136 See generally “Informal Notes of Myron Taylor,” September 27, 1942, 49, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
137 “Strictly Personal Memorandum, Giving Summary of Considerations Expressed by H. E. Monsignor Tardini, in Conversation with H.E. Mr. Myron C. Taylor,” September 26, 1942, 73, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
138 The translator for the Taylor-Maglione talks was an American priest, Walther Carroll, who was stationed at the Vatican. Several days after the meetings, Carroll used his hurriedly scribbled notes to write a detailed account.
139 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 290; see generally Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews.
140 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, 214, citing Maglione to Taylor, Vol. 5, September 1942, ADSS, 705, 721.
141 Notes of Montini, memo from Myron Taylor, 7247/42, Vatican City, September 27, 1942, ADSS; see also Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 159–60.
142 Telegram from the Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, October 16, 1942, United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, “Diplomatic Papers,” Europe, 1942 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 777.
143 Typical of the type of on-the-ground information available to the Vatican were the accounts of the Ustašan atrocities sent by Croatia’s Monsignor Vlatko Maček to both the Catholic Episcopate in Croatia and to an OSS source in Switzerland. “L’Episcopat Catholique en Croatie: Son point de vue à l’égard du raceme-Son attitude à l’égard e la persecution des Orthodoxes-Son activité charitable,” RG 226, Entry 210, Box 94, Proj. 974345, NARA. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 43; Pius did issue some public statements about the ravages of war during 1942. For instance, in May, he bemoaned the deaths of innocent civilians. He was not talking about the Jews, but rather the Allied air raids over Japan and Germany that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. See Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 170.
144 Between 1965 and 1981, the Vatican published an eleven-volume set of documents about World War II and Pius XII. Four Jesuit historians compiled the documentation (Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Le Saint Siège et la guerre en Europe–ADSS). Although most historians acknowledge ADSS as an important historical contribution, some shortcomings are also notable. Michael Phayer, an American professor who has written two acclaimed books about Pius XII and World War II, has criticized the ADSS document release as “critically flawed because of its many omissions.” For instance, no documents of the German bishops were published; the private papers of the Nazi sympathizer Bishop Alois Hudal were not unsealed; few papers from Eastern Europe, the center of the death camps, were included. Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing’s letters to Pius in 1943 and 1944 were missing. It is not clear whether those are still in the Vatican’s archives or were destroyed after the war. Some critical documents given to the Vatican during the war from the Polish representative in exile to the Holy See were added only after historian Gitta Sereny noted their absence. See generally Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, xvii; see also Sereny, Into That Darkness, 329, 334. As for the frequency of the meetings between Pius and Leiber, see Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 187.
145 For more information see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035177/.
146 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 271; John O’Hanlon, The Life of St. Malachy O’Morgair, Bishop of Down and Connor, Archbishop of Armagh (Memphis, TN: General Books LLC, 2013), 111–12.
147 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 270–71.
148 “A film is being made here,” D’Arcy Osborne wrote in his diary on July 31,1942, “for world distribution . . . I cannot say how I deplore this. It is like Hollywood publicity.” Separately Osborne wrote that the “Pope’s silence is deafening” about “the German crimes.” Osborne’s diary was the only personal memoir of any of the diplomats stationed at the Vatican that survived the war intact. He took it with him when he returned to England. The other diplomats had burned their files at the request of the Vatican Secretary of State when the Nazis occupied Rome in 1943: Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 285; see also Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 210–11.
149 John Evangelist Walsh, Bones of St. Peter: The First Full Account of the Apostle’s Tomb (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 17; Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 231–33; Kaas and Pius had become friends when the Pope—then Pacelli—served as the Nuncio to Germany during the 1920s. Pacelli had lobbied for Kaas’s appointment as a monsignor. Mother Pascalina said the duo were “extremely close.” Kaas selected for his team two Jesuits, Engelbert Kirschbaum and Antonio Ferrua; the Vatican’s then current architect, Bruno Appolonj-Ghetti; and an anthropology professor, Enrico Josi, who held the title Inspector of the Catacombs. See also Paul Hoffman, The Vatican’s Women: Female Influence at the Holy See (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), Kindle edition, location 822 of 2992.
150 Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 232–33; see also Walsh, Bones of St. Peter.
151 Walsh, Bones of St. Peter, 27.
152 Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 235–36. When Kaas died in 1952, he was initially buried at the Vatican’s Campo Santo cemetery. But Pius had him reinterred in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica, making Kaas the only monsignor buried near virtually all of the twentieth-century Popes; see also Walsh, Bones of St. Peter, 57–58.
153 Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943–June 1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 54. Katz relied on new testimony and freshly released documentation for his book, which was received to widespread critical acclaim on its publication. Katz charged that Pius XII had advance warning—nineteen hours—of the Nazi massacre of civilians at the Ardeatine Caves. Katz’s evidence that Pius had known and failed to act was circumstantial. The Vatican condemned the book. The late Pope’s sister and niece sued Katz in Rome. Italian law allows surviving relatives to sue for defamation and libel. A Roman judge ruled in the family’s favor, concluding that, “Robert Katz wished to defame Pius XII, attributing to him actions, decisions and sentiments which no objective face and no witness authorized him to do.” The court fined Katz and gave him a thirteen-month suspended jail sentence. Some pro-Vatican historians, such as Professor Ronald Rychlak, contend that the court ruling means “Someone truly interested in the truth about Pius XII would [be] dissuaded from relying on any of Katz’s work.” This author believes that while the evidence presented by Katz about Pius’s foreknowledge of the massacre is circumstantially persuasive, it is not conclusive. However, the remainder of his book is thoroughly researched and reported. Any citations to Katz’s work are separate to those portions from any issue about whether Pius may have known beforehand that the Nazis were about to kill Romans.
154 Walsh, Bones of St. Peter, 59.
155 McDowell, Inside the Vatican, 30–31.
156 Walsh, The Bones of St. Peter, 122–26, 128–31; Hoffman, The Vatican’s Women, Kindle edition, location 822 of 2992; “Vatican displays Saint Peter’s bones for the first time,” The Guardian, November 24, 2013.
157 Sereny, Into That Darkness, 142.
158 Polish Ambassador to Secretary of State, December 19, 1942, Vol. 8, ADSS, 755.
159 Papée met with Pius about ten times while he was in Rome during the war. He also met frequently with Cardinals Maglione and Montini. In one of his last meetings with Pius, in 1944, the Pope greeted him by raising both his arms as if exasperated: “I have listened again and again to your representations about our unhappy children in Poland. Must I be given the same story yet again?” Sereny, Into That Darkness, 330, 332.
160 Summary from a War Cabinet Meeting, December 12, 1939 (WM-39-112), 65/2/46, 264–65, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
161 Rafael Medoff, “Sidestepping Genocide, Then and Now,” Commentary, December 13, 2007; see the declaration at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/UN/un1942a.html.
162 A digital copy of Pius’s 1942 Christmas address is at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12CH42.HTM; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 268, n. 1.
163 Defenders of Pius, such as author Ronald Rychlak, argue that since Pius “used the Latin word stirps, which means race,” he was therefore referring to Jews since it “had been used throughout Europe for centuries as an explicit reference to Jews.” Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 177. The problem with that contention is that Pius did not use stirps when talking about Jews in any other instance. Why would the Pope decide that on the most important address of his Papacy about the Holocaust to be indirect about calling a Jew a Jew?
164 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 291; see also, Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 216–17.
165 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 219.
166 Palazzo Ciano, Diary 1937–1947, English reprint of 1947 book (New York: Enigma, 2002), 536–38. Pius’s defenders interpret the broad language of the 1942 Christmas message to be a resounding condemnation of Nazi crimes. They emphasize in particular the sentence about those who “because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.” Other historians contend that that single sentence was unfortunately lost in the forty-four-minute talk. What is undeniable is that it unquestionably had no impact. See generally Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 177–78; Justus George Lawler, Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2002), 109–17.
167 M. James Hennesey, “American Jesuit in Wartime Rome: The Diary of Vincent A. McCormick, SJ. (1942–1945),” Mid America: An Historical Review 56, No. 1 (1974): 36.
168 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 58.
169 Myra Noveck, “Israel’s Holocaust Museum Softens Its Criticism of Pope Pius XII,” The New York Times, July 1, 2012.
170 The Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, recounting Tittmann meeting with Pius XII, January 5, 1943, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, Volume II, Europe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 911–12; see Lawler, Popes and Politics, 110–11. Defenders of Pope Pius cite Vatican Radio broadcasts in 1942 about the atrocities in Poland as evidence the church spoke out about the crimes. The few broadcasts addressed the abuses against the church, however, not the Nazi war against the Jews. The American bishops did release a November 1942 statement expressing “a deep sense of revulsion against the cruel indignities heaped upon the Jews in conquered countries.” It was the very type of declaration most diplomats hoped in vain the Vatican might issue. See generally Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 175.
171 Tittmann to Secretary of State, October 6, 1942, Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. III (Europe), (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 777.
172 Lawler, Popes and Politics, 116.
173 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 86–87, 89–90. Slachta had also implored Hungarian church leaders to influence their Slovakian counterparts. She feared that the “hellish and Satanic” treatment of Jews she had witnessed in Slovakia might spill over to Hungary. She inquired about possibly excommunicating Monsignor Tiso, or the country’s prime minister, Bella Tuka, a daily communicant. Her pleas went unanswered.
174 Maria Schmidt, “Margit Slachta’s Activities in Support of Slovakian Jewry, 1942–43.” Included in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocides, Vol. 1 (New York: Pergamon, 1989), 207–11.
175 Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 82.
176 Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 304–6. See also Livia Rothkirchen, “Vatican Policy and the ‘Jewish Problem’ in ‘Independent’ Slovakia 1939–1945,” Yad Vashem Studies, 6 (1967), 36.
177 ADSS 9.147, Pressburg (Bratislava), Chargé d’affaires Bratislava, Giuseppe Burzio to Cardinal Maglione, April 10, 1943, ADSS. Reference: Report number 1517 (AES 2754/43), location and date: Presburg (Bratislava). On March 7, 1943, Burzio sent an Italian translation of the letter dated February 17, 1943 (No. 403/I/1943, AES 2754/43).
178 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, Kindle edition, location 632 of 4256. According to Phayer, Stepinac presented the report to Pius a year later during his April 1942 visit. The precise visit during which he passed the grim report is not clear because the Vatican has not released details about the document. However, Secretary of State Maglione wrote to Stepinac a month after his 1943 visit, thanking him for the documentation about what was happening to Jews and Serbs inside Croatia. Maglione was likely commenting on the nine-page report. See Alexander, The Triple Myth, 102–3.
179 George Weigel, “The Vatican Secret Archives Unveiled,” National Review Online, June 27, 2012; Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 73; Cromwell, Hitler’s Pope, 260.
180 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 96–97. The document given by Marie-Benoît to Pius was also omitted from the Vatican’s eleven volumes of Acts and Documents of the Holy See related to the Second World War, Actes et Documents du Saint Siège Relatifs á la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, ADSS. See also Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoit and Jewish Rescue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2013.
181 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 96.
182 Confidential Annex, Conclusions, Minute 3, Air Policy—Bombing Policy, 65/39/3, 16, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK; “Roman Catholics would be gravely distressed by an air bombardment of Rome,” concluded the secret memo distributed to the British civilian and military leadership; Report of 1940 Vatican notice to the Allies, see The Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, January 5, 1943, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, Europe, 1943, 913–14; see also Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 106.
183 Myron Taylor to FDR, January 1, 1943, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, Volume II, Europe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 910–11; see also Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, summarizing Tittmann’s audience with Pius XII, January 5, 1943, Foreign Relations of the United States, Europe, 1943, 911–12, 910-53; Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 201–2; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust 62, n. 97.
184 Although Rome was the focus of the Pope’s entreaties, Secretary of State Maglione lobbied that the bombers should also avoid hitting his own ancestral house near Naples. The Allies, meanwhile, had pleaded in vain with the Pope to condemn the massive civilian casualties from the Nazi aerial attacks on Birmingham and Coventry in November 1942. Monsignor Tardini, one of the Pope’s aides, told the British envoy that while Pius was “very distressed” about those bombings, he would not comment publicly. As for FDR’s assurance about the bombing, see President Roosevelt to Pius XII, June 16, 1943, reprinted in Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, Volume II, Europe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 919–20. As for Eden’s threats, see in the same volume “Memorandum by the Acting Chief of the Division of European Affairs (Atherton) to the Under Secretary of State (Welles), March 8, 1943, 915–16.
Behind the scenes, the British aggressively kept open their options about whether to bomb Rome. Churchill himself pressed the issue at a dinner party with Myron Taylor: The Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant) to the Secretary of State, London, December 8, 1942, Foreign Relations of the United States, Europe, 794.
185 Osborne quoted in Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 216.
186 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 208; Memorandum, Report for the month of July 1943 for the Dominions, India, Burma and the Colonies and Mandated Territories, August 27, 1943 (WP-43-381), 66/40/31, 125, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
187 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 207-08; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 63.
188 Pius XII to President Roosevelt, July 20, 1943, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, Volume II, Europe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 931–32; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 63, n. 103.
189 Although prime ministers such as Mussolini ruled effectively with full power, Italy remained technically a monarchy. The royal rule was dissolved finally by a popular referendum on June 2, 1946.
190 Daniel Jonah Goldenhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 159–60.
191 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 273.
192 Mussolini established his new government—the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana)—at Salò on Lake Garda, a Nazi stronghold in northern Italy. See generally Katz, The Battle for Rome, 49.
193 For details about the Nazi plans to possibly kidnap Pius, see Dan Kurzman, A Special Mission: Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII (New York: Da Capo, 2008).
194 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 39.
195 David Alvarez and Robert Graham, Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican, 1939–1945 (Studies in Intelligence) (London: Routledge, 1998), 83–85.
196 It is not clear if Nogara was in Rome when the German occupation began. There are no reports of what, if anything, was done inside the IOR to protect its financial records in case the Nazis entered the city-state.
197 Saul Friedländer, Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 182.
198 Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 118.
199 Eugenio Zolli, Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 169-70.
200 Rychlak, Hitler, the War and the Pope, 204-05; Zolli, Before the Dawn, 170; Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 120-21.
201 Letter from Nogara to Cardinal Maglione, Vol. 9, ADSS, 494. See also Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 118–22, 135; Rychlak, Hitler, the War and the Pope, 204–05.
202 Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 121.
203 Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey Through a Crime Against Humanity (West Sussex, UK: Littlehampton Book Services, 1969), 85–87.
204 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 103.
205 Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust, 101, 104.
206 Eitel Friedrich Molhausen, the German Consul in Rome, inadvertently saw the secret message from SS chief Heinrich Himmler to Obersturmbannführer Kappler, ordering the implementation of the Final Solution against Rome’s Jews. Molhausen warned Weizsäcker who in turn passed along the word to the Vatican. Leonidas G. Hill, “The Vatican Embassy of Ernst Von Weizsäcker,” 1943–1945, The Journal of Modern History, 39, no. 2, June 1967, 144–47; Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 65–66; Robert Katz, Death in Rome (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 25.
207 Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 65–66.
208 Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews, 151; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 301, 304.
209 Maglione quote in Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews, 152,181.
210 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 100.
211 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 106.
212 Hitler was not the only dictator Hudal admired. He called Mussolini the “brilliant Duce.” Archivo della Congregazione per la dottrina della fede, S.O., R.V. 1934, 29; Prot. 3373/34, Vol. 1, 3–4; see also, Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 76–81; 116–24.
213 Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 169–70. It was the Pope’s nephew, Count Carlo Pacelli, the General Counsel of the State of the Vatican, who asked Hudal to intervene. The bishop’s German connections were impeccable, so the Vatican considered him the ideal go-between.
214 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 77; Steinacher, Nazis on the Run.
215 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 216–17. As for the Hudal-Pius friendship, see Alfred Persche, unpublished manuscript titled “Die Aktion Hudal: Das letzte Aufgebot des Abendlandes,” 72–73, archives of Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes (Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance), Vienna. See generally Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 31–33.
216 Telegram from Weizsäcker to Foreign Office, Berlin, October 17, 1943, Inland Il Geheim, quoted in full in Katz, Black Sabbath, 215.
217 Some historians have suggested that Pius feared that if he protested, the Germans might detain him or take him as prisoner to Germany.
218 See Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 155; see also Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 63; Katz, The Battle for Rome,109.
219 Susan Zuccotti, “Pius XII and the Holocaust: The Case in Italy,” in The Italian Refugee: Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, eds. I. Herzer, Kathleen Voight, and J. Burgwin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 133.
