican ended the debate over what to do about Pavelić in 1947 when it sent him through its ratline to Argentina. A group of Franciscan priests greeted him on his arrival at the port of Buenos Aires.56 The former Croatian henchman became a security advisor to Argentine dictator Juan Perón.57,III
Draganović concentrated on his fellow Croatians. Other clerics helped the Germans. None was more energetic than Bishop Alois Hudal, the rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima. The Vatican picked him as the intermediary with the German ambassador during the 1943 roundup of Rome’s Jews.59 After the war, Hudal dropped his emphasis on all things German, referring to himself instead as “the Austrian bishop in Rome,” and establishing the Austrian Liberation Committee.60
Franz Stangl was the commandant of the notorious Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, where an estimated 1,000,000 to 1,250,000 Jews and Gypsies were gassed. In the closing days of the war, he had fled westward from Poland and by the time he reached Austria, “I heard of a Bishop Hudal at the Vatican in Rome who was helping Catholic SS officers, so that’s where we went.” Stangl, like many other fleeing Nazis, recalled, “I had no idea how one went about finding a bishop at the Vatican.”61
While walking across a bridge in Rome, Stangl ran into an SS intelligence officer whom he knew.
“Are you on the way to Hudal?” asked the SS officer, who was himself on the run.
A half hour later Stangl was in a room at a nearby rectory. Bishop Hudal walked in and put out both his hands to welcome him. “You must be Franz Stangl,” Hudal said in German. “I was expecting you.”62
Hudal put Stangl at the Germanikum, a Jesuit hostel for German theological students. He remained there until his Red Cross passport arrived, at which time Hudal gave him some money and sent him packing to Syria. Not far behind Stangl was another Sobibor death camp commandant, Gustav Wagner, “The Beast.” He had earned a dreaded reputation for his extreme sadism. (Stangl was captured in Brazil in 1967 and died in a West German prison of a heart attack in 1971. Hudal sent Wagner to Brazil, where he was arrested in 1978. A Brazilian court freed him, ruling that the German extradition request had “inaccuracies.”63 In October 1980, he was found dead in his São Paulo apartment with a knife in his chest. Wagner’s attorney said it was a suicide, which Brazilian authorities accepted, but many suspected revenge by Nazi hunters.64)
Hudal relied on several German-affiliated seminaries and rectories to house the crowd of Nazis. Some of the fugitives arrived disguised as monks.65 As recounted by Stangl, every day they were woken at dawn and had to leave their safe houses. They got daily meal tickets for lunch at a kitchen run by nuns. And their only instruction was not to draw any attention to themselves until they returned each evening.66
SS Standartenführer Walter Rauff, who engineered the mobile gas vans that killed 97,000 Jews before the Nazis developed more efficient gas chambers, played OSS and church cards to escape justice. Rauff had represented the SS in secret 1944 negotiations (Operation Sunrise) with Dulles’s OSS and the Wehrmacht to ensure that the German surrender in Italy would be orderly and not marked by victor’s vengeance. When U.S. counterintelligence detained him after the war in northern Italy, Rauff threw about Dulles’s name as if it alone would set him free. But his CIC investigators were unimpressed. The chief of the CIC concluded Rauff was “most uncooperative during interrogation . . . his contempt and everlasting malice toward the Allies [is] but lightly concealed. [Rauff] is considered a menace if ever set free, and failing actual elimination, is recommended for lifelong internment.”67 Rauff escaped. He later boasted, “I was helped by a Catholic priest to go to Rome.”68 Some historians believe Angleton sprang Rauff, through S-Force Verona, a joint American-British elite counterintelligence cell based in Italy.69 Once free Rauff went underground, relying on Hudal’s protection, and stayed ahead of his pursuers through the “convents of the Holy See” before fleeing for Syria.70 In Syria, he served as an intelligence advisor to the country’s military dictator. (Rauff ended up in Chile as an unofficial advisor to strongman Augusto Pinochet. He died there in 1984.)
Father Anton Weber, a Palatine priest in the St. Raphael Society, worked with Hudal. He processed the paperwork for Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of all the trains that carried Jews to Poland’s extermination centers. While Weber prepared the paperwork, Eichmann was sheltered at a monastery under the jurisdiction of Genoa’s Archbishop Giuseppe Siri.71
During the war, Pius had charged Weber with responsibility for saving Rome’s baptized Jews. He estimated that of the twenty thousand Jews in wartime Rome, about three thousand were baptized. The Vatican saved only two to three hundred.72 In contrast, after the war, Weber, Hudal, and others saved many more Nazis.73 When confronted decades later by a journalist, Weber admitted the difference was that he tried to filter out the Jews who pretended to be converts. He did not even do a cursory exam to spot the Nazis. “They [Jews] were all claiming to be Catholics. . . . I made them recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ave Maria; that proved in a hurry who was genuine and who wasn’t.”74 As for the fugitives he helped, “We really didn’t know the people we aided. At least, we knew nothing beyond what they themselves told us. . . . How on earth could I know that he was someone else?”75
“It was curious that Catholic priests kept helping me on my journey,” Eichmann recalled years later. “They helped me without asking any questions.”76,IV
Were priests such as Draganović, Hudal, and Weber lone wolves who took advantage of the Vatican’s humanitarian postwar bureaucracy and abused it for their own perverted motivations, or did the church’s effort to save war criminals proceed with the blessing of its highest officials, including Pius?
