The Vatican Bank and Nazi Gold
Search warrant anyone?
ROME — Wealth plundered by the Nazis from their victims has been traced to banks in Switzerland,
Sweden, Portugal and other neutral countries that were secretly helping
the Nazis stash stolen gold or launder it to buy war material. One
state after another has reluctantly opened its archives and banking records to aid the search, with one glaring exception: the Vatican.
So far the Vatican has flatly refused to allow investigators access to its archives, despite repeated pleas from several nations and from Jewish groups. A task force headed by the US Under-secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat is expected to issue
a report that questions the Vatican’s wartime financial dealings. And
mounting evidence suggests that plunder from the Ustasha, Croatia’s
pro-Nazi fascist government during the war, with the aid of Croatian
Catholic priests, made its way to Rome. Some of it was used to help
Croatian war criminals flee to South America.
From 1941 to 1945, the Ustashas
exterminated an estimated 500,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, and looted
theirproperty. They demanded 1,000 kilograms of gold from the Jews of
Zagreb, only to ship them to concentration camps
and kill them anyway. The Croatian Catholic Church was closely
entangled with the Ustashas: in the early years of the war, Catholic
priests oversaw the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs while
Franciscans distributed propaganda.
Several high Catholic officials in
Yugoslavia were later indicted for war crimes. They included Fr.
Dragutin Kamber, who ordered the killing of nearly 300 Orthodox Serbs,
the “hangman of the Serbs” Bishop Ivan Saric of Sarajevo, and Bishop
Gregory Rozman of Slovenia, a wanted Nazi collaborator. A trial in 1946
resulted in the conviction of a half-dozen Ustasha priests, including
former Franciscan Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, a commandant of a
concentration camp where the Ustashas tortured and slaughtered hundreds of thousands with a brutality that shocked even the Nazis.
As more secret documents become public,
it is Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic, who emerges as the most significant
player of all. The Franciscan had been a senior official of the Ustasha
committee that handled the forced conversion of the Serbs. In 1943, the
Ustasha arranged with the Church for Draganovic to be sent to Rome.
There he served as a seminary of Croatian monks that was in fact a
center of clandestine Ustasha activity. He also became the Ustasha’s
unofficial emissary at the Vatican and liaison to the Vatican
organization to aid war refugees.
Draganovic and collaborators such as Fr.
Golik provided the means and support, including forged Red Cross
passports, for a number of Ustasha war criminals to escape justice.
Through an underground railroad of sympathetic priests known as “the
ratline”, the Ustashas were able to escape to neutral countries,
primarily Argentina. Virtually the entire Ustasha leadership went free.
The day that Germany capitulated 288
kilograms of gold were removed from the Croatian National Bank and state
treasuries. Some of that landed in Draganovic’s hands. Called the
“Golden Priest”, he doled it out to Croatian refugees, including Ustasha
soldiers. He was never charged and returned to Yugoslavia, where he
died in 1983.
A memo that surfaced last summer prompted the State Department’s interest, but the Vatican swiftly dismissed it, saying the charges could not be true. Other reports mention Ustashas meeting Vatican officials, living in the Vatican; even being hidden at the pope’s summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo and driving cars with Vatican plates in Rome. The Vatican’s tolerance of the Ustasha during the war was no secret, but though they insist they have nothing to hide, they refuse outside researchers free access to their archives because the collection contains sensitive personnel files. As a general rule, the Vatican says it releases church documents only after about 75 years, but outside observers contend it is much rarer than that.
A memo that surfaced last summer prompted the State Department’s interest, but the Vatican swiftly dismissed it, saying the charges could not be true. Other reports mention Ustashas meeting Vatican officials, living in the Vatican; even being hidden at the pope’s summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo and driving cars with Vatican plates in Rome. The Vatican’s tolerance of the Ustasha during the war was no secret, but though they insist they have nothing to hide, they refuse outside researchers free access to their archives because the collection contains sensitive personnel files. As a general rule, the Vatican says it releases church documents only after about 75 years, but outside observers contend it is much rarer than that.
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