220 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 524.
221 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 98. Some Catholic writers, such as Britain’s Joanna Bogle, have argued that the nuns and priests who sheltered Jews did so only as part of an authorized directive from Pius XII. But the work, while highlighting the bravery of many individual clerics and nuns when it came to saving Jews, falls short of conclusively establishing that it was official church policy. See Joanna Bogle, Courage and Conviction: Pius XII, the Bridgettine Nuns and the Rescue of the Jews (Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 2013).
222 Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 65, 69–82; 121; Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 165, 200, 218.
223 L’Osservatore Romano, June 21, 1948; This was the time during which Pius worked on the two most important encyclicals of his Papacy. But neither was focused on the war or the moral duty of Catholics at times of such unprecedented civilian carnage. Mystic Corporis Christi (On the Mystical Body of Christ) was released in June. It was an ecclesiastical insider’s discourse on why the Pope believed the Church was the living mystical body of Christ: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12MYSTI.HTM. The second—Divino Afflante Spiritu (On the Promotion of Biblical Studies)—was released a few months later on September 30. Divino strongly condemned the spiritual exegesis of modernists: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12DIVIN.HTM.
224 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 289.
225 Ibid., 289.
226 Osborne’s memo describing the meeting was not declassified by the British government until December 1998; Richard Z. Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves: How Hitler and Europe Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 249–50.
227 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 281–82.
228 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985), 623. In 1944, the Pope covertly asked the American government to do its best to stop the resettlement of Jews in northern Italy. By that time, however, the German army had fled Rome and Pius might have felt a bit braver, although still subdued in his opposition to the plight of the Jews.
229 Vol. 9, ADSS, 426, 274, as cited in Marrus, The Nazi Holocaust, Part 8: Bystanders to the Holocaust, Vol. 3, 1264.
230 Wistrich, “Reassessing Pope Pius XII’s Attitudes Toward the Holocaust.”
231 Herczl, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, 206.
232 Pius had set a poor precedent in Hungary with his 1943 appointment of Josef Grosz as the country’s second-ranking bishop. Grosz was an avid supporter of Hungary’s fascist party, the Arrow Cross. Many Hungarian Catholics, and even other prelates, interpreted Grosz’s appointment as a tacit approval by Pius of the new bishop’s political views.
233 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 166.
234 Amiram Barkat, “New Research Bares Vatican Criticism of Nazi-Era Pope,” Haaretz, December 1, 2006, 1. The accounts of both Bishops Burzio and Roncalli indicate that the Vatican had the Auschwitz Protocols by May 1944, although the church’s official position is that Pius did not see the document until October.
235 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 166–67; see also David B. Woolnera and Richard G. Kuria, eds., FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), chapter 13.
236 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 188.
237 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 223–24.
238 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 189.
239 Foreign Office files, 371/43869/21, National Archives, Kew, UK, cited in Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 290; see also Robert G. Weisborg and Michael W. Honhart, “A Question of Race: Pope Pius XII and the ‘Colored Troops’ in Italy,” The Historian, vol. 65, issue 2, winter 2002, 415).
240 As early as 1920, when he was Secretary of State, Pacelli had requested Pius XI’s intervention to stop France’s deployment of black troops, mostly of African heritage, in fighting in the Rhineland. That was because he said they were routinely raping German women and children. It was a charge the French adamantly rejected and called “odious.” Credible proof of such widespread behavior was never forthcoming. Foreign Office Papers, in Public Records Office, Kew, UK, 371/43869/21. For more information on the British national archives depository, see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/default.htm See also Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, quoting an interview with P. Gumple, S.J., 319, 320.
241 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 157.
242 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 287.
243 Katz, The Battle for Rome, 324–25.
244 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 21–22.
245 Squires, “Wartime Pope Pius XII ‘More Concerned About Communism than Holocaust,’ ” 1, referring to the discovery of previously classified wartime correspondence from D’Arcy Osborne to the British Foreign Office recounting details of one of his meetings with Pius XII.
246 David Kranzler, “The Swiss Press Campaign That Halted Deportations to Auschwitz and the Role of the Vatican, the Swiss and Hungarian Churches,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, Vol. 1, 162. Since the Nazi invasion a few months earlier, Horthy was mostly sidelined and the nation’s power was held by its Nazi Governor General, SS Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer.
247 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 107.
248 Ibid., 108–9.
249 Cooney, The American Pope, 141.
250 In May 2014, to the consternation of church traditionalists, Pope Francis announced he was not ready to allow Pius’s beatification. “There’s still no miracle,” Francis told reporters as he returned to Rome after a two-day visit to Israel. “If there are no miracles, it can’t go forward. It’s blocked there.” Before 1983, two miracles were necessary for beatification. Only one is now required. Nicole Winfield, “Pope Francis Says Pius XII’s Beatification Won’t Go Ahead,” The Times of Israel, May 27, 2014.
251 See generally Lawler, Popes and Politics, 133.
252 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 25–26; see also Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 259–60, 275; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope.
253 Lawler, Popes and Politics, 125. See generally Christina Susanna House, “Eugenio Pacelli: His Diplomacy Prior to His Pontificate and Its Lingering Results,” (thesis, Bowling Green State University, August 2011).
254 Foreign Office files, Osborne to Halifax, December 7, 1940, 380/106, National Archives, Kew, UK.
255 Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 468 of 10577.
256 When Pacelli was in Germany after World War I, there were violent pro-communist demonstrations. Pacelli wrote to the Vatican Secretary of State about how the three red leaders were all Jews. That experience helped form his later view that socialism, communism, and Jews were all intertwined. He described a trip by a colleague to meet representatives of the new Bolshevik government that controlled Munich. “An army of employees were dashing about to and fro, giving out orders, waving bits of paper, and in the middle of this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and divorcée, who was in charge. . . . This Levien is a young man, of about thirty to thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.” (Max Levien was head of the Munich Soviet movement.) See also Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, pp. 295–96. Defenders of Pius, like Jesuit historian Pierre Blet, counter that the letter to the Vatican Secretary of State was probably only signed by Pacelli, as such matters were often prepared by one of the Nuncio’s aides. Of course, that overlooks Pacelli’s micromanagement. It would have been out of character for Pacelli to send such a letter to his superiors without signing off on every word.
257 David L. Kertzer, “The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism,” The New York Times, September 23, 2001.
258 The International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission—consisting of three Catholic scholars appointed by the Vatican and three Jewish scholars selected by a group of Jewish organizations—concluded a ten-year study into the question of Pius XII and his role during World War II in 2009. The reassessment of Pius was that “Pius XII was neither ‘Hitler’s pope’ nor a ‘righteous Gentile.’ The polished diplomat ultimately won out over the voice of conscience in facing the formidable trial of the Holocaust.” In July 2012, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial and Museum, modified text in an exhibit so it was less critical of Pius. The title of that portion of the exhibit was changed from “Pius XII” to “The Vatican.” The previous text noted that Pius had signed the Reichskonkordat with Germany “even if this meant recognizing the Nazi racist regime.” The revision noted that Pius was only the Papal Nuncio when the Concordat was negotiated and it removed the last sentence. In another instance, the previous text addressed the deportation of Rome’s Jews by concluding that Pius “did not intervene.” The revision states that Pius merely “did not publicly protest.” In September 2013, Yad Vashem further moderated its position, adding that the Vatican was sometimes aware that convents sheltered Jews hiding from the Nazis.
Although the changes seem minor, considering they were made at Israel’s most important tribute to the Holocaust, they were significant. It was a confirmation that judging Pius’s wartime actions had become more complex and nuanced over time with the release of more documents. It was also a victory for the Vatican, which had for years bitterly protested the Yad Vashem text. In 2007, Archbishop Antonio Franco, the Papal Nuncio to Israel and the Palestinian territories, had threatened to not take part in Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony because of it. After the changes, Franco told the Catholic News Service that the revision was “a step forward”; see Wistrich, “Reassessing Pope Pius XII’s Attitudes Toward the Holocaust.”
1 The Nazis also collected a similar tax on behalf of Protestants. Ninety-five percent of all Germans paid the church tax during the years Hitler was in power. The concept of the tax has since spread to other countries, presently covering Catholics in Germany, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, as well as parts of Switzerland and Italy. The average tax is 9 percent of the person’s income tax. So someone paying a $5,000 income tax would pay another $450 as a church tax. In 2010, the last year for which the church released information, the tax brought in about $14 billion, paying 70 percent of the Vatican’s expenses. That year, a retired German professor of church law filed a lawsuit demanding that he be allowed to receive Communion and have a Catholic burial, but not be forced to pay the tax. A German court ruled against him, in a decision the national press dubbed “pay to pray.” An extension of the tax to cover capital gains as of 2015 has caused thousands of Germans to quit their parishes. See Tom Hehegan, “Capital Gains Mean Church Losses in New German Tax Twist,” Reuters, August 29, 2014. See also Doris L. Bergen, “Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? A Response to Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (January 2007): 29–30.
2 Clemens Vollnhals, “Das Reichskonkordat von 1933 als Konfliktfall im Alliierten Kontrollrat,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 35, Jahrg., October 4, 1987), 677, 695–97. See also Paul L. Williams, The Vatican Exposed (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), Kindle edition, 428 of 2622.
3 Because of Luxembourg’s restrictions on access to company files, it is not possible to determine how Grolux was ultimately dissolved or what happened to its 36 million Luxembourg francs (then worth approximately $2.25 million). McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1033.
4 RG 226, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Box 168, XL12579, NARA.
5 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 190.
6 William Harvey Reeves, “The Control of Foreign Funds by the United States Treasury,” Law and Contemporary Problems, Duke University Law School, 1945, 22.
7 Pollard, The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash, 1085, 1091. Some reports claim that the amount of gold transferred was substantially higher, approximately $22 million; see Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 27; see also McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War.”
8 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 457–58; see Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 190.
9 In 2012, documents released from the National Archives of the United Kingdom revealed that from 1941 through mid-1943 the British government had intercepted many Vatican cables and communications about the church’s investments to the U.S. and U.K. They provide a limited view of Nogara’s overall strategy. Other documents that provide a fuller portrait of Nogara’s financial management are sealed in the British National Archives; a year of ABSS statements at J. P. Morgan are missing; and the diary of the British envoy to the Vatican, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, is in the British library but heavily redacted. U.S. Treasury Department, Treasury Financial Agent, Form 1, November 10, 1941, part of the collection of T series, 231/140, National Archives, Kew, UK; also McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1032.
10 Executive Order No. 8839, April 10, 1940, Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control, U.S. Treasury Department, Washington: March 30, 1943, 6, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
11 American isolationists objected to the freezing order, criticizing it as a provocative act that could encourage an Axis retaliation against the U.S. FDR claimed authority for his executive order from a broad World War I–era statute, the Trading with the Enemy Act.
12 U.S. Treasury Department, “Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control,” Washington, March 30, 1943, 6, Papers of Bernard Bernstein Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO; see also Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 451–52, 829, citing U.S. Department of the Treasury, Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control (Washington, DC, 1945).
13 Executive Order 8785, 6 Federal Register, 2897, 1941. And in Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control, U.S. Treasury Department, Washington: March 30, 1943, 6, 11, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
14 Shortly after that amendment, the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union. Russia was then removed from the blacklist.
15 “Italians Take $480,000,000 from the U.S.,” New York Post, May 3, 1941.
16 General License No. 44, Roman Curia—Generally Licensed National, Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control, U.S. Treasury Department, Washington, March 30, 1943, 44, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
17 “Nephew of Pius XI Dies,” The New York Times, January 29, 1953, 28.
18 Cardinal Carlo Salotti, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, and one of Pius’s closest advisors, “is pro-Fascist and a close friend of Pius XII.” Cardinal Adolf Bertram, Director of the Confraternity of German Bishops, “is a weak man who has collaborated with the Nazis.” Genoa’s cardinal, Pietro Boetto, “is unquestionably the ringleader of the Fascist clique within the College of Cardinals.” Cardinal Raffaele Carlo Rossi, Secretary of the Consistorial Congregation, “is decidedly pro-Fascist.” Cardinal Celso Benigno Luigi Constantini is “a Fascist.” Argentina’s Cardinal Santiago Luis Copello is “a Fascist, [and] anti-United States.” Paris’s Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard is “a collaborationist.” And Cardinal Nicola Canali, President of Vatican City, is “a Fascist.” J.C.H. to A.W.D. (Allen Dulles), OSS, September 10, 1942, RG 226, E217, Box 20, Location 00687RWN26535, NARA.
19 Foreign Office files, 37150078, Financial Activities of the Vatican, John Crump, Ministry of Economic Warfare, to Peter Hebblethwaite, Foreign Office, March 29, 1945, National Archives, Kew, UK; U.S. Treasury Department, “Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control,” Washington, March 30, 1943, 24, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
20 Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 163.
21 RG 131, Department of Justice, Foreign Funds and Control Records, Box 487, Letter of John Pehle to Henry Morgenthau, April 21, 1942, NARA; see also Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933–1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983), 191. The U.S. did more than simply fail to list the Vatican as a blocked country under the president’s executive order. At times, the U.S. gave the church, under the direction of Pius XII’s nephew Carlo Pacelli, permission to import supplies through an Allied naval blockade.
22 Harold H. Tittmann Jr., Inside the Vatican of Pius XII, Kindle edition, locations 665–77.
23 Ibid.
24 McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1045; Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 96, citing J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, to Adolf Berle Jr., Assistant Secretary of State, September 22, 1941, Decimal File 1940–44, Box 5689, File 866A.001/103, RG 59, NARA. For details on the Pope’s personal account, see Memo from Chase National Bank to Ferdinando Federici, September 30, 1941,“Pope’s Account with Chase National Bank, New York,” RG 59, IWG (Nazi war crimes working group), FBI Secret Intercepts, NARA.
25 “Authorizing a Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals and Controlling Certain Exports,” July 22, 1941, Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control, U.S. Treasury Department, Washington: March 30, 1943, 14–15, Papers of Bernard Bernstein Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. See also Reeves, “The Control of Foreign Funds by the United States Treasury,” 57.
26 A historical review of the Proclaimed List for just Latin America—in which most of the countries were neutral during the war—reveals that in the first year it was issued some six thousand businesses were listed. Those marked as pro-Axis by the State Department, relying invariably on undisclosed evidence assembled by the FBI, included a diverse group, ranging from accountants, lawyers, even landlords who had done business with a German, Italian, or Japanese national: Max Paul Friedman, Economic Warfare, Enemy Civilians, and the Lessons of World War II Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin American World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 418.
27 F. W. W. McCombe’s Report on Vatican Funds, May 16, 1941, T 231, 1131, National Archives, Kew, UK. The TWE (Trading with the Enemy) files were released by the British government mostly between 1999 and 2008 and are maintained at the Department of Trade and Industry: Enemy Property Claims Assessment Panel (EPCAP) Secretariat; Database of Seized Property, Reference Section NK 1, National Archives, Kew, UK. The British published a “Statutory List,” which was their blacklist.
28 McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1043.
29 On January 21, 2013, The Guardian published a “special investigation” under the banner headline, “How the Vatican Built a Secret Property Empire Using Mussolini’s Millions.” The newspaper followed the Lateran Pacts money that was deposited into British Grolux to list the properties the church had acquired over the years. “Behind a disguised offshore company structure, the church’s international portfolio has been built up over the years, using cash originally handed over by Mussolini in return for papal recognition of the Italian fascist regime in 1929. Since then the international value of Mussolini’s nest-egg has mounted until it now exceeds £500m.” A Vatican spokesman dismissed it the following day: “I am amazed by this article in the Guardian, which seems to come from someone who is among the asteroids. . . . These things have been public knowledge for 80 years.” David Leigh, Jean François Tanda, and Jessica Benhamou, “Mussolini, a Vatican Vow of Silence and the Secret £500m Property Portfolio: Offshore Structure Veils List of London Properties Fascist Origins of Papacy’s Wealth Hidden from 1931,” The Guardian, January 22, 2013, 1.
As for Nogara’s transfer of the Vatican’s share of British Grolux to the Morgan Bank, see Foreign Commonwealth Office files, 371/30197, letter of P. W. Dixon to F. W. Combe, Trading with the Enemy Branch, August 27, 1941, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 189, and “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1088.
