God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  Blending in anonymously in the swarm of refugees were some Nazi fugitives. Some had either worked in the extermination camps, others had run the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, and a few were high-ranking officials responsible for the Third Reich’s ruinous war. They had shed their military uniforms, donned civilian clothes, and were frantically trying to avoid the American and British military police searching for them.34 The Allied Nazi hunters had no idea then that a handful of Catholic clerics in Rome anxiously awaited the Nazis. The church provided those fugitives not only a place to sleep and some food, but something far more valuable: false travel documents as well as a ticket by boat to a welcoming foreign country.35

  Helping fleeing Nazis was not a policy established by Pius XII. The Vatican became a mandatory postwar stop for many war criminals fleeing Europe for a hodgepodge of reasons. Some prelates believed that the new communist regimes—particularly Yugoslavia with its demands for the return of all Ustašan leaders—were incapable of providing fair trials. Church officials felt that returning the wanted men was as good as killing them. Others were deluded by a notion that the fugitives might reunite and rally in a war to drive out the communists. And still others were fascist sympathizers or even dedicated National Socialists who wanted to do whatever they could to help the Nazis escape.36

  Since the church had been silent during the Holocaust, on which there was a flood of grisly evidence since the end of the war, it was reasonable to wonder if Pius and his advisors felt any moral duty to unequivocally prohibit clerics from assisting criminals involved in that mass killing. There was no such policy. Pius, Montini, and Tardini never uttered a word in opposition to the priests who helped the fugitives. If the Pope’s silence during the war had fostered an environment in which otherwise dutiful Catholics could participate in mass murder and not fear excommunication or eternal damnation, after the war his approach to Nazi criminals created an atmosphere in which Catholics were free of any responsibility for the Holocaust. Instead, sympathetic prelates were emboldened to help murderers evade justice.

  Pius stubbornly resisted any effort to apologize for the Vatican’s wartime inaction (such an apology would not come for nearly fifty years, under Pope John Paul II).37 He expressed public anger over the convictions of half a dozen Croatian Catholic priests by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission.38 The Pope believed those trials were not about delivering justice for wartime atrocities but were propaganda intended to embarrass the church. The same tribunal convicted Bishop Stepinac, but only after he had refused Yugoslavia’s offer of safe passage to Rome. Pius was so infuriated that he made the imprisoned Stepinac a cardinal (John Paul II beatified him in 1998, the first step toward sainthood).39

  The Pope’s passion—more than he ever demonstrated over wartime reports of the massacres of Jews—did not stop with a handful of Croatian Catholic prelates. He urged the commutation of death sentences for some of the most notorious Catholic Nazi criminals. U.S. Military Governor of Germany General Lucius Clay rejected Pius’s personal plea for clemency for SS officer Otto Ohlendorf, an infamous chief of an Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing) squad in Russia.40 The Pope’s request for leniency for Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser, who earned a reputation as a merciless ethnic cleanser, raised a fury in Poland, the country where Greiser had been a regional governor. Polish officials rejected the Pope’s appeal and newspapers condemned the Pontiff’s “flirtation . . . and defense [of] Germany.”41 That did not stop Pius from also asking for clemency for Hans Frank, the lawyer turned Governor General who oversaw the Holocaust in occupied Poland, as well as Oswald Pohl, one of the chief administrators for all Nazi concentration camps.42 Despite Pius’s interventions, all the men were hanged.

  The Pope’s clemency appeals encouraged a similar outpouring of pleas from German priests.43 Cardinal von Faulhaber decried denazification—the Allied effort to prevent hard-core Nazis from returning to postwar German industry and politics—as “unnecessary.” Other bishops denounced the Nuremberg trials as illegal, and even managed to win a commutation of death sentences for some of the Catholic defendants in the “doctors’ trials,” including the debauched concentration camp physician Hans Eisele.44 In December 1945, Bishop Aloisius Muench, the Vatican emissary to the U.S. Military Governor in Germany, wrote a pastoral letter that compared the Nazi murder of millions to the Allied rationing of food after the war. Other bishops used their pulpits to mythologize Catholic resistance to the war and to assure German Catholics that “collective guilt” was not applicable to Germans and the Holocaust. Pius thought that if ordinary Germans were burdened with too much guilt over what happened to the Jews, they might be distracted from concentrating on the Russian red menace.45