Draganović was in fact aided by some of the church’s top prelates. His benefactors included Monsignor Montini and Cardinal Angelo dell’Acqua, in the Secretariat of State; Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, who ran the Vatican’s intelligence service as Prefect of the Congregazione de Propaganda Fide; and Genoa’s powerful Archbishop Giuseppe Siri, an avid anticommunist who considered the Ustašans reliable allies in the fight against bolshevism. Those clerics, as did Pius, embraced the prospect that one day a revived Ustaša might topple Tito and return Catholicism to power in Croatia.78
From 1945 to 1947, while Draganović ran his ratline, Pius and his Secretary of State’s office peppered the Allies to reclassify detained Ustašans from their status as hostile prisoners of war to something more benign. The church hoped that a milder classification might result in their freedom or at least prevent their extradition to Tito’s Yugoslavia.79 At Draganović’s urging, Pius appealed to release some Croatians from a POW camp under British control. The British Foreign Office bristled at the Vatican’s interference and rejected the church’s request.80
In January 1947, Yugoslavia insisted the British arrest five ranking Croatian fugitives hiding in the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies. Although the institute was outside the territorial walls of Vatican City, Article 16 of the 1929 Lateran Treaty specifically gave it full extraterritoriality.81 In a flurry of urgent cables, the British debated what to do. “We would arrest and surrender these men if they were anywhere else in Italy than the Vatican,” wrote one Foreign Office official.82 Having spent the war inside the Vatican, British envoy Sir D’Arcy Osborne knew the Pope and top clerics as well as any other Western diplomat. He knew that Pius would be outraged at any hint of infringing on the church’s territorial status. Osborne convinced the Yugoslavians to ask the Vatican directly for the men’s extradition. He also tried to persuade the church that the British had “no doubt” about the guilt of the five men, and warned that should Pius refuse to return the Croatians it would reinforce a growing international perception that Vatican officials were the “deliberate protectors of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s ex-minions.”83 Papal officials ignored the Yugoslavian extradition requests.
Monsignor Tardini tried placating the Allies. He told Osborne, “the Pope had recently issued strict orders to all ecclesiastical institutions in Rome that they were not to entertain guests, i.e. harbour fugitives, without higher authority.”84 Instead of soothing the Allies’ irritation, Tardini’s response prompted concerns that the micromanaging Pius might have taken personal control of which fugitives received safe haven.
“I do not believe for a moment,” wrote Osborne to the Foreign Office, “that the Pope would give the order for their surrender.”85
Three weeks later when Tardini again met with Osborne, he informed the British envoy that there was nothing the church could do. He claimed the five wanted Ustašans were no longer at the Pontifical Institute. A frustrated Osborne addressed Yugoslavian complaints that Draganović—with the assistance of Monsignor Montini’s Pontifical Commission of Assistance—was flagrantly using the San Girolamo seminary as a way station to send war criminals to Argentina.86
Tardini was nonplussed. Monsignor Montini’s Pontifical Commission had “nothing to do with the Secretariat of State” so unfortunately the monsignor could be of no assistance.87
Beyond the Ustašan criminals, did the Pope know about Hudal’s energetic work to save Nazis? Decades later, when the revelations about Hudal’s ratline came tumbling out in declassified government files, the Vatican tried distancing Pius from Hudal.
There is no question that Hudal and Pius knew each other from when Pius was the Nuncio to Germany. Pius performed the celebratory Mass to mark Hudal’s appointment as a bishop in 1933. One cleric dates their friendship as far back as 1924 when the two were at a Vatican celebration for the Austrian ambassador.88 Pius’s key German advisors—Father Robert Leiber, Augustin Bea, and Monsignor Bruno Wüstenberg—were unquestionably friends with Hudal.