30 Conclusion Former Reference regarding the Foreign Secretary: WM (40) 99, 65/6/44, 388, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
31 Foreign Office files, 37150078, Financial Activities of the Vatican, John Crump, Ministry of Economic Warfare, to Peter Hebblethwaite, Foreign Office, March 29, 1945, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also Nechama Janet Cohen Cox, “The Ministry of Economic Warfare and Britain’s Conduct of Economic Warfare, 1939–1945,” King’s College London, 2001, online at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/2935689/246631.pdf; see Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 190.
32 Maurizio Pegrari, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 78, (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2013).
33 “Italy’s Money Mart Here Shut by U.S. Order,” New York Herald Tribune, June 22, 1941.
34 RG 84, Safehaven Files, Banca della Svizzera Italiana, memo from managing director to United States consul in Berne, March 30, 1943, Entry 323, Box 6, NARA. In 1947, Banca della Svizzera Italiana formed a partnership with the Bank of Rome and opened the Banco di Roma per la Svizzera. One of Pius XII’s nephews, Prince Marcantonio Pacelli, was appointed as President. See Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 181.
35 Sudameris was actually a collection of eight banks operating in five countries. Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 108; see generally Chernow, The House of Morgan, iBooks edition, 795–96. The Sudameris banks had shares in Nogara’s interlocking network, the same one he used to help German firms move assets to South America.
36 RG 226, Research and Analysis Branch, Letter from R. Fenton, UK, Entry 19, Box 90, XL6425, NARA; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 191; and Leigh et al., “Mussolini, a Vatican Vow of Silence and the Secret £500m Property Portfolio.”
37 After the war Malagodi served as secretary to Italy’s Liberal Party and in the 1980s was the President of the Italian Senate. Pegrari, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
38 Fondo AD2 (Nogara), Cart. 15, fasc. 40–45, telegram of Giovanni Malagodi to Bernardino Nogara, May 15, 1943, ASBCI, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
39 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 110–11; Confidential cable dated December 21, 1945, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
40 The State Department Report that covers Sudameris, Nogara, and the Vatican is the “Report of Recent Activities of the Banque Francaise et Italienne pour L’Amerique du Sud (Sudameris),” by Virginia Marino of the Economic Warfare Section of the War Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, May 9, 1944, Entry 16, Box 850, File 70712, RG 226, Location 190/2/28/6, NARA.
41 Ministry of Economic Warfare, letter to Berne Embassy, April 10, 1945, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 192; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 110.
42 See generally Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 192.
43 Nogara to J. P. Morgan & Co., New York, November 10, 1941, T 231, 140, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1039.
44 General Ruling No. 17, 8 Federal Register, 14, 351, 1943; Reeves, The Control of Foreign Funds by the United States Treasury, 42–43; US Treasury Department, “Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control,” Washington, March 30, 1943, 6–17, 19–20; Treasury Department, Office of the Secretary, April 13, 1943, General License No. 68A, As Amended, 67, 106, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
45 Journal entries for January 2, 1942, and March 19, 1942, Series T 231, 141–42, National Archives, Kew, UK.
46 Reeves, The Control of Foreign Funds by the United States Treasury, 31. It is also possible that the Vatican investigation merely got lost in the volume of cases into possible evasions of the economic warfare laws that flooded into the Treasury Department. Treasury received nearly 600,000 reports of violations over four years.
47 U.S. Treasury Department, “Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control,” Roman Curia—Generally Licensed National—General License No. 44, Washington, March 30, 1943, 44–45, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
48 Germany and Japan were excluded from the list of countries from which it could operate. In the spring of 1943, U.S. officials were furious to intercept an SS cable that reported the Vatican had sent $45,000 to Japan to care for wounded soldiers. Treasury threatened to terminate the church’s special status, but the Vatican was spared any punishment after claiming the money was sent to the church’s Apostolic Delegate there for “relief of prisoners of war in Japanese hands.” Phayer, Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War, 103–5; see also Memorandum, U.S. Treasury Department, regarding the transfer of sums in U.S. currency to the currency of European countries, Box 5690, RG 59, Location 250/34/11/1, NARA. Records at the National Archives, RG 59, IWG (Nazi war crimes working group), FBI Secret Intercepts, has hundreds of pages of government tracking of transfers between Vatican-owned bank accounts in the U.S. and banks abroad, as well as details about the dividends earned on shares and bonds, from the company stocks held by the church in its U.S. accounts.
The presence of church missions in otherwise blacklisted or sanctioned countries continued as a problem between the U.S. and the Vatican long past World War II. Information contained in a WikiLeaks cable shows that as late as 2002, the Treasury Department had blocked Vatican funds sent to Cuba, prompting a furious response from the church’s Secretary of State. Treasury, as it did in World War II, backed off and released the money: https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/02VATICAN83_a.html.
49 The IOR’s roots go back to an 1887 commission of cardinals appointed by Pope Leo XIII. Their role was to use some cash donations from the faithful to buy property. That commission morphed in 1904 under Pius X into the Commission of Religious Works. And in 1908, the Pope removed its “cardinal only” status, and renamed the small group the Prelate’s Administrative Commission for the Works of Religion. His successor, Pius XI, approved in 1934 some expanded powers that allowed the commission to act as a financial clearinghouse for other Vatican branches. In 1941, a year before he created the IOR, Pius XII had placed the commission under the oversight of a panel of cardinals, and gave it limited rights to accept deposits from some clerics, only for the “works of religion and Christian piety.” The commission was subsumed by the IOR. See generally Raw, The Moneychangers, 53.
50 See Reese, Inside the Vatican, 205–6.
51 See J. Paul Horne, “How the Vatican Manages Its Money,” Institutional Investor, January 1971, 78. Canon lawyers made a point that the IOR was “in Vatican City” not “of the Vatican.” That seemed to create some distance between the IOR and the Pope in case the bank ended up in any difficulty. See Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 185.
52 “Marcinkus Comments,” Il Sabato, October 22, 1982.
53 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 45.
54 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 200; see also Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 45.
55 Raw, The Moneychangers, 53.
56 The countries that share a border with Italy are France, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria, San Marino, and the Vatican.
57 “Declaration of attorney, Franzo Grande Stevens, in support of the IOR’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s third amended complaint,” October 30, 2000, Turin, Case No. C-99-4941 MMC, United States District Court, Northern District of California, § 21: “It is the custom and practice of the IOR not to retain records after ten years.”
58 Raw, The Moneychangers, 54.
59 For examples of U.S. intelligence efforts to keep track of Vatican financial transactions, see in general Federal Bureau Investigation, Secret, Interagency Working Group (IWG), Nazi War Crimes, FBI Secret Intercepts—Vatican, RG 59, NARA.
60 Executive Order 8785, 6 Federal Register, 2897, 1941.
61 The Allies also had learned that a fascist finance official had thanked one of the IOR’s lay officers, Massimo Spada, for the IOR’s purchase of fascist-issued bonds that helped support Mussolini’s government. Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 24–25.
62 Susan Headden, Dana Hawkins, and Jason Vest, “A Vow of Silence: Did Gold Stolen by Croatian Fascists Reach the Vatican,” U.S. News & World Report, March 22, 1998.
63 The British were the first to put the Bank Swiss Italianne of Lugano on the blacklist in 1940 and the Americans followed late the following year.
64 “Papers Link Vatican to Illegal Deals with Nazis Swiss Bankers Used as Conduit, U.S. Intelligence Documents Say,” The Toronto Star, Reuters, August 4, 1997, A3; see also Arthur Spiegelman, “Vatican Bank Dealt With Reichsbank in War-Document,” Reuters, International, August 3, 1997.
65 The accounts in Germany were not significant investments, but that the church could maintain them without discovery is evidence that the Allies were not fully capable of following the money trail. Files maintained at Entry 1069, Box 287, RG 59, Location 250/48/29/05, NARA; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 103–6.
1 When I was far enough along on my research—which had started in 2005—to know precisely what IOR-related information might be in the Secret Archives, I sought access from the Vatican. The Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, formally passed my request for access to Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States. Viganò in turn forwarded my request to Archbishop Jean-Louis Bruguès, the Archivist of the Secret Archives. After several weeks, my request for access was formally denied in 2013.
2 Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, viii–ix.
3 Ibid., xii.
4 Joseph Belth, ed., “Life Insurance and the Holocaust,” The Insurance Forum, Special Holocaust Issue 25, no. 9 (September 1998): 81, 92–93.
5 After the war, Italian and German businessmen feverishly tried convincing the Allies that their collaboration with the fascists had only been for business expediency, not because of ideology. See, for instance, interrogation of Kurt Schmitt, Allianz’s General Director, July 8, 1947, Office of Military Government, RG 260, Folder 2/58/2-7, NARA. The same was true in Germany, see generally Feldman Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 51. During the war, the business relationships were incestuous between a handful of the largest companies. For instance, U.S. intelligence uncovered that Schmitt secretly owned shares in Generali’s American subsidiary. See “The Pilot Reinsurance Company of New York Shareholders of Record,” February 4, 1942, RG 131, Box 26, Folder 230/38/110/5, NARA.
6 Ranking Officials, Assicurazioni Generali, also Washington Reports 1943, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
7 Webster, “The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank,” 329.
8 The company was Galata, a mining and mineral exploration firm. See Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, ed. Percy Strzelecki, Vol. 34, (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: The Institution, 1908), 234.
9 Webster, “The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank,” 329.
10 Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy 1908–1915, 111; Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 18. At that time, BCI was more than simply a bank. It had equity and management stakes in many companies, with its largest interests in armaments, shipping, and steel. Italy sometimes committed public money or gave special tax breaks to BCI-led industries that were considered critical to the nation (such as the chemical industry in central Italy in 1912). The Bank of England, the Morgans, and the Mellons had minority shares in some BCI industrial syndicates.
11 Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 52, citing Carte Nogara, correspondence between Nogara and Volpi between 1912 and 1914. The BCI archives have two files dealing with the Merkur Gewerkschaft (German) and Monte Amiata (Italian) mines: that correspondence covers from 1919 to 1926 and includes an attempt by Nogara, then a BCI executive and mining engineer, to get the Amiata corporation to take an interest in Anatolian mining (Turkish) from 1920 through 1922. When Volpi became the chief Italian representative in peace talks with the Turks, he tapped Nogara to fill his vacant spot on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. “Italy: Volpi’s Commission,” Time, November 2, 1925; Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); see also Memorandum, Treaty of Peace with Turkey from the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, February 17, 1920, 24/98/65, 253, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
12 Webster, “The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank,” 359.
13 Franco Amatori, “Entrepreneurial Typologies in the History of Industrial Italy (1880–1960),” The Business History Review 54, no. 3 (Autumn, 1980): 371.
14 Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of Totalitarian Culture,” 13, n. 62.
15 Volpi was not only a power with which to be reckoned in Italy, but he was a respected businessman in other Western countries. In 1928, Time, in covering Volpi’s decision to peg the weak lira to the gold standard and undertake a comprehensive renegotiation of Italy’s debt, said he “epitomizes the best type of self-made Italian business man” and described his work for Mussolini as “brilliant.” He was also famous for a glittering social life. His fifteen-thousand-square-foot palace surrounded by formal gardens, at the foot of the Spanish Steps at Via del Quirinale, was widely acknowledged as one of the most sumptuous homes outside Vatican City. There, at dazzling parties, his regular guests included everyone from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, Maria Callas, and Orson Welles. His 1933 launch of the Venice Film Festival was in keeping with his outsized personality.
16 It was not easy to be successful in private industry in Italy under fascism. By the mid-1930s only the Soviet Union owned a larger share of private industry than the Italian government. The capitalism that was the backdrop for businessmen like Nogara and Volpi thrived on a steady stream of preferential state policies and government subsidies that would have defied the words “free market” in many countries. See Franco Amatori, “Entrepreneurial Typologies in the History of Industrial Italy (1880–1960),” The Business History Review 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 361; and L’Italia di Fronted alla Prima Guerra Mondiale by Brunello Vigezzi, review by Richard Webster, The Journal of Modern History 41, no. 4 (December, 1969): 626.
17 Webster, “The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank,” 329.
18 “The Regeneration of Tripolitania,” La Rinascita Della Tripolitania: Memorie e studi sui quattro anni di governo del Conte Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, The Geographical Journal 71, no. 3 (March 1928): 280–82; “Italy: Volpi Out,” Time, July 16, 1928.
19 The company’s full name was Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian Culture,” 17–18; see Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1087.
20 Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 218. Volpi had an edge in Croatia over his Italian counterparts. Mussolini had chosen him to be the lead negotiator in a 1941 economic pact the fascist government signed with Pavelić. It meant that Volpi had a status in Catholic Croatia that competitors could not match. Srdjan Trifković, “Rivalry Between Germany and Italy in Croatia, 1942–1943,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 4 (December 1993), 886.
21 Everyone in Italy refers to the holding company as Bastogi, named after Pietro Bastogi, the first Finance Minister of the Italian Republic, who founded the company in 1862. Its official name is Italiane Strade Ferrate. Luciano Segreto, “Models of Control in Italian Capitalism from the Mixed Bank to Mediobanca, 1894–1993,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 652. See also Parliamentary Commission Report of Inquiry on the Case of Sindona, Chamber of Deputies Senate, VIII Legislature, Doc. XXIII, Read 22 May 1980, n. 204, June 23, 1981, 27–28.
22 Marco Parenti was a cofounder and had business links to the Rothschilds. Other Jewish founding members of Generali included: Vidal Benjamin Cusin, the grandfather of two future directors of the company; a lawyer, Giambattista Rosmini; a competing insurance executive, Alessio Paris; shipbuilder Michele Vucetich; and a Frankfurt native, Giovanni Cristoforo Ritter de Zahony. Morpurgo’s father was a banker who was all too familiar with institutionalized Italian anti-Semitism. On a few occasions under the Papacy of Benedict XIV, when he entered the Vatican for business, he was required to pin a small piece of colored fabric on his suit so that those who dealt with him knew he was Jewish. John Authers and Richard Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle over the Debts of the Holocaust (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 108–9.
23 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 171; Segreto, “Models of Control in Italian Capitalism,” 652; Tom Weiss, interviewed by Brendan Howley, November 13, 2005.
24 Maura Hametz, “Zionism, Emigration, and Anti-Semitism in Trieste,” 126–32.
25 The resignation of Edgardo Morpurgo caused an international outcry, but the Italians ignored the criticism.
26 The new chairman of RAS was a strident fascist, Fulvio Suvich, the ex-ambassador to the United States, and a Trieste native who was good friends with Volpi. Italian Jewish insurance executives were not the only ones being shoved aside by race laws. The Nazis set the example by excluding Jews from all German business life, including their removal as shareholders and directors of insurance companies. They were excluded from the industry by the time the violence against Jews had created financial problems for insurance companies. State-organized hooliganism, for instance, in Germany culminated in Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938—in which Jewish businesses and synagogues were torched and vandalized nationwide. German insurers were on the line for tens of millions of dollars in insurable losses. But those executives worked with the Third Reich to devise ways to avoid paying most of the claims. They used several pretexts to cheat their customers, with the most common excuse being that the riots and vandalism were a public disturbance and therefore not subject to compensation. Some insurers fretted that their failure to pay the claims were a “black spot on the coat of honor of the German insurance industry,” so they conspired with the Nazis to levy a one-billion-mark fine on the Jews, from which some funds would be recycled back to the victims as payments for broken glass and stolen goods. Ultimately, German insurance companies started a massive repurchase of life insurance policies from Jewish clients as it became clear that Jews were not insurable under the race laws.
27 Quoted in Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, industria e finanza tra Giolitti e Mussolini, 221.
28 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 105, 171.
29 See Report on Internationale Unfall & Schadensversicherungs Ges A.G. from GEA Branch, NARA, Exhibits 6–12, 18, 26A, 30–31; Confidential Memo from the American Embassy in Rome to the Secretary of State, March 19, 1945, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA; Tom Weiss, interviewed by Brendan Howley, November 13, 2005.
30 Joseph B. Treaster, “Holocaust Survivors’ Insurance Ordeal,” The New York Times, April 8, 2003, 8.
31 Authers and Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune, 109. Morpurgo sent his agents throughout Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Pale of Settlement, an enormous region Russia set aside in the eighteenth century in which Jews were allowed to live and work. The Pale of Settlement comprised about 20 percent of western Russia and what is today most of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.
32 Franz Kafka worked in Generali’s Prague office for nine months. According to company records, he left because of a “nervous ailment.”
33 Belth, “Life Insurance and the Holocaust,” 90.
34 Christopher Kobrak and Per H. Hansen, eds., European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 43.
35 Ibid., 42. Generali accounted for 8 percent of Italy’s GDP. In comparison, in 2013, ExxonMobil had revenues of $500 billion, but accounted only for .03 percent of U.S. GDP.