  Given this atmosphere, some inside the church felt secure enough to help the fugitive Nazis by using some of the questionable gold that had arrived at the Vatican. Part of that gold may have paid for food and board for the fugitives, fake paperwork, travel money, and sometimes even work in a foreign safe haven.46 Some money might have even come from the Pope.47 The Vatican classified large untraceable payments as “information services” to Vilo Pečnikar, Pavelić’s son-in-law. U.S. intelligence had numerous reports that Papal payments funded the Croatian escape network, with Franciscan priest Dominic Mandić acting as the official liaison between the Vatican and the ratline.48,II In April 1947, the British detained suspected Vatican-ratline middleman, Croatian General Ante Moskov. He had 3,200 plundered gold coins and seventy-five diamonds. The Pope personally appealed to the British, in vain, to release Moskov and fourteen other Ustašan officers.49

  Pavelić, the number-one-wanted Croatian, stayed in Rome and evaded a CIC manhunt for more than two years.50 Even before U.S. authorities ordered Gowen to stand down in his search, the former Croat leader had moved between several Vatican-owned properties to avoid detection, including St. Anselmo’s, a Benedictine seminary, and Santa Sabina, a Dominican basilica.51 Most of the time, however, he was in San Girolamo under Draganović’s protection.52 By that time, San Girolamo had become a seminary like no other. All visitors were searched for weapons. Casual callers were questioned about how they had learned about it. Passwords were required to enter any locked room.53

  A 1947 British Foreign Office report concluded that Pavelić had left San Girolamo and might instead be living “within Vatican City.”54 Gowen thought that the Vatican’s protection of Pavelić was so strong that the only way to get him might be to seize him from the church properties, but the idea of violating Vatican sovereignty was a nonstarter in Washington.55 The Vatican ended the debate over what to do about Pavelić in 1947 when it sent him through its ratline to Argentina. A group of Franciscan priests greeted him on his arrival at the port of Buenos Aires.56 The former Croatian henchman became a security advisor to Argentine dictator Juan Perón.57,III

  Draganović concentrated on his fellow Croatians. Other clerics helped the Germans. None was more energetic than Bishop Alois Hudal, the rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima. The Vatican picked him as the intermediary with the German ambassador during the 1943 roundup of Rome’s Jews.59 After the war, Hudal dropped his emphasis on all things German, referring to himself instead as “the Austrian bishop in Rome,” and establishing the Austrian Liberation Committee.60

  Franz Stangl was the commandant of the notorious Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, where an estimated 1,000,000 to 1,250,000 Jews and Gypsies were gassed. In the closing days of the war, he had fled westward from Poland and by the time he reached Austria, “I heard of a Bishop Hudal at the Vatican in Rome who was helping Catholic SS officers, so that’s where we went.” Stangl, like many other fleeing Nazis, recalled, “I had no idea how one went about finding a bishop at the Vatican.”61

  While walking across a bridge in Rome, Stangl ran into an SS intelligence officer whom he knew.

  “Are you on the way to Hudal?” asked the SS officer, who was himself on the run.

  A half hour later Stangl was in a room at a nearby rectory. Bishop Hudal
walked in and put out both his hands to welcome him. “You must be Franz Stangl,” Hudal said in German. “I was expecting you.”62

  Hudal put Stangl at the Germanikum, a Jesuit hostel for German theological students. He remained there until his Red Cross passport arrived, at which time Hudal gave him some money and sent him packing to Syria. Not far behind Stangl was another Sobibor death camp commandant, Gustav Wagner, “The Beast.” He had earned a dreaded reputation for his extreme sadism. (Stangl was captured in Brazil in 1967 and died in a West German prison of a heart attack in 1971. Hudal sent Wagner to Brazil, where he was arrested in 1978. A Brazilian court freed him, ruling that the German extradition request had “inaccuracies.”63 In October 1980, he was found dead in his São Paulo apartment with a knife in his chest. Wagner’s attorney said it was a suicide, which Brazilian authorities accepted, but many suspected revenge by Nazi hunters.64)