Still, Pius’s defenders say there is no evidence that Hudal ever told the Pope about the ratline. In 1977, in its only public statement on the matter, a deputy spokesman for the Vatican said about Hudal, “Generally the Vatican leaves this problem to the historians, because much time has passed and it’s difficult to say what happened.”89
It is uncontested that the indefatigable Monsignor Montini, who met with the Pontiff daily about all refugees’ matters, supervised Hudal.90 According to contemporaneous U.S. intelligence, Hudal gave “large compensation” to Draganović, further evidence the ratlines the two men ran symbiotically used many of the same sources for obtaining Red Cross passports, arranging travel, and even setting up jobs in safe haven countries.91
In 1947, when Eva Perón, the wife of Argentina’s Juan Perón, arrived in Rome as part of a European tour, Pius XII gave her a state reception. “Evita” also met with Bishop Hudal, and with Draganović at a reception hosted by the Italian government at the Rome Golf Club. An informant later reported to CIC officer William Gowen that Draganović and Perón discussed visas and Croatian emigration to Argentina.92 Buenos Aires was the port of choice for war criminals processed through both ratlines. U.S. intelligence had concluded that Buenos Aires’s archbishop, Antonio Caggiano—a close Perón ally—was a conduit between the Italian escape networks and the South American church.93
The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94 The report singled out Hudal, named twenty-one Vatican relief organizations suspected of assisting fugitives, and even exposed how easy it was for them to get fake travel papers. That explosive document kicked off a heated debate inside the U.S. State Department about how best to respond.95
Unknown to State Department officials, by the time of that classified report, the Cold Warriors in charge of U.S. and British intelligence had struck a secret deal with the church to share its ratlines.96 The Americans and British were racing against the Soviets to scoop up the best Nazi intelligence agents and rocket scientists.97 The partnership with the Vatican worked well. SS officer Klaus Barbie—nicknamed the “Butcher of Lyon”—gave the British and Americans crucial information about the network of informants he had developed in occupied France. Once they had what they needed, the OSS handed Barbie over to Draganović at a Genoa railway station and paid the Croatian priest to get Barbie to South America.98 By putting Barbie and others into the Vatican’s ratline, the intelligence services created an additional layer of deniability for their own postwar utilization of the Nazis. And the church benefited. Both British and American intelligence promised to protect the Vatican in case any other Allied government division started an investigation. The OSS, for instance, ensured that the report like the one that arrived at the State Department was shelved. And it kept from the diplomats any knowledge of Bishop Hudal’s 1948 request to Juan Perón for five thousand visas for “anti-Bolshevik” German soldiers.99 The CIA picked up the costs for running Draganović’s ratline through 1951.100
Pius’s obsession with communism made the Vatican a predictable Cold War ally. In men like Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Dulles brothers, Pius XII found that the British and American leadership embraced his anticommunist worldview.101 Pius printed and distributed copies of Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain speech. The Pope used the same hard-line rhetoric during some of his own talks to the faithful, referring to Catholics as “soldiers prepared for battle” with international communism.102 In June 1947, the U.S. announced the Marshall Plan, the massive American financial commitment to rebuild Europe. The Soviets condemned it as a blatant attempt to spread U.S. hegemony over Western Europe. The Vatican’s support was unqualified.103 No one but a handful of insiders knew that hidden inside the Marshall Plan was what New York’s Cardinal Spellman dubbed “black currency,” covert funds—some of which came from captured Nazi assets—to help the church offset anything it spent to help defeat the communists in the Italian national elections set for 1948.104
The dominant role the United States played in the Allied victory tilted the political balance of power away from Europe and toward America. A similar dynamic played out inside the church. The Vatican’s core theological and political conservatives aligned themselves with America. Church leaders believed that the U.S. shared Christian values and that the war victory confirmed a new American century. The American branch of the church had an unparalleled fundraising capability. It raised more donations for the Pope than the next dozen countries combined. Preeminent among the U.S. prelates was New York’s Cardinal Spellman. Friendly with almost every key U.S. political power broker, Spellman was anticommunist and worked hard to arrange support among U.S. institutions for the church’s covert role in the first postwar Italian balloting. Upon returning from a visit to Rome, Spellman shared with friends that Pius was “extremely worried about the election results, and in fact had little hope of a success for anti-Communist parties.”105 The Curia dreaded a “disastrous failure at the polls which will put Italy behind the Iron Curtain,” noted a Vatican emissary, Bishop James Griffiths.106
In the year leading up to Italy’s elections, Pius and President Harry Truman exchanged a series of letters, some of which leaked to the press before the election. Those letters cemented the Washington-Vatican alliance. Over domestic Protestant protests, Truman dispatched Myron Taylor back to the Vatican as the President’s personal representative. And Spellman—mocked as “the American Pope” by some Italian clerics—arranged a series of fall visits to the Vatican for eighteen U.S. senators and forty-eight congressmen.107 Some Vatican diplomats, such as France’s Jacques Maritain, resigned, protesting that Pius’s obsession with communism and his alignment with the United States had made him far too partisan.