36 German insurance companies instituted a “risk supplement” that increased life insurance premiums between 20 percent and 30 percent. Still, the longer the war continued it took a heavy toll on insurers. For instance, during 1942, Allianz, the largest German insurer, had 17,537 policyholders killed in combat, resulting in payouts of 40.3 million reichsmarks. The battle of Stalingrad meant that in the first three months of 1943, another twenty thousand policyholders were dead, costing the insurer another 50 million reichsmarks.
37 Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 347.
38 Kobrak and Hansen, European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 51–52.
39 Kurt Schmitt to Giuseppe Volpi, Action Note (Aktennote), September 24, 1938; and Volpi to Schmitt, September 27, 1938, FHA, MR A 1/2; Kobrak and Hansen, European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 51; see also Stefan Karlen, Lucas Chocomeli, Kristin D’haemer, Stefan Laube, and Daniel C. Schmid, “Schweizerische Versicherungsgesellschaften im Machtbereich des Dritten Reich” (Swiss insurance companies in the area governed by the Third Reich), Independent Commission of Experts, ICE, Vol. 12 (Zürich: Pendo Verlag GmbH, 2002).
40 Elimination of German Resources for War, Vols. 1–9, U.S. Congress, Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, 79th Congress, 2nd Session, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945), 381. There are additional volumes of documents and testimony printed from these hearings under the same general title, but it is in the book published as Volumes 1–9 covering German and Italian insurance companies.
41 Memorandum re Assicurazioni Generali, Rome, August 17, 1945, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA; Elimination of German Resources for War, Senate Military Affairs Subcommittee on War Mobilization,1945, RG 226, Files 184–212, 222–230. The template Volpi used to gain a share of the business was the 1936 collapse of Europe’s third largest insurer, Austria’s Jewish-owned Phönix Life. There a consortium of Germany’s Munich Re, Austria’s Städtische, and Italy’s Generali divided the spoils. Records of the German External Assets Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria (USACA) Section, 1945–1950, Società Anonima Di Assicurazioni “Acciai Alpine,” Milan, Italy, General Records series, publication Microfilm Series M1928, File 2-203, Roll 0095, catalogue identification 1561456, NARA; see also Aktennote Kissakalt, September 17, 1935, Archives of Munich Reinsurance Company, A 2.13/46, Munich.
42 Nogara was familiar with shell companies from his work in Constantinople. There he had formed his first in 1913 in order to bypass a Turkish ban on foreigners bidding for development rights in an ambitious coastal development. See Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 262.
43 See generally Kobrak and Hansen, European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 55.
44 Munich Re (Münchener Rück) is used in the insurance industry to refer to Munich Reinsurance Company (Münchener Rückversicherungs-Gesellschaft AG). Munich Re and RWM, September 28, 1939, A. 2.14/55, Center for Corporate History of Allianz, historical archives of the Munich Reinsurance Company, Munich; Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, Appendix II, “German and Italian Insurance Companies known to have been operating in German Occupied and Allied Countries,” RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651, 3, NARA.
45 See Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 321, 321n, Aktennote Kurt Schmitt, May 12, 1941; see Stefan Karlen et al., “Schweizerische Vericherungsgesellschaften im Machtbereich des ‘Dritten Reichs’ ” (2002).
46 See Italian Foreign Ministry files generally for Volpi’s efforts to keep the Germans from getting any business in Croatia; Trifković, “Rivalry Between Germany and Italy in Croatia, 1942–1943,” 879–904; R. A. H. Robinson, The English Historical Review 101, no. 398 (January 1986): 303.
47 Richard J. Overy, “The Economy of the German ‘New Order,’ ” ed., Richard J. Overy, Gerhard Otto, and Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Die “Neuordnung” Europas. NS-Wirtschaftspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten (Berlin: Metropol, 1997), 11–26; Harm G. Schröter, Außenpolitik und Wirtschaftsinteresse: Skandinavien im außenwirtschaftlichen Kalkūl Deutschlands und Großbritanniens, 1918–1939 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1983), 15–19, available at Columbia University Collection, New York; see generally Alice Teichova, “Instruments of Economic Control and Exploitation: The German Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia,” in Richard J. Overy, G. Otto and Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Die ‘Neuordnung’ Europas: NS-Wirtschaftspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten (Berlin: Metropol, 1997), 83–107.
48 Report to Arnoldo Frigessi, January 21, 1941, papers of Arnoldo Frigessi di Rattalma, Banca Commerciale Archives, Milan, Cart. 108, fasc. 3; see also Kobrak and Hansen, European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 56.
49 Protocol of Meetings, September 20–21, 1942, and appended documents, FHA, MR, C/210; see also Kobrak and Hansen, European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 58–59. Volpi was also active in Croatia extending his electrical utility conglomerate, SADE, eventually providing half the country’s power during the war.
50 Report on Internationale Unfall & Schadensversicherungs Ges A.G. from GEA Branch, Records of the German External Assets Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria (USACA) Section, 1945–1950, Reports on Businesses, compiled 1945–1950, see particularly report “Preliminary Report on Internationale Unfall & Schadensversicherungs-Gesellschaft A.G., September 5, 1947,” RG 260, M1928, 49B, Roll 0017, NARA.
51 Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651,13–14, NARA.
52 Volpi tried to evade the U.S. ban by trading real estate in Italy for blocked funds in the U.S. See RG 131, Box 26, Folder 230/38/10/5; and Louis Pink, Superintendent of Insurance, New York State, to John Pehle, Assistant to the Secretary, Treasury Department, July 22, 1941, RG 131, NN3-131-94-002, Box 15, Folder 48B, 230/8/3414, NARA; see telex from J. W. Pehle to Herbert Kimball, October 28, 1942, RG 131, NN3-131-94-002, Box 15, Docket Files of 1940/60, Bis Enterprises, Folder 48/A, 230/38/34/4, NARA.
53 See for instance the shares owned in Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà, an investment that Nogara duplicated across all top-shelf Italian insurance companies. Report on Internationale Unfall & Schadensversicherungs Ges A.G. from GEA Branch, Records of the German External Assets Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria (USACA) Section, 1945–1950, Reports on Businesses, compiled 1945–1950, RG 260, M1928, 49B, Roll 0017, Exhibit 4, NARA.
54 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 115, citing a file summarizing foreign insurance company operations in Italy, Entry 196, Box 16, File 30, RG 226, location 190/10/9/5, NARA.
55 Nogara purchased controlling shares in both Fondiaria Vita (the life insurance branch) and Fondiaria Infortuni (accident insurance). This information is contained as part of the so-called Safehaven Report, at the National Archives. During World War II, the U.S. tried to persuade neutral countries to seize German assets deposited in their countries. See Donald P. Steury, “The OSS and Project Safehaven,” CIA, at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/summer00/art04.html. The effort was code-named Operation Safehaven. This information about Fondiaria and the Vatican is from the Safehaven Report, April 1, 1945, Entry 210, Box 337, RG 226, Location 250/64/28/1, NARA. The Safehaven probe of all Italian insurance firms is April 1945, COI/OSS Central Files, Entry 92, Box 502, File 8, RG 226, Location 190/6/1/4, NARA.
56 Nogara was a director of the Istituto di Credito Fondiario, so even without help from Volpi, he may have been able to get the advance scoop.
57 Webster, “The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank,” 356.
58 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 115.
59 U.S. Treasury Department, “Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control,” Washington, March 30, 1943, 23–24, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO; see Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 111–20.
60 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 126ff, 132.
61 Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651,10–13, NARA. One of the most comprehensive intelligence overviews of German and Italian insurers and their interrelationships is Memo, Saint JJI to Saint BB, Response to Questionnaire by Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, October 25, 1945, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA.
62 Confidential Memo, No. 2236, Subject: Status of Assicurazioni Generali, September 11, 1945, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
63 Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, Appendix II, “German and Italian Insurance Companies known to have been operating in German Occupied and Allied Countries,” RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651, 3, NARA.
64 Memo, Saint JJI to Saint BB, Response to Questionnaire by Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, October 25, 1945, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA, 16. Also, Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, Appendix II, “German and Italian Insurance Companies known to have been operating in German Occupied and Allied Countries,” RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651, 5–6, NARA; see also in the same document and file, Appendix 3, one page, “The distribution of foreign business of German Insurance Companies.”
65 Without Albula, the Germans could not have obtained Swiss francs, the currency demanded by the selling company, Dorna Vatra. See Ibid., Memo, Saint JJI to Saint BB, NARA, 8–10.
66 From Vincent La Vista to Herbert J. Cummings, Subject: SAFEHAVEN Italian Insurance Companies, October 24, 1945, Record Group 84, PRFSP State Department, Rome Embassy and Consulate, Confidential Files, 1946, 851 A.C. Finance, Section 851.5, Box 11; also Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651; and Memorandum, untitled, August 17, 1945, Rome, State Department, NARA.
67 See memorandum regarding reinsurance in Chile, to the Foreign Funds Control, U.S. Treasury, February 23, 1942, RG 131, NN3-131-94-002, Box 15, Folder 48B, 230/8/3414, NARA; see generally list of companies involved, in part, M1928, “Records of the German External Assets Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria (USACA) Section, 1945–1950, part of RG 260, 2003, NARA.
68 “Copy for US Embassy,” Board of Trade, Secret, January 24, 1945, RG 84, File 850.6, 851, Box 272, NARA.
69 Memo, for the Ambassador, August 29, 1945, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA; see also “The Export of Insurance, Business and Finance Section,” The Economist, August 25, 1945, 24.
70 Confidential Memo, No. 2236, Subject: Status of Assicurazioni Generali, September 11, 1945, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
71 Report of Finance Sub-Commission, HQ AC for February, 1945, from Headquarters of the Allied Commission, APC 394, March 10, 1945, RG 59, Foreign Service Post, Rome Embassy and Consulate, General Records, 1945, Box 861, 850.9.851, NARA; see also “Italians Take $480,000,000 from the U.S.,” New York Post, May 3, 1941.
72 See generally Annual Statement of The Generali Insurance Company, United States Branch, 1940, RG 131, Box 15, folder 48B, setting forth reinsurance dealings between Generali and some blacklisted firms; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 116–17.
73 For a straight listing of their status in fascist Italy, see “Who’s Who in Fascist Italy,” Confidential memorandum, December 26, 1942, RG 226, E179, Box 4, NARA.
74 Insurance, Confidential, Series 24932, RG 131, NN3-131-94-002, Box 15, Folder 48B, 230/8/3414, NARA.
75 See generally Ranking Officials, Assicurazioni Generali, Record Group 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
76 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 108.
77 Memo to S. S. Gilbert and S. Klotz, June 22, 1942, RG 131, NN3-131-94-002, Box 15, Folder 48B, 230/38/34/4, NARA.
78 Memorandum for the Files, 1942, recounting a July 25, 1942, meeting, NND 968123, NARA.
79 Gold was a favorite way Germans and Italians circumvented currency restrictions: Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War (Die Schweiz und die Goldtransaktionen im Zweiten Weltkrieg), The Independent Commission of Experts, Switzerland: World War II, Vol. 16.
80 RG 84, Safehaven Files, Banca della Svizzera Italiana, memo from managing director to United States consul in Berne, March 30, 1943, Entry 323, Box 6, NARA.
81 See generally Authers and Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune.
82 “Life Insurance and the Holocaust,” 81–100; Becker to Bernstein, November 27, 1946, RG 260, OMGUS, Finance, Box 60, 17/60/10, NARA. In Germany, the insurance companies became partners with the Third Reich. The Reichsbank took 75 percent of the profits from policies in return for cloaking the source of the money.
83 Author interview with Elan Steinberg, April 2, 2006; Interagency Task Force on Nazi Assets Directed by Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat: U.S. Department of State, “U.S. and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War II: Preliminary Study” (1997); see also Authers and Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune. As for the figure of $200 billion, that is from Professor Joseph Belth, Insurance Forum 25, no. 9 (September 1998), who calculated that half of those who died in the Holocaust owned life insurance and that the average policy was for several thousand dollars. In 2004, the Holocaust Insurance Claims Research Project reached the same conclusion that previous estimates of restitution had not included property insurance claims and unclaimed bank accounts. See Sidney Zabludoff, “Restitution of Holocaust-Era Assets: Promises and Reality,” Jewish Political Studies Review, March 1, 2007; see also Reports on Archival Research, The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, April, August and October 2004.
84 Becker to Bernstein, November 27, 1946, RG 260, OMGUS, Finance, Box 60, 17/60/10, NARA.
85 Author interview with Elan Steinberg, April 2, 2006; see generally “Subject to Questionnaire by Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme,” October 25, 1945, Washington, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, 16-17, 24, NARA. See also Belth, “The Insurance Forum,” 82.
86 Letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, to Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski, March 20, 2013, in the Gerald Posner collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Professor Gerald Steinacher notes that “[t]he Vatican remains the only European state that withholds free access to its archives to contemporary historians.” Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Kindle edition, 2342 of 9472.
87 From Vincent La Vista to Herbert J. Cummings, Subject: SAFEHAVEN Italian Insurance Companies, October 24, 1945, Record Group 84, PRFSP State Department, Rome Embassy and Consulate, Confidential Files, 1946, 851 A.C. Finance, Section 851.5, Box 11, NARA.
88 Economic Advisory Branch report, undated, Property Control, German Intelligence and Investments 1945–50, RG 260, Records Property Division, Box 651,13–14, NARA. In Croatia, for instance, Mussolini was not long out of office when a new law created the Croatian Reinsurance Company of Zagreb, which redirected almost all the insurance work that had been the province of the Italian and German Croat companies.
89 Ranking Officials, Assicurazioni Generali, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
90 Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 235–36.
91 Ibid., 236.
92 See generally Headquarters Allied Commission, Finance Sub-Commission, APO 394, Confidential, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA.
93 Headquarters Allied Commission, Finance Sub-Commission, APO 394, Confidential, RG 59, Department of State, Rome Embassy, File 851, Box 161, NARA; also Memo, Saint JJI to Saint BB, Response to Questionnaire by Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, October 25, 1945, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA, 24–26. See also Claudio Lindner and Giancarlo Mazzuca, Il leone di Trieste: il romanzo delle Assicurazioni Generali dalle origini austroungariche all’era Cuccia (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer), 1990.
94 See Giorgio Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1977); Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 236.
95 Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 237. The Allied High Commission for Sanctions Against Fascism later seized whatever Volpi assets the Germans had missed, and charged him with crimes for aiding the fascists. He stayed in Switzerland during the trial that resulted in a guilty verdict in January 1947. The court, however, extended amnesty to him. By then it was clear that few German or Italian businessmen would pay any price for having helped the Axis war effort. The American embassy had complained at the end of the war to the Secretary of State, “there are some forty-five high ranking insurance executives in Rome whom the Allied Commission consider ‘undesirable elements.’ ” The Italians were resistant to putting any on trial. In Germany, General Lucius Clay, the U.S. Military Governor, aborted all the war crimes trials of the German insurance industry executives. Volpi’s German counterparts walked free, many returning to the only business they knew, insurance.
1 Declaration on Gold Purchases, February 22, 1944, Documents Pertaining to Foreign Funds Control, U.S. Treasury Department, Washington: March 30, 1944, 15–16, Papers of Bernard Bernstein, Subject File, Box 23, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.
2 BIS was the subject of furious wartime debates inside the U.S. and other countries. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau pressed the case that since BIS was effectively controlled by the Nazis, there should be no U.S. delegates. Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 26–33.
3 BIS attracted prominent names from its inception. Its first president was Gates McGarrah, who had previously been the president of Chase National Bank before becoming chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau worried that at the very start of the war that BIS was Axis-controlled. William C. Bullitt to Henry Morgenthau, May 9, 1939, Telegram 907, Charles Higham “Trading with the Enemy” Collection, Box 1, Folder 1, University of Southern California Cinematic Arts Library.
4 Schröder managed J. H. Stein Bank, the German side of an international banking family that included one of London’s oldest merchant banks, Schrobanco. John Foster Dulles, as a Sullivan and Cromwell partner, represented Schrobanco’s American subsidiary. There were concerns in both the British and American governments about whether Schrobanco did business with some blacklisted companies. Published reports in 1944 in Britain suggested the company was loyal to Germany. Still, one senior Schrobanco executive worked for the OSS in Cairo and Zurich. After the war, when U.S. forces detained Kurt von Schröder, he provided information that helped prosecutors prepare some of their war crimes trials. In return, he was not personally charged with any crimes although the Allies knew the SS had freely used his bank, J. H. Stein, as a repository of plundered assets throughout the war. See Richard Roberts, Schroders: Merchants and Bankers (London: Macmillan, 1992), 292–97; U.S. Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality 1945–46, Miscellaneous Reference Materials, Transcripts of Interrogations, Baron Kurt von Schröder, RG 238, World War II War Crimes, Box 2, NARA.