  Hudal relied on several German-affiliated seminaries and rectories to house the crowd of Nazis. Some of the fugitives arrived disguised as monks.65 As recounted by Stangl, every day they were woken at dawn and had to leave their safe houses. They got daily meal tickets for lunch at a kitchen run by nuns. And their only instruction was not to draw any attention to themselves until they returned each evening.66

  SS Standartenführer Walter Rauff, who engineered the mobile gas vans that killed 97,000 Jews before the Nazis developed more efficient gas chambers, played OSS and church cards to escape justice. Rauff had represented the SS in secret 1944 negotiations (Operation Sunrise) with Dulles’s OSS and the Wehrmacht to ensure that the German surrender in Italy would be orderly and not marked by victor’s vengeance. When U.S. counterintelligence detained him after the war in northern Italy, Rauff threw about Dulles’s name as if it alone would set him free. But his CIC investigators were unimpressed. The chief of the CIC concluded Rauff was “most uncooperative during interrogation . . . his contempt and everlasting malice toward the Allies [is] but lightly concealed. [Rauff] is considered a menace if ever set free, and failing actual elimination, is recommended for lifelong internment.”67 Rauff escaped. He later boasted, “I was helped by a Catholic priest to go to Rome.”68 Some historians believe Angleton sprang Rauff, through S-Force Verona, a joint American-British elite counterintelligence cell based in Italy.69 Once free Rauff went underground, relying on Hudal’s protection, and stayed ahead of his pursuers through the “convents of the Holy See” before fleeing for Syria.70 In Syria, he served as an intelligence advisor to the country’s military dictator. (Rauff ended up in Chile as an unofficial advisor to strongman Augusto Pinochet. He died there in 1984.)

  Father Anton Weber, a Palatine priest in the St. Raphael Society, worked with Hudal. He processed the paperwork for Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of all the trains that carried Jews to Poland’s extermination centers. While Weber prepared the paperwork, Eichmann was sheltered at a monastery under the jurisdiction of Genoa’s Archbishop Giuseppe Siri.71

  During the war, Pius had charged Weber with responsibility for saving Rome’s baptized Jews. He estimated that of the twenty thousand Jews in wartime Rome, about three thousand were baptized. The Vatican saved only two to three hundred.72 In contrast, after the war, Weber, Hudal, and others saved many more Nazis.73 When confronted decades later by a journalist, Weber admitted the difference was that he tried to filter out the Jews who pretended to be converts. He did not even do a cursory exam to spot the Nazis. “They [Jews] were all claiming to be Catholics. . . . I made them recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ave Maria; that proved in a hurry who was genuine and who wasn’t.”74 As for the fugitives he helped, “We really didn’t know the people we aided. At least, we knew nothing beyond what they themselves told us. . . . How on earth could I know that he was someone else?”75

  “It was curious that Catholic priests kept helping me on my journey,” Eichmann recalled years later. “They helped me without asking any questions.”76,IV

  Were priests such as Draganović, Hudal, and Weber lone wolves who took advantage of the Vatican’s humanitarian postwar bureaucracy and abused it for their own perverted motivations, or did the church’s effort to save war criminals proceed with the blessing of its highest officials, including Pius?

  Draganović was in fact aided by some of the church’s top prelates. His benefactors included Monsignor Montini and Cardinal Angelo dell’Acqua, in the Secretariat of State; Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, who ran the Vatican’s intelligence service as Prefect of the Congregazione de Propaganda Fide; and Genoa’s powerful Archbishop Giuseppe Siri, an avid anticommunist who considered the Ustašans reliable allies in the fight against bolshevism. Those clerics, as did Pius, embraced the prospect that one day a revived Ustaša might topple Tito and return Catholicism to power in Croatia.78

  From 1945 to 1947, while Draganović ran his ratline, Pius and his Secretary of State’s office peppered the Allies to reclassify detained Ustašans from their status as hostile prisoners of war to something more benign. The church hoped that a milder classification might result in their freedom or at least prevent their extradition to Tito’s Yugoslavia.79 At Draganović’s urging, Pius appealed to release some Croatians from a POW camp under British control. The British Foreign Office bristled at the Vatican’s interference and rejected the church’s request.80