Pius ignored that critique as well as the Lateran Pacts’ prohibition against the church being involved in politics. He hoped that the relationships formed then put into play elements that would safeguard the Vatican for decades to come. If the communists won the election, Pius had decided to emulate Pius IX and become a prisoner Pope, never venturing outside Vatican City so long as the reds were in power.108
The church revived Catholic Action—the lay social organization that Mussolini had shuttered—and it organized Italian voters across the country. The CIA sent in millions in covert aid and used the fear inside the Vatican to cement a firmer relationship with the ranking prelates who ran the city-state.109,V James Angleton, William Colby, and a support team (the Special Procedures Group) handpicked by Allen Dulles, orchestrated a campaign that mixed together propaganda and political sabotage (the lessons learned in that election became the template for helping handpicked candidates win in other countries).111 With some of the U.S. money, Monsignor Montini directed a campaign slush fund through the Vatican Bank.112 And the Vatican encouraged priests to condemn bolshevism from their pulpits and to remind worshippers that Catholicism and communism were incompatible. The Pope even gave a remarkably partisan pre-election speech, calling the vote “the great hour of Christian conscience.”113
It marked the church’s greatest role in secular politics since the mid-nineteenth century when it controlled the Papal States.114 In April 1948, 90 percent of eligible Italians went to the polls.115 The Pope had backed the right side. The conservative Christian Democrats crushed the left-wing Popular Democratic Front.116
The new Prime Minister, Alcide De Gasperi, an antifascist who had hidden inside the Vatican during the war while working as a librarian, embraced the country’s concordat with the church.117 The communists had vowed to repudiate all the church’s special treatment. De Gasperi reaffirmed Mussolini’s financial pact with the Vatican, including its tax-free status and complete independence from any Italian scrutiny regarding its financial affairs.
In May 1949, Look asked Spellman to write a cover story titled “The Pope’s War on Communism.” He wrote that Pius had “embarked on a spiritual crusade against the atheistic philosophies of Communist Russia. . . . [the Pope’s] armies are the God-loving peoples of the earth.”118 Two months later, Pius announced that he would excommunicate any Catholic who “defend[ed] and spread the materialistic and anti-Christian doctrine of Communism.” The church’s harshest punishment now applied to anyone who even read communist newspapers or literature. The Holy See insisted the notice be posted in churches worldwide.119 Other Vatican officials followed Pius’s lead. Cardinal Tisserant decreed that communists could no longer receive Christian burials. And the cardinals of Milan and Palermo banned communists from confession or receiving absolution. In contrast to Pius’s laissez-faire attitude during the war, when it came to whether Catholicism was incompatible with Nazi Party membership, in the postwar the Pope was unequivocal: it was not possible to be a Catholic and a communist.
I. When a U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent later questioned Pavelić, the Croatian leader admitted the British had detained him and his gang when they had crossed into Austria. The British threatened to turn them over to the new Yugoslavian communist government, where the gang was wanted for war crimes. Instead, Pavelić claimed they were set free after turning over two truckloads of gold to the British soldiers. The CIC officer thought Pavelić was lying to hide “where this money was.” There was also some suspicion inside the CIC that Angleton might have been the author of that Pavelić “admission,” to hide the real trail of the money.6
II. Ratline is a sixteenth-century nautical word referring to crude ladders on the sides of ships made from strips of rope. Sailors on sinking ships climbed down the ratlines in the hope of reaching a lifeboat. As used in reference to World War II, it refers to the last escape routes for the Nazis.
III. Pavelić was badly wounded in a 1957 assassination attempt in Buenos Aires, and died from complications from his wounds two years later in the German Hospital in Madrid, Spain. As for Draganović, he stunned everyone by turning up at a Belgrade press conference in 1967 and praising Tito’s communist government. He lived there until his 1983 death. The debate over whether he voluntarily defected, or had possibly always been a communist double agent, or even whether he was kidnapped by Yugoslavian intelligence, remains heated among historians.58
IV. Weber and other clerical helpers for Hudal did sometimes baptize Protestant SS fugitives as Catholics. Although that was in violation of canon law, the priests liked that the men they saved were now members of the Roman church.77
V. During the run-up to the 1948 election, the CIA laid the groundwork for its alliance with Intermarium (Between the Seas), a strong Catholic lay organization composed primarily of Eastern European exiles. At least half a dozen of Intermarium’s chief officers were later identified as former Nazi collaborators. Draganović was the Croatian representative on its ruling council. With the help of the CIA, Intermarium morphed into Radio Free Europe. MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, funneled money through the Vatican Bank to a related anticommunist group, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.110