5 See generally Murphy to Mowinckel, Records of the OSS, Office of the Director, RG 226, Entry 116, June 4, 1945, NARA.
6 The Independent Commission of Experts was a group of financial, political, and historical researchers who for six years, starting in 1996, reviewed and prepared a report on the armaments industry/trade; Swiss insurance companies in the Third Reich; use of Switzerland as a financial center; gold transactions and Aryanization in Austria; and Franco-Swiss financial relations. Their final report was issued in 2002. Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (Zürich: Pendo Verlag GmbH, 2002); see also Jean Ziegler, Die Schweiz, das Gold und die Toten (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1997); and Werner Rings, Raubgold aus Deutschland. Die ‘Golddrehscheibe’ Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Piper, 1996).
7 Die Schweiz und die Goldtransaktionen im Zweiten Weltkrieg Überarbeitete und ergänzte Fassung des Zwischenberichts von 1998: http://www.uek.ch/de/publikationen1997-2000/gold.pdf. Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz—Zweiter Weltkrieg—Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War, Final Report, the Independent Commission of Experts, Switzerland, March 22, 2002.
8 Interrogation of Walter Funk, July 6, 1945, Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, RG 238, 1933–50 and 1943–50, Box 73, NARA.
9 Elizabeth White, “The Disposition of SS-Looted Victim Gold During and After World War II,” American University International Law Review, 14, no. 1, Article 15 (January 1998): 212–13; see also Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 39–40.
10 Interrogation of Walter Funk, October 22, 1945, Box 186, PS 3544, Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, NARA. For an in-depth investigation of the disposition of looted Nazi gold during and immediately after the war, as well as the question of the missing files about gold and the Reichsbank, see the two reports issued by the Interagency Task Force on Nazi Assets Directed by Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat: U.S. Department of State, “U.S. and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War II: Preliminary Study (1997),” and U.S. Department of State, “U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations with Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustaša Treasury (1998).”
11 “Jewish Group Rejects Report On Nazi Gold,” Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1997; author interview with Elan Steinberg, April 2, 2006.
12 “BIS Archive Guide,” Bank of International Settlements (Basel: 2007), 2, https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bis.org%2Fabout%2Farch_guide.pdf; see also Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 296.
13 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 276.
14 Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 32–33, citing Interrogation Statement of Heinrich Otto Abetz to U.S. military, June 21, 1946. See generally Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 100, 108, 124; Roland Ray, Annäherung an Frankreich im Dienste Hitlers? Otto Abetz und die deutsche Frankreichpolitik, 1930–1942 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2000); Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 276–77. Statement of Heinrich Otto Abetz to U.S. military, June 21, 1946. Abetz, the German ambassador to Vichy France, was tried and convicted of war crimes for his role in sending French Jews to death camps. He served five years of a twenty-year sentence.
15 Heinrich Otto Abetz told American interrogators that in return for a share of the profits, the Vatican’s espionage unit had divulged the secret to Pierre Pucheu, a Vichy cabinet minister and director of a private bank in Paris. Pucheu in turn passed the secret to Yves Bréart de Boisanger, the governor of the Bank of France and a BIS director. Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 32–33, citing Interrogation Statement of Heinrich Otto Abetz to U.S. military, June 21, 1946. See generally Paxton, Vichy France, 100, 108, 124; Ray, Annäherung an Frankreich; Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 276–77. Statement of Heinrich Otto Abetz to U.S. military, June 21, 1946.
16 The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, known as the Bretton Woods Conference, recommended in 1944 that BIS be dissolved since it had operated as an Axis-dominated entity in outright violation of its neutral charter. But its solid business and government connections, chiefly through Allen Dulles, helped it successfully resist the dissolution order. Today, BIS thrives in a role that mirrors the International Monetary Fund. See generally “BIS Archive Guide,” 2.
17 U.S. State Department Post Files, Switzerland, 1945, Interrogation of Allen Dulles, NARA; see also Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 277.
18 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 277–78.
19 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 295.
20 SCI Unit Memo, May 27, 1945, supplementary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, Abwehr II Recruiter, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A; the document is an attachment to a longer memo dated October 25, 1945, “Subject to Questionnaire by Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme,” NARA.
21 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 38.
22 There is a May 27, 1945, two-page summary of an interrogation with Reme. Another one-page summary dated June 6, 1945. That document notes “attached herewith Supplementary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm REME,” but all that is attached to that sheet is “Appendix C.” And there is also a twenty-six-page questionnaire answered by Reme dated October 25, 1945. The National Archives declassified all three documents on April 28, 2006. On June 22, 2006, the National Archives released supplementary documents related to Reme, including an intelligence twelve-page “Top Secret” summary about Reme and his intelligence service, complete with drawings of his Milan office. On June 27, 2006, the National Archives declassified a fifteen-page OSS file on Reme, including notes again about his supplementary interrogation. American intelligence determined that SD agents—Sicherheitsdienst, the SS spy agency—had penetrated Jauch and Hübener: “Eilers, Edith, PF 608.624,” OSS Archives, London, RG 226, DSS E119A, subdocument “Eilers, Edith Ida Johanna,” June 6, 1945, Folder 309, 2, NARA. The SD had in fact inserted into the firm in 1941 one of its own operatives, Dr. Herbert Worch. See also Memo, Saint JJI to Saint BB, Response to Questionnaire by Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, October 25, 1945, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA, 12.
23 Report on “FIDE Group, Abwehr II, Background Notes, Top Secret, RG 226, Box 13, File 79, 2.
24 Appendix C of SCI Unit Memo, May 27, 1945, supplementary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, Abwehr II Recruiter, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA.
25 Preliminary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, SCI Unit Rome, Top Secret, May 18, 1945, OSS Archives, RG 226, OSS E119A/File 1359, NARA.
26 Supplementary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, May 27, 1945, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA, 2.
27 Preliminary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, SCI Unit Rome, Top Secret, May 18, 1945, OSS Archives, RG 226, OSS E119A/File 1359, NARA. Elsewhere, in the typed notes in the same file, unattributed comments say Reme “recruited agents for Italian Sabotage Agency in Milan” based on information from “Antonio Calrari [a] captured saboteur.”
28 An Argentine insurance company, Mackenzie Limitada, was blacklisted by the United States Treasury for its business dealings with the Axis powers. The firm was reported to have operations in Genoa and Milan. During his interrogation and investigation of Reme, Angleton discovered that Reme’s operating alias was Carlo Mackenzie. Angleton did not know about the eponymously named blacklisted firm in Argentina, operating in the same industry–insurance–in which Reme was a senior executive before his transfer to Milan. Declassified files reviewed by the author do not answer whether the Mackenzie/ insurance overlap between a blacklisted firm and Reme are simply a coincidence or are somehow linked. See generally “Memorandum for Listing, Insurance,” British Embassy, Washington, DC, February 6, 1942, RG 131, Box 15, Folder 48B, 230/8/34/4, NARA.
29 Some Abwehr files about its battle with the SS are available in the so-called Himmler Collection, about nine thousand pages of Gestapo intelligence and counterintelligence files released by the National Archives in 2002; Interagency Working Group, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.
30 Reme told his interrogators that “some agents” of SD’s Ämter VI had approached his senior partners in Jauch and Hübener in 1941. The work they requested got the firm “into serious difficulties.”
31 “Zeidler, PF. 602.690,” OSS Archives, London, RG 226, DSS E119A, subdocument “Obtaining of Technical Intelligence,” Folder 1617, NARA.
32 Interim Report of Dr. Hans Martin Zeidler, AMT VI Wi, Secret, “Incorporation of OK/AMT AUSLAND u ABWEHR I Wi IN AMT VI Wi (Feb 44), No. 15, RG 319, Entry Oskar Turina XE1G186, Box 469, NARA. Angleton says that Reme did not leave Italy because he thought it “would have been suicide.” Supplementary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, May 27, 1945, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA, 2
33 Schellenberg also said that the Abwehr agents in the Vatican had been “broken when the Allies took Rome.” But that was only an assumption by Schellenberg, since his group had no way of knowing what the embedded Abwehr units did after the occupation of Rome. Report of Interrogation of Walter Schellenberg, June 27 to July 12, 1945, Top Secret, RG 226, E119A, Folder 2051, NARA. See also Reinhard R. Doerries, ed., Hitler’s Last Chief of Foreign Intelligence: Allied Interrogations of Walter Schellenberg (London: Cass, 2003).
34 London, OSS Archives, Appendix F, RG 226, OSS E119A, Folder 1359, NARA.
35 Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 252, discussing how during the time Nogara was there “Constantinople became a center of international agents, influence peddlers, and journalists selling their pens, in addition to the customary concession-seekers and promoters who claimed foreign backing.”
36 Ibid., 252–53; Roman, Giuseppe Volpi, 37–38. Nogara had worked closely in 1912-13 in Constantinople with German businessmen on a plan for a rail link from Turkey to the new state of Albania.
37 See generally Report of Interrogation of Walter Schellenberg, June 27 to July 12, 1945, Top Secret, RG 226, E119A, Folder 2051, NARA.
38 Schellenberg was one of the highest-ranking Nazis to testify against other German officers in exchange for a light sentence—he was set free after serving two years of a six-year sentence.
39 Given that there are millions of files in the national archives of the three countries, and an equally large amount in private archives of companies, banks, and independent international charities and political associations, it is not possible for a single author to have reviewed every wartime document. All major government archives have finding tools, although there is no universal name search since no government has fully digitized all its files. Still, excluding someone—such as how many Nogaras are mentioned—is easier than finding a specific document on a particular subject. While it is not possible to say with absolute certainty that there was no unrelated Nogara who might have been an Abwehr agent in Italy during World War II, the author has not found evidence of one.
40 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 301–02.
41 Frattini, The Entity, 277–79.
42 One of Angleton’s informants was Virgilio Scattolini, who was also providing intelligence to the Germans. Although he was an opportunist and a writer of pornography, he had excellent connections inside St. Peter’s. Another Angleton source was Monsignor Enrico Pucci, the Vatican aide who gave daily press briefings. Pucci secretly sold to the fascists the same reports he peddled to the Allies. Cooney, The American Pope, 144. See also Frattini, The Entity, 278.
43 Two-page letter within the SCI Unit Memo, May 27, 1945, supplementary Interrogation Report of Reinhard Karl Wilhelm Reme, Abwehr II Recruiter, Washington Registry SI Intel Field Files, records of the Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, Box 214, NND 897108, Entry 108A, NARA.
44 Ibid.
45 When Angleton left Italy, the CIA’s William Colby became the Rome station chief. Like Angleton, Colby was a rising star in American intelligence. He went on to become the Saigon station chief during the Vietnam War, before finally becoming the CIA’s Director in 1973.
46 A 1958 Italian obituary of Nogara, listed him as the Vatican’s representative to the Committee of National Liberation, Rome’s underground resistance movement. The author could not substantiate any such affiliation from government archives about Nogara nor from available files concerning the history of the Committee of National Liberation. The listing could have been inserted by the Vatican or by Nogara’s family as a way to posthumously create antifascist credentials. Or it could have been added to his biography by a Western intelligence agency as a way of further burying any link to the Abwehr. Finally, it is also possible that Nogara belonged to the Abwehr as well as the Committee of National Liberation, serving both in order to best protect his Vatican investments.
1 Generally Briefing by Stuart Eizenstat, Undersecretary for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs, regarding release of the report, U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations with Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustaša Treasury, June 2, 1998.
2 Report of Interrogation of Walter Schellenberg, June 27 to July 12, 1945, Top Secret, RG 226, E119A, Folder 2051, Section 107, “Faked Pound Notes,” NARA. Schwend’s name is also spelled as Schwendt in some U.S. military files as well as in some books by historians. The first spelling is used here because on documents in which Schwend signed his name, he did so without the t. For more on Schwend and his counterfeiting plot—Operation Bernhard—see Auszug aus den Akten Friedrich Schwendt, RG 242, T-120, Roll 5781, Frame FH297319-55, NARA. See Dr. Kevin C. Ruffner, “On the Trail of the Nazi Counterfeiters,” The Daily Beast, September 20, 2014.
3 The OSS used Schwend on so-called bird-dog operations, designed to find wanted Nazis. His code name was Flush. Schwend wrote a long report about his counterfeiting operation for the OSS, but according to the intelligence agency, and its successor the CIA, that report was inadvertently destroyed. The Americans cut Schwend loose in 1946 when they discovered he was running yet another counterfeiting operation in Italy. He ended up in Peru where he produced fake dollars and trafficked in small arms. Cables of December 12, 1966, and August 19, 1969, Memorandum for CIA Deputy Director for Plans, RG 263, Freidrich Schwend Name File, Vol. 2, NARA. See generally Kevin C. Ruffner, “On the Trail of the Nazi Counterfeiters,” Studies in Intelligence (2002), 44, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol40no5/html/v40i5a12p.htm. See also release of “Studies in Intelligence” document by the CIA, September 18, 2014.
4 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 297; see also Auszug aus den Akten Friedrich Schwendt, RG 242, T-120, Roll 5781, Frame FH297319-55, NARA; Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). As for the exchange of British sterling in 1945, see John Hooper and Richard Norton-Taylor, “The Pope Has a Problem; The Vatican Is Still Trying to Hide What May Be Ugly Secrets About Nazi Loot,” The Guardian, February 12, 1998, 19.
5 The Yugoslavian government later claimed that 258 pounds of gold were stolen. An early detailed accounting about the Ustaša looting of gold reserves is a January 1946 intelligence report from James Jesus Angleton. He reported that Ustašan fugitives had fled into Austria with two crates of gold. U.S. Strategic Services Unit report of James Angleton, January 22, 1946, Entry 210, Box 6, RG 226, Location 250/64/28/02, NARA; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 211, Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 301–2.
6 Deposition of William E. W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99–04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, March 9, 2006, Vol. 4, 759–61, 775.
7 Bigelow to Glaser, July 19, 1946, Entry 183, Box 27, RG 226,Llocation 190/9/22/05, NARA. Besides his cash, Schwend had buried about 7,000 pieces of gold in a remote stretch of Austrian countryside. But before he could retrieve it and send it to the Vatican or other safe haven, the OSS took it as part of their convoluted bargain with Schwend. See Ruffner, “On the Trail of the Nazi Counterfeiters.”
8 Argentina: Economic/Safehaven: German Capital Invested in Argentina, Report F-3627-A, RG 260, Office of the Military Government, United States (OMGUS), Property Division, Box 645, Argentina, NARA.
9 Emerson Bigelow worked for the Strategic Services Unit, an intelligence organization that existed briefly between the winding down of the OSS and the start-up of the CIA. He was not an intelligence officer but rather a financial analyst who sent his report to Harold Glasser, the Treasury Department’s Director of Monetary Research. Bigelow’s memo was declassified on December 31, 1996, as part of the State Department’s normal review of historical documents. In July 1997, the document was released pursuant to a Freedom of Information and Privacy Act request to two television producers, Gaylen Ross and Stephen Crisman, who were filming a two-hour documentary for the Arts and Entertainment Network about how Switzerland handled Nazi gold during and after the war. The State Department released the document too late to be included in the July 26 show, so instead the producers released it to several newspaper reporters and wire services. Bigelow to Glasser, July 19, 1946, Entry 183, Box 27, RG 226, Location 190/9/22/05; Memo from Emerson Bigelow to Harold Glasser, Director of Monetary Research, U.S. Treasury Department, October 21, 1946, RG 226, Entry 183, Box 29, File 6495; also Entry 183, Box 27, RG 226, Location 190/9/22/05, NARA.
10 Gowen’s father, Franklin, was assigned at the same time to the State Department’s Vatican mission. During the war, he had served as Myron Taylor’s assistant.
11 There was some debate among CIC investigators about whether the British troops and priests were authentic or merely Ustašan officers in stolen uniforms and clerical robes. CIC agent Gowen believed that the uniforms were stolen and had been taken from the headquarters of the British 8th Army. Letter from Dr. Jonathan Levy to Rene Brülhart, Autorita di Informazione Finanziaria, March 25, 2013, Re: Offer to Compromise Without Prejudice on the Matter of the Ustaša Treasury; Deposition of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, December 12, 2005, 56.