  In January 1947, Yugoslavia insisted the British arrest five ranking Croatian fugitives hiding in the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies. Although the institute was outside the territorial walls of Vatican City, Article 16 of the 1929 Lateran Treaty specifically gave it full extraterritoriality.81 In a flurry of urgent cables, the British debated what to do. “We would arrest and surrender these men if they were anywhere else in Italy than the Vatican,” wrote one Foreign Office official.82 Having spent the war inside the Vatican, British envoy Sir D’Arcy Osborne knew the Pope and top clerics as well as any other Western diplomat. He knew that Pius would be outraged at any hint of infringing on the church’s territorial status. Osborne convinced the Yugoslavians to ask the Vatican directly for the men’s extradition. He also tried to persuade the church that the British had “no doubt” about the guilt of the five men, and warned that should Pius refuse to return the Croatians it would reinforce a growing international perception that Vatican officials were the “deliberate protectors of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s ex-minions.”83 Papal officials ignored the Yugoslavian extradition requests.

  Monsignor Tardini tried placating the Allies. He told Osborne, “the Pope had recently issued strict orders to all ecclesiastical institutions in Rome that they were not to entertain guests, i.e. harbour fugitives, without higher authority.”84 Instead of soothing the Allies’ irritation, Tardini’s response prompted concerns that the micromanaging Pius might have taken personal control of which fugitives received safe haven.

  “I do not believe for a moment,” wrote Osborne to the Foreign Office, “that the Pope would give the order for their surrender.”85

  Three weeks later when Tardini again met with Osborne, he informed the British envoy that there was nothing the church could do. He claimed the five wanted Ustašans were no longer at the Pontifical Institute. A frustrated Osborne addressed Yugoslavian complaints that Draganović—with the assistance of Monsignor Montini’s Pontifical Commission of Assistance—was flagrantly using the San Girolamo seminary as a way station to send war criminals to Argentina.86

  Tardini was nonplussed. Monsignor Montini’s Pontifical Commission had “nothing to do with the Secretariat of State” so unfortunately the monsignor could be of no assistance.87

  Beyond the Ustašan criminals, did the Pope know about Hudal’s energetic work to save Nazis? Decades later, when the revelations about Hudal’s ratline came tumbling out in declassified government files, the Vatican tried distancing Pius from Hudal.

  There is no question that Hudal and Pius knew each other from when Pius was the Nuncio to Germany. Pius performed the celebratory Mass to mark Hudal’s appointment as a bishop in 1933. One cle
ric dates their friendship as far back as 1924 when the two were at a Vatican celebration for the Austrian ambassador.88 Pius’s key German advisors—Father Robert Leiber, Augustin Bea, and Monsignor Bruno Wüstenberg—were unquestionably friends with Hudal.

  Still, Pius’s defenders say there is no evidence that Hudal ever told the Pope about the ratline. In 1977, in its only public statement on the matter, a deputy spokesman for the Vatican said about Hudal, “Generally the Vatican leaves this problem to the historians, because much time has passed and it’s difficult to say what happened.”89

  It is uncontested that the indefatigable Monsignor Montini, who met with the Pontiff daily about all refugees’ matters, supervised Hudal.90 According to contemporaneous U.S. intelligence, Hudal gave “large compensation” to Draganović, further evidence the ratlines the two men ran symbiotically used many of the same sources for obtaining Red Cross passports, arranging travel, and even setting up jobs in safe haven countries.91

  In 1947, when Eva Perón, the wife of Argentina’s Juan Perón, arrived in Rome as part of a European tour, Pius XII gave her a state reception. “Evita” also met with Bishop Hudal, and with Draganović at a reception hosted by the Italian government at the Rome Golf Club. An informant later reported to CIC officer William Gowen that Draganović and Perón discussed visas and Croatian emigration to Argentina.92 Buenos Aires was the port of choice for war criminals processed through both ratlines. U.S. intelligence had concluded that Buenos Aires’s archbishop, Antonio Caggiano—a close Perón ally—was a conduit between the Italian escape networks and the South American church.93

  The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94 The report singled out Hudal, named twenty-one Vatican relief organizations suspected of assisting fugitives, and even exposed how easy it was for them to get fake travel papers. That explosive document kicked off a heated debate inside the U.S. State Department about how best to respond.95