12 The lieutenant colonel was Ivan Babic, a decorated Ustašan veteran who had fought against Russian troops. Deposition of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, December 12, 2005, 45.
13 Headden, Hawkins, and Vest, “A Vow of Silence,” 34.
14 Ibid., 34; Declaration of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-4941 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, January 16, 2003, 6.
15 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 113.
16 Declaration of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-4941 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, January 16, 2003, 5–6; see also Deposition of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, December 12, 2005, 45–47. See also Steinacher, Nazis on the Run, xx, 13.
17 Wilensky, Six Million Crucifixions, Kindle edition, 3207 of 8032.
18 Deposition of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, March 9, 2006, 796; see also Exhibit, Declaration of William W. Gowen, January 16, 2003.
19 Declaration of William W. Gowen, January 16, 2003, 15–18. The Foreign Service officer was J. Graham Parsons. He had replaced Gowen’s father, Franklin, as Myron Taylor’s assistant. The elder Gowen left his post in 1945, shortly after his son had arrived in Italy on behalf of the CIC.
20 Declaration of William W. Gowen, 18.
21 Letter from Dr. Jonathan Levy to Rene Bruelhart, Autorita di Informazione Finanziaria, March 25, 2013, Re: Offer to Compromise Without Prejudice on the Matter of the Ustašan Treasury. Secret Staff Summary for the Director, CIA, Subject: Pending Release of Amb. Eizenstat's Vol. II Report on WWII Victim Gold, May 29, 1998, pages 1-3, declasified and released by the CIA under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
22 Deposition of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, December 12, 2005, 82–84.
23 From Vincent La Vista to Herbert J. Cummings, Subject: SAFEHAVEN: FLIGHT OF CAPITAL BY PETACCI FAMILY, Secret, Report No. 11, Rome, June 19, 1946, RG 84, PRFSP, State Department, Rome, Embassy and Consulate, Confidential Files, 1946, 851 AC, Finance Section, 851.5, Box 11, NARA.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Rick Hampson, “Pope Changed the World,” USA Today, April 3, 2005.
27 Myron C. Taylor to Secretary of State (Edward Stettinius), April 20, 1945, RG 59, Box 28, Entry 1069, Location 250/48/29/05, NARA.
28 The Italian communist chief was Palmiro Togliatti. Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 135. Pius in part blamed the Allies for the strong postwar power of the Soviets. He was convinced that if America and Britain had not so thoroughly destroyed the Germans, the Russians would not have been able to grab half of Europe.
29 Cooney, The American Pope, 145, citing undated OSS documents in note 54.
30 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 141.
31 Ibid., 238.
32 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 25.
33 Pascalina was put in charge of Church Asylum, which focused in large part on German POWs in gigantic Allied makeshift detention camps. See Steinacher, Nazis on the Run, 102. Montini had worked with Draganović during the war as the de facto representative for Croatian refugees. Subject Dr. Krunoslav DRAGANOVIC, Secret: U.S. Officials Only, Date of Info: 1945–1952, Date Acquired: July 1952, Date of Report, July 24, 1952, Approved for release Feb 1998, (262), NARA; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 233. The postwar Confraternity of San Girolamo was a charity founded in July 1945 for Croatian refugees. It provided a cover for Draganović to continue his work with the Vatican and Monsignor Montini.
34 The Allies had compiled a Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects (CROWCASS). By the time it was phased out in 1948, it had 85,000 wanted reports and forty book-length reports of wanted criminals. As the largest database of its kind, investigators in a dozen countries used CROWCASS, as well as military and army police files, cross-referencing names against the millions detained in POW or displaced persons’ camps. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 67.
35 Vatican passports were only for clerics, although a few were issued to Black Nobles. The church’s alliance with the International Red Cross, which was itself under tremendous pressure and operating at full capacity because of the flood of refugees, was natural. Some Red Cross passports used by Nazi fugitives were fake.
36 See generally Sereny, Into That Darkness, 275–91.
37 Stephanie Stern, “Papal Responses to the Holocaust: Contrast Between Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II,” Colgate Academic Review 8, Article 5 (Fall 2010). Even when Pius was offered opportunities to make up for some of the church’s inaction during the war, he failed to do so. Five months after hostilities ended, the World Jewish Congress’s Gerhart Riegner met with Monsignor Montini and Pius. Riegner pleaded for assistance in finding any Jewish children who might have survived the death camps. He informed the two church leaders that the Nazis had murdered 1.5 million Jewish children. Montini dismissed that as exaggerated. Pius promised the church would help. It did nothing. It was not until 2004 that historians uncovered in France an unsigned letter approved by Pius XII instructing that Jewish children who had been baptized to save them from the gas chambers should be entrusted only to families who agreed to raise them as Catholic. Jewish groups raised an uproar. Vatican spokesman Father Sergio Pagano contended the letter was only meant to apply to “abandoned” children. “It would be another thing if the children were requested back by their parents,” he said. John Thavis, “Vatican Not Impressed with Threat to Sue over Access to Archives,” Catholic News Service, January 28, 2005.
38 Headden, Hawkins, and Vest, “A Vow of Silence,” 34. Schellenberg was sent later to Great Britain. During extensive interrogations there he gave the most complete accounts of Nazi wartime intelligence. See Ruffner, “On the Trail of Nazi Counterfeiters.”
39 In a World Peace Rally in New York, Cardinal Spellman told a large crowd that Stepinac’s only crime was “fidelity to God and country.”
40 Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina (London: Granta, 2002), 346; Michael Phayer, “Canonizing Pius XII: Why Did the Pope Help Nazis Escape?,” Ohlendorf testimony in Case 9 Transcripts, RG 238, Entry 92, Box 1, Vol. 2, 510, NARA.
41 Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Poland (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press USA, 2012), 330–31. Greiser’s case is typical of others in which Pius intervened for clemency. Greiser wrote to Pius and two British politicians—Anthony Eden and Alfred Duff Cooper—he thought might be sympathetic to his appeal to avoid a death sentence. The politicians were smart enough to ignore him. Only Pius responded, asking the Poles to spare Greiser, in part “following the divine example of our Lord, who, on the cross, praying for his executioners.” Greiser had met the Pope (then Secretary of State Pacelli) during a visit to Rome in 1938.
42 Epstein, Model Nazi, 330; see also Goñi, The Real Odessa, 346.
43 Glenn Yeadon, The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century (Palm Desert, CA: Progressive Press, 2008), 276.
44 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 154, 201; see also Suzanne Brown-Fleming, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006).
45 Brown-Fleming, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience, 88, 188–89; Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 136.
46 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 148–49.
47 Jakob Weinbacker interview with Gitta Sereny, in Sereny, Into That Darkness, 305–6.
48 William Gowen and Louis Caniglia, Counter Intelligence Corps, Rome, August 29, 1947, RG 319, Box 173, File IRR XE001109 Pavelić, Location 270/84/1/4, NARA; Antonio Vucetich, El Socorro, Argentina, to Olga Vucetich-Radic, May 6, 1947, RG 59, Box 17, Entry 1068, Location 250/48/29/01-05, NARA. See also for a general discussion Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 234–45.
49 Aarons, Sanctuary, 216–17; Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 245–46, 263.
50 Pavelić was no newcomer to Italy as a fugitive. In 1934 he had found safe haven there after assassinating Serbian King Alexander and the French Foreign Minister. Mussolini refused to extradite him. In 1941 he returned to Croatia to lead the new fascist state.
51 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 222–23, 225.
52 Goñi, The Real Odessa, 343, citing CIC memorandum, Life and Work of Dr. Dominik Mandic, October 10, 1946, CIA Operational Files M; Blazekovic, Studia Croatica, 1973, Issues 50–51; Headden, Hawkins, and Vest, “A Vow of Silence,” 34.
53 Headquarters of Counter Intelligence Corps, Allied Forces Headquarters, APO 512, Subject: Father Krunoslav DRAGANOVIC, Re: PAST Background and PRESENT Activity, February 12, 1947, NARA. San Girolamo was the busiest of the ratline seminaries, but it was not the only one. It catered to Croatian fugitives. Lithuanians went to a Father Jatulevicius on the Via Lucullo, while Hungarians were directed to a small house on Via dei Parione run by Father Gallov. See generally Simpson, Blowback, 179.
54 Headden, Hawkins, and Vest, “A Vow of Silence,” 34.
55 Lt. Col. G. F. Blunder, Headquarters, Mediterranean Theater of Operations, to Col. Carl Fritzsche, Assistant Deputy Director of Intelligence, November 8, 1947, RG 319, Box 173, File IRR XE001109 Pavelić, Location 270/84/14, NARA.
56 Headden, Hawkins, and Vest, “A Vow of Silence,” 34. The British Foreign Office in 1998 denied any involvement in the escape of the Ustašan fugitives, but refused to release any military intelligence records about Pavelić.
57 It took the Vatican fifty years to respond to the charges that it had helped Pavelić escape, and it did so only after Vienna-based Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had released a damning report about the church’s role as Pavelić’s postwar protector. The Vatican’s response? It claimed only that it could not find any evidence of payments to anyone named Pavelić in the records of the IOR. “Vatican Will Attend Nazi Gold Conference in London,” Agence France-Presse, December 1, 1997 See also Yossi Melman, “Pope Paul VI Allegedly Helped Croatian Fascists,” Ha’aretz, January 16, 2006.
General funding for Croatian refugees also came from the American National Catholic Welfare Council, a charitable organization directed by the U.S. cardinals. Chicago’s Cardinal Samuel Stritch was the best fundraiser, but he had good reason to do so since he oversaw the largest Croatian congregation in the U.S. See generally Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 247–48. The CIA declassified what it claimed were the last two pages in its possession about Draganović, but both are completely redacted.
58 “Ante Pavelic Dies in Madrid at 70,” Reuters, Madrid, December 29, 1959; Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 143–50.
59 Telegram from Weizsäcker to the Foreign Office, Berlin, October 17, 1943, Inland Il Geheim, quoted in full in Katz, Black Sabbath, 215.
60 Steinacher, Nazis on the Run, 119–20. Disguised as an Austrian refugee organization, the Austrian Liberation Committee and Hudal received financial aid from the American Catholic Bishops Conference among other church groups.
61 Stangl interview with Gitta Sereny in Sereny, Into That Darkness, 274
62 Ibid., 289.
63 Tony Paterson, “How the Nazis Escaped Justice,” Independent Press, January 28, 21=013, 26.
64 Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN: 1987), Kindle edition, location 4025 of 9931. In 1979, BBC investigative journalist Tom Bower tracked Wagner to Sao Paulo. In an interview, when asked about his savage role at the death camp, said: “I had no feelings, although at the beginning I did. It just became another job. In the evenings we never discussed our work, but just drank and played cards. . . . I feel like an ordinary man, no different from others.” Tom Bower, “The Tracking and Freeing of a Nazi Killer: The Life and Deaths of Gustav Wagner,” The Washington Post, August 19, 1975, E1.
65 See Holger M. Meding, Flucht vor Nurnberg?: Deutsche und osterreichische Einwanderung in Argentinien, 1945–1955 (Vienna: Köln, Weimar, Wien, Böhlau Verlag, 1992).
66 Sereny, Into That Darkness, 290.
67 Interrogation Report on SS-Standartenführer Rauff Walther. CSDIC.SC/15AG/SD 11, May 29, 1945, RG 263, Walter Rauff Name File (note: different spellings of Walther/Walter are as reflected in the files), NARA.
68 Sworn statement (translated) of Hermann Julis Walter Rauff Bauermeister, Santiago, Chile, December 5, 1962, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles; see Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 38; see also Simpson, Blowback, 92–94.
69 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 38.
70 Kevin Freeman, “Wiesenthal Center Releases Documents Which Link Rauff to Important Figures in the Catholic Church,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 9, 1984; see also Simpson, Blowback, 93–94.
71 Simon Wiesenthal interview with Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 28; Steinacher, Nazis on the Run, 134.
72 Sereny, Into That Darkness, 319.
73 Summary Report, by Special Agent Robert Mudd, RG 262, Box 12, Entry A1-86, NARA; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 235.
74 Anton Weber interview with Gitta Sereny in Sereny, Into That Darkness, 318. Some countries that were willing to accept baptized Jews still wanted to ensure they were getting real converts and not merely Jews who claimed to be Catholic to avoid being killed. Brazil, for instance, offered the Vatican three thousand visas but insisted they only be issued to Jews who had been Catholics for at least two years.
75 Anton Weber interview with Gitta Sereny in Sereny, Into That Darkness, 319.
76 Adolf Eichmann, “Meine Flucht: Bericht aus der Zelle in Jerusalem,” CIA, War Crimes, CIA name files, IWG, RG 263, Box 14, Eichmann, Adolf, Vol. 1, NARA.
77 Sereny, Into that Darkness, 321–22.
78 Monsignor Karl Bayer interview with Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness, 309; Goñi, The Real Odessa, 342. As for the misplaced hope in the Vatican leadership that the Ustaša might be able to return to power, see Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 234.
79 Most of the files about Pius’s overt support of the efforts to free Ustašan and other war criminals were released by the U.K. National Archives in 2001 and 2002. One of the first journalists to put those files into their historical context was Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa, 328–34. Osborne to Foreign Office, August 27, 1945, Foreign Office, 371/48920 R14525; Appeal of the Vatican, March 27, 1946, War Office 204/1113; Osborne to Foreign Office, January 16, 1947, Foreign Office, 371/67370 R 1166, all files at the National Archives, Kew, UK.
80 Appeal of the Vatican, March 27, 1946, War Office 204/1113, National Archives, Kew, UK.
81 In fact, the Italians and Allies never searched monasteries. Church officials even successfully extended their Lateran Pact sovereignty to many schools, churches, and convents. See Steinacher, Nazis on the Run,143–46.
82 Quoted in Goñi, The Real Odessa, 330
83 Osborne, instructions provided by the Foreign Office, 1947, Foreign Office files, 371/59423 R17521 and R17586, cited in Goñi, The Real Odessa, 330–31.
84 Quoted in Goñi, The Real Odessa, 331.
85 D’Arcy Osborne to Foreign Office, January 16, 1947, Foreign Office files, 371/67370, R1166, National Archives, Kew, UK.
86 Deposition of William E. W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, December 12, 2005, 40–41.
87 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 59, citing Draganović’s statement to the Yugoslav authorities, September 1967, 26; Ibid., 108, citing the report of a British diplomat in Italy in 1947. Major Stephen Clissold was sent to Genoa to detain some Ustašan criminals, but they managed to escape by sea. According to Clissold, the fugitives were “sponsored by the Pontifical Commissione de Assistenza,” and a “trusted collaborator” of Draganović had given them safe shelter while in Genoa; citing telegram from Rome to Foreign Office, February 22, 1947, Public Records Office, Foreign Office, 371 673372, and an unpublished manuscript of Stephen Clissold. See also Goñi, The Real Odessa, 332. Further evidence that Pius personally protected Draganović is that the Croatian remained in his position as the head of San Girolamo until Pius’s death in 1958, at which point the next Pope, John XXIII, promptly evicted him.
88 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 32.
89 Father Ciro Benedettini quoted by Diana Jean Schemo, “A Nazi’s Trail Leads to a Gold Cache in Brazil,” The New York Times, September 23, 1997, 1.
90 Since the 1944 death of Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione, Pius had relied on two undersecretaries, Monsignors Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Montini, for all foreign policy and refugee issues. Goñi, The Real Odessa, 331; see also Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 34–35.
91 CIA memorandum, “A Dangerous and Uncompromising Extremist,” Subject: Dr. Krunoslav DRAGANOVIC, Report No (redacted), Date of Intelligence Information 1945–1952, Date of report, July 24, 1952, CIA Operational Files, Declassified, NARA.
92 Deposition of William W. Gowen, Emil Alperin v. Vatican Bank, Case No. C99-04041 MMC, USDC Northern District of California, March 9, 2006, 760–61; John Triggs, “The True Story of the Looted ‘Nazi Gold,’ ” The Express, November 20, 2004, 53.
93 Triggs, “The True Story of the Looted ‘Nazi Gold,’ ” 53.
94 “Illegal Emigration Movements in and Through Italy,” Vincent La Vista to Herbert J. Cummings, May 15, 1947, Holocaust-Era Assets, Civilian Agency Records, RG 19, File 10, NARA.
95 Memo to J. Graham Parsons, State Department, July 28, 1947, “Political General 1947,” RG 59, Box 17, Entry 1068, Location 250/488/29/01-05, NARA; see Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 44.
96 CIC documents set forth “the provisional agreement” to work with Draganović, describing him as “head of the Vatican resettlement project for refugees.” Steinacher, Nazis on the Run, 200. When John Moors Cabot, the U.S. ambassador to Belgrade, learned about the Allied intelligence–Vatican ratline, he complained to Washington, “We are conniving with [the] Vatican and Argentina to get people to haven in latter country.” The OSS was under no illusion about Draganović, calling him a “Fascist, war criminal.” “Klaus Barbie and the United States Government,” A Report to the Attorney General of the United States, August 1983, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice, 136; see also Mark Fritz, “The Secret History of World War II: From Hot Conflict to Cold War; US Made Moral Compromises in Using Former Nazi Spy Network Against Soviet Threat,” The Boston Globe, Part 9 of 9, December 26, 2001, 1.
97 Operations Paperclip and Overcast were OSS programs that recruited 765 Nazi rocket scientists and engineers in the decade following the war. The recruits ranged from Wernher von Braun, the “father of rocket science,” to Hubertus Strughold, who was involved in medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp. Reinhard Gehlen, a Catholic and Wehrmacht officer, was put in charge of an eponymously named counterintelligence group that spied on the East Germans and the Soviets. The Gehlen Group consisted of ex-Nazis, quite a few of whom were involved in wartime atrocities. (The Gehlen Group was eventually absorbed into West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service or Bundesnachrichtendienst, the BND.)
The same was true of Allied intelligence recruitment in other fields such as chemical warfare, electronics, and to a smaller extent medicine and cryptography. In some instances, after supplying information, fugitives were simply given a free pass to a safe country. SS Officer Klaus Barbie is the most prominent example. See generally Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne, 1991); Heinz Hone and Hermann Zolling, The General Was a Spy: The Truth About General Gehlen and His Spy Ring (New York: Putnam, 1972); Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton, and Neal Ascherson, The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection (New York: Henry Holt, 1985); Simpson, Blowback.
98 Paul S. Lyon, “Rat Line from Austria to South America,” appendix to “Klaus Barbie and the United States Government,” A Report to the Attorney General of the United States, August 1983, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice, http://www.justice.gov/criminal/hrsp/archives/1983/08-02-83barbie-rpt.pdf.
99 Bishop Hudal to Juan Perón, August 31, 1948, Collegio Santa Maria dell’Anima, Nachlass Hudal, Box 27, August 1948.
100 John Hobbins, “Memorandum for the Record, Subject: Informant Disposal, Emigration Methods of the 430th CIC Detachment,” Top Secret, reproduced in “Klaus Barbie and the United States Government,” A Report to the Attorney General of the United States, August 1983, Tab 96 and 145n.
101 Dianne Kirby, “Divinely Sanctioned: The Anglo-American Cold War Alliance and the Defence of Western Civilization and Christianity, 1945–48,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 3 (July 2000): 385–412.
102 Kent, The Lonely Cold War, 239.
103 Adriano Ercole Ciani, “The Vatican, American Catholics and the Struggle for Palestine, 1917–1958: A Study of Cold War Catholic Transnationalism” (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, Canada, 2011).
104 Cooney, The American Pope, 161, citing undated Spellman memo to Marshall; Simpson, Blowback, 91.
105 Telegram to the State Department from J. Graham Parsons, January 16, 1948, J. Graham Parsons Papers, Series 4, Special Collections, Georgetown University. Myron Taylor also reported to the State Department that Pius’s main worries were that the election could easily result in a “leftist dictatorship” and that the communists “remain the best organized and most active party with indefatigable will to [gain] power and seemingly limitless funds.”
106 Griffiths memo to Cardinal Spellman, March 4, 1948, cited in Cooney, The American Pope, 159.
107 “Pope Sees Senators; Says Hate and Greed Bar Peace,” The New York Times, November 11, 1947, 29; Pope Receives Congressman,” The New York Times, 42; Cooney, The American Pope, 157; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 224.
108 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 145–46.
109 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 48.
110 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 56, 237–38.
111 The extent of fear in the Truman administration about a communist electoral victory in Italy was revealed by George Kennan, then chief of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, when he cabled U.S. diplomats in Europe: “As far as Europe is concerned, Italy is obviously key point. If Communists were to win the election there our whole position in Mediterranean, and possibly in Europe as well, would probably be undermined.” Kennan recommended American military intervention and occupation of Italy if the communists won. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 31–32; Simpson, Blowback, 89–92; Steinacher, Nazis on the Run.
112 Author interview with Elan Steinberg, April 12, 2006. See also Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt), 79; James E. Miller, “Taking Off the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections,” Diplomatic History 7, 1983. See generally George J. Gill, “The Truman Administration and Vatican Relations,” The Catholic Historical Review 73, no. 5, July 1987; Martin A. Lee, “Their Will Be Done,” Mother Jones, July/August 1983.
113 Quoted in Gollin, Worldly Goods, 464.
114 John F. Pollard, “The Vatican, Italy and the Cold War,” in Diane Kirby, Religion and the Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 110.
115 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 202; Cooney, The American Pope, 155–58; Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 146-47.
116 The Popular Democratic Front consisted of the Italian Communist Party and the Italian Socialist Party. The disclosure of some of the money spent ($1 million to the center-right political parties) was made in a CIA memorandum to the Forty Committee (National Security Council), presented to the Select Committee on Intelligence, United States House of Representatives in 1975. The U.S. government provided overt aid in excess of $350 million ($3.6 billion in 2014 dollars) to Italy just in the year leading up to the election. The communists tried countering the Vatican’s influence among voters by publicizing the case of a priest in the Secretary of State’s office, Edward Prettner Cippico, who was arrested before the vote for stealing money from wealthy Italians who had used the IOR to evade currency restrictions. The church defrocked Cippico. The Cippico revelations titillated Italians but had no discernible impact on the election. (Sentenced to nine years in prison, an appellate court overturned his conviction and after the election the church reinstated him into the priesthood.) See Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 182–83. The church and CIA were not stymied simply if a country did not have free elections. In Guatemala, the CIA and Cardinal Spellman joined forces in backing a 1954 coup that put into power their handpicked anticommunist, Colonel Castillo Armas. See generally Dermot Keogh, “Ireland, The Vatican and the Cold War: The Case of Italy, 1948,” The Historical Journal 34, no. 4 (December 1991): 931–52.
117 John Tagliabue, “Giulio Andreotti, Premier of Italy 7 Times, Dies at 94,” The New York Times, May 6, 2013, 1. Mussolini had imprisoned De Gasperi in 1927, but released him two years later to the “custody” of Pope Pius XI. See Berry, Render Unto Rome, 25.
118 Cardinal Francis Spellman, “The Pope’s War on Communism,” Look, May 24, 1949.
119 “Vatican Decree in Scots Churches: Anti-Communist Move,” The Glasgow Herald, August 9, 1949, 5; “Catholic Communists to Be Excommunicated,” The Advocate, July 15, 1949, 3.
1 Simpson, Blowback, 67.
2 Martha Hopkins, “For European Recovery,” Library of Congress, Information Bulletin, Vol. 56, No. 11, June 23, 1997.
3 Article 37 in the armistice with Italy, on September 29, 1943, established the Allied Control Commission for Italy. The Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories ran the country until the Italian peace treaty was signed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1947. While under Allied military command, Italian public companies were held in the equivalent of nontrading escrow accounts, and shareholders like the Vatican had to wait until 1947 before their ownership rights in those firms were fully restored.
4 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 181.
5 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, citing H. J. A. Sire, The Knights of Malta (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 258–59; see also Paul Hoffman, “Curia Cardinals Rule Informally,” The New York Times, October 8, 1958, 3.
6 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 208.
7 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 200; see also Gollin, Worldly Goods, 465. Carlo Pacelli was the Vatican official who asked Bishop Hudal to represent the church in the October 1943 talks with the German ambassador about the Nazi roundup of Rome’s Jews. Pacelli was also at the center of a family scandal, taking a picture of Sister Pascalina and Pius’s doctor, Ricardo Galeazzi-Lisi, in what Vatican insiders said was a “compromising situation.” The picture evidently made its way back to Pius, but whatever the private fallout, it did not affect Pius’s close attachment to his doctor, nephew, or Sister Pascalina. Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 201.
8 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 350–51.
9 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 107, citing Lai interview with Spada, March 7, 1979. That department was one of the few paying a competitive salary compared to private industry.
10 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 207.
11 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 12; Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 76–77; see also Raw, The Moneychangers, 53.
12 Most sources list fourteen children for Mennini, although one writer says it was ten. Hebblethwaite, Pope John Paul II and the Church, 108.
13 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 39; Gollin, Worldly Goods, 465. One of Mennini’s sons was a Jesuit priest and a daughter was a nun. See generally Raw, The Moneychangers, 64.
14 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 107, n. 24.
15 See Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 189; Chernow, The House of Morgan, hardcover, 286.
16 Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 61.
17 See John Lukacs, “The Diplomacy of the Holy See During World War II: Review Article,” The Catholic Historical Review 60, no. 2 (July 1974): 273; and Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 192, citing APSS (Ambasciata presso la Santa Sede), pacco 71, memorandum to the minister, 4 and 24, November 1942.
18 In addition to the handful of men who comprised Nogara’s close circle, there was a second tier that also wielded reduced but still considerable influence. Some worked inside the Vatican, and a few represented Nogara outside the church but without any formal arrangement. They included two of Carlo Pacelli’s cousins, Marcantonio and Giulio Pacelli; and Baron Francesco Maria Oddasso, a director at Nogara’s SNIA Viscosa, the country’s largest textile company. Luigi Gedda, an ex-president of Catholic Action, was a Nogara insider, as was Antonio Rinaldi, vice president of the Apostolic Chamber and a private finance company that did business with the IOR. There were also Nogara’s longtime friends Vittorio Cerruti, Giovanni Battista Sacchetti, Count Enrico Galeazzi, and Count Paolo Blumensthil (whose father, Colonel Bernardino Blumensthil, had led the Vatican’s last Pontifical Army, which was disbanded in 1906). See Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 46-47; Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 27, 97, 135; Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 39; “Who’s Who in Fascist Italy,” December 26, 1942, RG 226, Box 4, File 174, NARA.
19 Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 188; Lai, Finanze vaticane, 14, 17; see Hachey, Anglo-Vatican Relations, 202, 226; and Chernow, The House of Morgan, hardcover, 286.
20 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 466–67.
21 Ibid., 467.
22 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 207.
23 Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 131–32, 159–60.
24 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 53.
25 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 18.
26 Ibid., 20; see also Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 52–53.
27 Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 91–92, 102; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 207.
28 In addition to buying ownership stakes in companies, the Vatican also bought bonds, some offered by the government, and others of state-owned companies such as Italy’s oil and gas enterprise, Ente Nazaionale Idrocarburi. By 1950, the church earned approximately $3 million annually in interest from its Italian bond investments. See generally Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 52–54.
29 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 20, citing Lai interview with Massimo Spada, March 7, 1979; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 100.
30 Ernst A. Lewin, “The Finances of the Vatican,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 2 (April 1983): 195; Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 116, 119–20, 122–23; see also Horne, “How the Vatican Manages Its Money,” 80.
31 “Italy: Hens Nesting on Rocks,” Time, September 19, 1969.
32 Romano, Giuseppe Volpi, 238. See also “German Penetration into European Insurance,” Economic Advisory Branch, Financial Investigative Branch, RG 260, Box 651, file 390/46/1, 6–7; Supplementary Reports, June to October 1946, RG 260, OMGUS Records, Property Division, Box 647, file 742, 1–5.
33 While Nogara and his financial administration prepared for the postwar era, Pius also set about to make his permanent mark on Catholicism. In 1950, he announced Munificentissimus Deus, the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. It decreed that God had taken to heaven the physical body of the mother of Jesus. The doctrine had been debated in earlier centuries and rejected by other Popes since scripture did not support it. Pius definitively settled the issue by invoking the Papal doctrine of infallibility (no other Pope has ever claimed infallibility on a matter of faith). Four years later, in his encyclical Sacra Virginitas, Pius cited Mary for the concept that virginity was more perfect than marriage. See Sacra Virginitas, March 25, 1954, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_25031954_sacra-virginitas_en.html. See generally Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 21.
34 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 57.
35 Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 131, 139–41.
36 Montini and Monsignor Domenico Tardini had jointly filled the office—subject to Pius’s tight supervision—that had been vacant since Cardinal Maglione’s 1944 death.
37 Steinacher, Nazis on the Run, 106.
38 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 57–58.
39 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 136.
40 “New Cardinals Receive Symbolic Hats from Pope,” The Boston Globe, January 14, 1953, 8.
41 Pius also passed over his other Undersecretary of State, Monsignor Tardini. In a January 12, 1953, meeting of some cardinals, Pius said he had wanted to appoint both Montini and Tardini, but that they had declined. Their decision, said Pius, was “palpable evidence of their virtue.” Few in the Curia believed that the duo had voluntarily passed the chance to become to cardinals. Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 112.
42 Francis Xavier Murphy, “City of God,” The Wilson Quarterly 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 105.
43 See Roland Flamini, Pope, Premier, President (New York, Macmillan, 1980), 166–67; Michael Novak, The Open Church (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 31–32. Theoretically any Catholic man can be selected at a conclave to serve as Pope. But the last noncardinal, Urban VI, was picked in 1378, and his choice led to the Western Schism in which Urban had to fight for legitimacy against Clement VII.
44 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 22.
45 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 146; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 29.
46 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 52–56.
47 See generally Raw, The Moneychangers, 52;. At the Ceramica Pozzi (earlier Pozzi-Ginori), Paolo Nogara served with Prince Marcantonio Pacelli, who represented the church’s investment in the firm. Paolo also served on a series of boards in the chemical industry, all of which had Vatican investments.
48 Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 114–15, 156–57.
49 Ibid., 114–15.
50 Arnaldo Cortesi, “Pope over Crisis, His Doctors Feel; New Therapy Set,” The New York Times, December 5, 1954, 1; Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 155.
51 Pascalina later wrote admiringly of Niehans, see generally Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 154–58, 179.
52 Sister Pascalina wrote in her memoirs about Pius’s “serious illness” and that “his stomach rejected all food.” He was beset daily with nausea and “the continued, cruelly debilitating hiccupping. The only periods of respite were the brief half hours of sleep.” Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 155.
53 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 22–23.
54 Niehans convinced the Pope not to undergo exploratory surgery to check further on what was causing his stomach problems. Instead, Niehans continued administering a combination of his specially formulated injections and as well as blood transfusions. Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 158.
55 Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 156–57.
56 By that time, Niehans had formed his own Swiss clinic that was shipping its products worldwide. Although he died in 1981, the eponymously named clinic flourished. On its website—http://www.paulniehans.ch/clinic.htm—the Clinic Paul Niehans claims it can “rejuvenate and revitalize your body” and cites famous patients including Pope Pius XII, Charlie Chaplin, Saudi King Ibn Saud, and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
57 Niehans returned to treat Pius in October 1958. He was there during the Pope’s final days; Pascalina “Niehans never left the bedside.” Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 187, 190, 192.
58 Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2013), 294. “I shall die quite suddenly one day and I’m glad I’ve written my testament. . . . I asked God for a day.” Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 164.
59 Sister Pascalina later recounted how she and a few other Papal confidants had tried but failed to see what Pius described. “The following day was a Sunday. Full of expectation we went into the garden, hoping to see the spectacle as well, but we came home again disappointed.” Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 136. See also Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 20–21.
60 Ventresca, Soldier of Christ, 292–93.
61 See for example Cortesi, “Pope over Crisis, His Doctors Feel; New Therapy Set,” 1.
62 Although embalming was against Vatican tradition, Dr. Galeazzi-Lisi persuaded Cardinal Tisserant that Pius had secretly authorized him to do it utilizing a method the doctor swore was the same ancient formula used for Jesus. But he botched the herbal and chemical preparation. While Pius’s body was still at Castel Gandolfo, where he died, Galeazzi-Lisi wrapped it in plastic in a failed attempt to minimize the horrific odor. During the public procession from the summer palace to Rome, Pius’s chest exploded and some of the body began disintegrating before the horrified crowd. After spending a full night repairing the corpse, the following day Pius was laid in a transparent sheath on a colossal catafalque in St. Peter’s. As thousands slowly passed to pay their respect, yellowish gray splotches began appearing on Pius’s face. The decaying odor was soon so strong that one of the Swiss Guards fainted. At night, with the crowds gone, Galeazzi-Lisi climbed a ladder to pour more of his herbal concoction into the Pope. It was for naught. The casket had to be sealed and placed into a larger lead coffin before it could be buried without further incident. Galeazzi-Lisi compounded his bungled embalming by selling to Paris Match photos of the dead Pontiff as well as what he claimed was his diary of the last four days of Pius’s life. Italy’s medical association expelled him for “infamous conduct,” and the Catholic church censured him. But he incredibly reclaimed his medical license because of a technical flaw in the administrative proceedings against him. “Funeral of Pope Pius XII and Coronation of John XXIII,” 1958, DO 35/8036 (reference prior department CON 221/1), National Archives, Kew, UK; see generally Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 23–26; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 356; and Murphy, La Popessa, 15–16.
63 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 31; Cooney, The American Pope, 258; see also Arnaldo Corteri, “Cardinal Roncalli Elected Pope; Venetian, 76, Reigns as John XXIII,” The New York Times, October 29, 1958, 1.
64 Peter Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes (Cleveland, OH: William Collins, 1978), 73–74.
65 When Venice was a republic, its top cleric was titled a Patriarch. That title from the days of the empire of the Papal States carried over to modern times. “Elections of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI; visit of Archbishop of Canterbury to Rome, 2 December 1960,” 1958–1963, PREM 11/4594, National Archives, Kew, UK.
66 Reese, Inside the Vatican, 95.
67 Cooney, The American Pope, 260; see also Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 41. A continuing conspiracy theory emerged from the conclave that Cardinal Siri was in fact elected, and then either not allowed to become Pope or for reasons not clear was afraid to accept the post. The so-called Siri Thesis is promoted by a small clique of Catholic traditionalists—called Sirianists—who believe that Roncalli was selected to liberalize the church by calling for the reform-minded Second Vatican Council. The “Siri-was-elected thesis” is based on several minutes of white smoke after a vote on the second day, as well as some incorrect Italian newspaper accounts. It has been repeated everywhere from self-published books to YouTube videos. Some proponents have cited still classified FBI reports (conveniently not available for independent review) to support the theory. At the next three conclaves, in 1963 and 1978 (two that year), Siri was the top vote getter on the first ballots. See Reese, Inside the Vatican, 78, 85, 91, 93, 95.
68 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 41; “Religion: I Choose John . . . ,” Time, November 10, 1958.
69 “Religion: I Choose John . . . ,” Time.
70 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 111–12.
71 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 48.
72 Wynn, Keepers of the Keys, 17–18; Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 48–49.
73 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 325.
74 Sereny, Into That Darkness, 323, note.
75 Wilton Wynn, Keepers of the Keys: John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II—Three Who Changed the Church (New York: Random House, 1988), 17–18.
76 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 19.
77 Lehnert, His Humble Servant, 189.
78 One version (Murphy, La Popessa, 301) has Pascalina slapping Tisserant. See also Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 137–-38; and Cooney, The American Pope, 262.
79 Spellman quoted in Cooney, The American Pope, 261.
80 John XXIII ordered the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, to stop referring to him as “The Illuminated Holy Father,” or “The Highest Pontiff,” and instead use the simpler “Pope.” “Religion: I Choose John . . . ,” Time.
81 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 27.
82 Wynn, Keepers of the Keys, 236.
83 Patrick Allitt, “Catholics and the New Conservatism of the 1950s,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7, no. 1, “Transitions in Catholic Culture: The Fifties” (Winter 1988): 15–37. The U.S. intelligence report is from Cooney, The American Pope, 278–79, citing memorandum, CIA staff report, “Change in the Church,” No. 27-63, May 13, 1963.
84 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 14–17.
85 Pope John refused repeated entreaties from the conservatives to mobilize the church in Italian elections on behalf of the Christian Democrats. In Latin America, John allowed bishops to criticize some totalitarian regimes backed by the U.S. When Spellman visited Nicaragua, the Pope personally requested that the New York cardinal not pose for any pictures with the right-wing strongman, Anastasio Somoza. Spellman ignored the directive and not only was photographed with Somoza but even gave his permission for his image to be put on a stamp with the dictator. “Visit by Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York to Nicaragua,” Code AN File 1781, FO 371/139625, National Archives, Kew, UK.
86 “Nogara, 88, Directed Vatican’s Finances,” The New York Times, November 16, 1958, 88.
87 See for instance “Bernardino Nogara,” The Boston Globe, November 16, 1958. The Globe, as did many other newspapers, had trouble describing what Nogara had done during his twenty-five years in the city-state. Some obituaries mistakenly referred to him as monsignor. Also, a few books and articles cite a statement attributed to Cardinal Spellman at the time of Nogara’s death: “Next to Jesus Christ the greatest thing that has happened to the Catholic Church is Bernardino Nogara.” However, no citation is provided. In his comprehensive biography of Cardinal Spellman (The American Pope), John Cooney does not repeat it, nor does John Pollard in his book, in which Nogara figures prominently, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
88 R. García Mateo, Rafael Wirth, and J. M. Puig de la Bellacasa, “Las finanza del Vaticano,” El Ciervo 19, no. 198 (August 1970): 10–11.
89 Francis Xavier Murphy, “A Look at the Earth’s Tiniest State,” Chicago Tribune, August 31, 1982, 11; Murphy, “City of God,” 104.
90 The First Vatican Council, called in 1864 by Pius IX, debated the role of the church in the modernist movement, and addressed whether the Pope was infallible when it came to matters of faith. Earlier Ecumenical Councils summoned in the church’s history—one in 325 to set the date for Easter or one in 431 to declare Mary the mother of God—did not require that all bishops assemble in Rome.
91 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 361. The Second Vatican Council led to the removal of some of the most incendiary anti-Jewish language that had been a hallmark of the Catholic liturgy for centuries. Many traditionalists resented the changes, charging that the removal diluted the faith. A few conservative congregations refused to abide by the new rules. French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 led a breakaway group of uncompromising conservatives he called the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). Lefebvre was excommunicated, although in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI reversed the excommunication posthumously.
92 “Pope Acts to Unite All Christians: Summons First Ecumenical (World-Wide) Council in Nearly a Century,” The Boston Globe, January 26, 1959, 1.
93 Wynn, Keepers of the Keys, 153.
94 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 35.
95 Lewin, “The Finances of the Vatican,” 187; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 96–97. One of the best estimates of the value of the Vatican’s real estate holdings was a 1978 survey mostly from public records, and excluding real estate held by foreign dioceses, by the International Herald Tribune. It put the value at $36 billion ($176 billion in 2014 dollars). In 1985, New York Times reporter Paul Hoffman reported that the church owned between 20 percent of all land and 25 percent of all buildings in Rome’s city limits: Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 171.
96 Raw, The Moneychangers, 51; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 97
1 Anonymous business colleague of Sindona quoted in Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, Pontiff (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 145.
2 Sindona’s father had trouble holding a regular job and his mother was an invalid. Sindona’s maternal grandmother raised him and his brothers. Raw, The Moneychangers, 56.
3 Galli, Finanza bianca, 65. Author John Cornwell charged that immediately after the war, Sindona was “illegally trafficking in grains, with the benign acquiescence of the Allied Military Government on the island [Sicily].” Cornwell, God’s Banker, 36. Cornwell does not provide a citation for the allegation, and this author did not find documentary evidence to support it.
4 Luigi DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker: Michele Sindona (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), 13–14, 22.
5 Jennifer Parmelee, Untitled, Associated Press, International News, Rome, BC cycle, May 18, 1986.
6 Gianni Simoni and Giuliano Turone, Il caffè di Sindona: Un finanzieri d’avventura tra politica, Vaticano e mafia (Milan: Garzanti Libri, 2009), 33–34; see also Galli, Finanza bianca, 72.
7 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 189.
8 Ibid., 190.
9 DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 31; Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Pontiff, 146. Some writers, such as Charles Raw (The Moneychangers) believe that Sindona did not meet Spada until 1958. But their correspondence predates that.
10 The party was the Partito Popolare.
11 Nick Tosches, Power on Earth (New York: Arbor House, 1986), 22; see also Galli, Finanza bianca, 65.
12 Murphy, “City of God,” 111; historian Carlo Pellegrini Bellavite, in a 2002 history of the Banco Ambrosiano (Il caso del controllo del Banco Ambrosiano), noted that “Montini had a good impression of Sindona. It was unlikely to find two people more different, Montini on the one hand a slender figure and ascetic, the disciple of Maritain, and the other figure a cold and ruthless Sicilian financier.” Cited in Galli, Finanza bianca, 69.
13 Michael Arthur Ledeen, West European Communism and American Foreign Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987); “Chief Italian Red Sees Rightist Plot,” The New York Times, August 2, 1948, 3.
14 DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 35.
15 Although Montini and Sindona were energized over the battle for control of the trade union because Secchia was a communist, neither man liked labor unions. Sindona thought they crippled fast-growing Italian companies from competing internationally, and Montini feared that if they grew too powerful, it would only be a matter of time before the Vatican’s menial lay workers would want to organize. In fact, in 1979, many Vatican employees did join the Association of Lay Vatican Workers. Although unions were still banned inside the city-state, the association operated loosely as a central bargaining authority when it came to salary increases, adjustments in work hours, and changes to pension rights. DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 34–35; Tosches, Power on Earth, 37.
16 “Italy: Beating the Cycle,” Time, September 25, 1964; see also Malachi Martin, The Final Conclave (Briarcliff, NY: Stein & Day, 1978), 28; Galli, Finanza bianca, 72.
17 Within three weeks of assuming the Papacy, Pope John broke a 372-year history by expanding the College of Cardinals to seventy, the largest ever. During his Pontificate, he added another fifteen, including five Americans. Senior cardinals were not pleased with the expansion since it diluted their exclusive club. Although John is often deemed a reformer since he appointed the first cardinals from the Philippines and Japan, the college became more Italian under him than it had been since the turn of the century. He also increased, to one third, the number of cardinals who were Curia officials.
18 Account of unnamed priest recounted in DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 35.
19 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 59.
20 David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 97–98; Paul L. Williams, The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 100–1.
21 Between 1958 and 1965, the percentage of Italian families that owned televisions rose from 12 percent to 49 percent, refrigerators from 13 percent to 55 percent, and washing machines from 3 percent to 23 percent. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 239; see also William Easterly, “Reliving the 1950s: The Big Push, Poverty Traps, and Takeoffs in Economic Development,” Journal of Economic Growth 11, no. 4 (December 2006): 289–318; see also Cornwell, God’s Banker, 33.
22 Galli, Finanza bianca, 72–73; see also Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Pontiff, 146.
23 Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 34–35.
24 The Nogara-created SNIA Viscosa textile conglomerate—for which Sindona did some legal work—bought 10 percent of BPF. And another 10 percent stake went to a Sindona friend, Tito Carnelutti, who owned the Banque de Financement of Geneva. See generally Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 59; and Tosches, Power on Earth, 44–45.
25 Cornwell, God’s Banker, 38; DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 37–38. Sindona also aggressively utilized the confidentiality shield of the attorney-client privilege to protect his clients’ identity in deals.
26 Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 34–35; DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 38–42; as for Di Jorio’s role, see Lai, Finanze vaticane, 38–39.
27 Tosches, Power on Earth, 47.
28 The two Liechtenstein firms were Ravoxr A.G. and Tuxanr A.G. See generally DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 56–57; Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 59.
29 “Italy: Beating the Cycle,” Time.
30 Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 33.
31 Tosches, Power on Earth, 60–61.
32 Ibid., 53.
33 Ibid., 118; Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 3536.
34 The tales of Sindona’s sponsorship by a Mafia cartel are oft repeated if unproven. In Larry Gurwin’s The Calvi Affair, Vito Genovese, representing all Sicilian mob families, picked Sindona to run a black-market produce business during the last few years of World War II, giving him the seed money to establish his career as an attorney while simultaneously indebting Sindona forever to the Mafia (page 10). Paul Williams, in The Vatican Exposed, even tied in the church, asserting that Sindona was introduced to Genovese by the archbishop of Messina (page 104). While clerics have been involved with the mob—four Franciscan monks were convicted in 1962 as made members of the Sicilian Mafia, and the prior of Rome’s St. Angelo’s Cathedral was convicted in 1978 of laundering ransom money for his Mafia family—there is no credible evidence linking any of the criminal clerics to Sindona. In 1972, Jack Begon, an ABC stringer in Rome, filed a story that in 1957 Sindona attended a summit meeting with leading Mafiosi in the penthouse of Palermo’s Hotel et des Palmes. Supposedly joining him were mob luminaries including Lucky Luciano, Joseph Bonanno, Carmine Galante, and representatives of the Genovese, Lucchese, and Gambino families. At that meeting, according to Begon, the mob bosses gave the young attorney “total control over the profits of the heroin trade for investment in Europe and the Americas.” Begon claimed that the following year some unidentified Mafiosi kidnapped and interrogated him to discover his sources. After an investigation, Italian authorities ultimately charged Begon with faking his own kidnapping and also embezzling $5,000 from ABC. A Rome court cleared him of any criminal liability but most journalists who have studied Begon’s story dismiss it as unsubstantiated. Nick Tosches, Power on Earth, is typical in dubbing it “fanciful” and an “apocryphal history.” Still, other authors—including Luigi DiFonzo in St. Peter’s Banker and Malachi Martin in Rich Church, Poor Church—have repeated the story without any caveat. In Williams’s The Vatican Exposed, the author goes so far as to list what food and wine the group ordered and says that it was the night in which “La Costra Nostra . . . came into being.”
While both the postwar produce story and the Hotel et des Palmes tale seem false, they were circulated so widely that many people simply accepted Sindona’s link to the Mafia as an uncontested fact.
There is an unresolved matter about Sindona and a possible underworld criminal connection. On November 1, 1967, Fred J. Douglas, a director in Interpol’s Washington, D.C., office, sent a letter to the police in Milan. It was an inquiry about four men, including Sindona and one of his trusted American executives, an accountant, Daniel Porco. The inquiry said that the men “are involved in the illegal trafficking of sedatives, stimulants and hallucinogens between Italy and the United States and other regions of Europe.” According to the Final Report of Italy’s Parliamentary Committee that ultimately investigated all civil and criminal matters that had arisen concerning Sindona, “The superintendent of Milan responded with a letter of bureaucratic style, which acknowledged a business relationship between Porco and Sindona, but concluded categorically that ‘based on the status of the investigation carried out by us, there is no evidence to say that the persons referred to, especially Porco and Sindona, are involved in drug trafficking between Italy and the USA.’ ” There is no indication the Milanese police opened a formal investigation, nor did anything more than make a few casual inquiries and rely on the truthfulness of the denials they received. (Relazioni di Commissioni Parlamentari di Inchiesti, Relazione conclusiva della Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul caso Sindona e sulle responsabilità politiche ed amministrative ad esso eventualmente connesse, VIII legislatura—Doc. XXIII n. 2-sexies, Relazione conclusiva di maggioranza, relatore on. Giuseppe Azzaro, Rome, March 24, 1982, 163.)
In the late 1970s, after Sindona’s empire had collapsed and he was jailed for financial crimes, some mobsters—like Francesco Marino Mannoia and Antonino Giuffrè—tried implicating him in drug trafficking. Those proffers were inevitably in exchange for leniency on pending charges or to deflect the investigation from the suspects that prosecutors thought were the real masterminds. In January 1982, Sindona was one of 470 men indicted in Italy in the then largest heroin smuggling case in history. But the charges against him were dismissed before the trial began, and the evidence was based solely on the account of a top mobster trying in part to buy his freedom by fingering the financier. In 1985, Sindona, from prison, bragged to author Nick Tosches, “Never did I lie down with the Mafia. . . . And never, despite their greatest efforts, blackmails, and dreams, have the prosecutors here or in America been able to produce one Mafioso to say otherwise. In all their wiretaps, not once have they heard the name of Michele Sindona mentioned.” Tosches, Power on Earth, 98, 240–42.
Ivan Fisher, a prominent New York criminal defense lawyer, represented Sindona on an appeal in 1979–80. Fisher had by then carved out a specialty in the high-profile defense bar by representing some top drug traffickers and Italian mobsters. He had been the lead counsel in the 1973 defense of the Pizza Connection, at the time the largest heroin conspiracy. “To the extent I know a negative,” Fisher told me, “I know Sindona was not into drugs or a member of the Mafia. My information goes well beyond whatever he and I discussed. The government tried hard to connect him to the Mafia, but it wasn’t possible. He did know some of the big New York mobsters, but that is because he was like a rock star among the Italians in America. Everybody wanted to hang out with Michele. But he wasn’t one of them.” Author interview with Ivan Fisher, June 19, 2013.