Jewish anger as Pope Benedict moves Pius XII closer to sainthood

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ante Pavelic turned back to face rising sun. Although the spring of 1945 was already some weeks old, the Slovene countryside was still cold and mist hung in the valleys and hollows. Despite the temperature, Pavelic wiped sweat from his brow. The fleeing dictator was now on foot, having abandoned his car on the clogged road and joined the trong of refugees marching wearily towards Austria.

Pavelic reflected on the irony of his situation. A few days before ha had been the Poglavnik of 'independent' Croatia, excercising comparable powers to the Fuhrer in Germany. He had even managed to keep the death machine operating almost until the end, while the Germans were frantically dismantling theirs. Then, without warning the Germans capitulated. The Poglavnik was now just one of hundreds of thousands fleeing towards Austria to surrender to the British...

Pavelic quivered, almost like a startled rabbit; he was sure he could see a motorised partisan unit in the distance. He turned again towards the Austrian frontier and broke into a desperate jog...

Pavelic hoped to be greeted in Austria by both Church and British leaders as a prominent Catholic leader in the struggle against 'atheistic Bolshevism'. After alll, British intelligence had maintained close pre-war relations with his underground terrorist network, even after the 1934 assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander in Marseilles. Pavelic also knew that the Holy See looked on Croatia as 'the frontier of Christianity'; a special relationship between Croatia and the Pope extended back to 700 AD.

Apart from this strong historical connection, Pavelic was also aware that Pius XII and his senior advisers held extremely charitable opinions of his militant Catholicism.

Mark Aarons and John Loftus "Unholy Trinity," St. Martin's Press, Edition 1992, pp 70-71, Chapter 4, titled "A staggering blow to the Holy See"

It is absurd to believe that 300,000 fugitive Nazis escaped to South America on the few U-Boats remaining at the end of the war, or that they all made their own travel arrangements...

The truth is much more ordinary, almost mundane. It is all the more shocking as a result. For whatever success ODESSA achieved, they were mere amateurs at Nazi-smuggling when compared with the Vatican. [Croat priest Krunoslav] Draganovic's Ratline was truly professional, ensuring that many guilty war criminals reached safe havens. Often they did not end up in the remote jungles of South America, but settled instead in Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States.

Most of the mass murderers were in fact not even German. At the end of World War II, there were tens of thousands of Central and East European Nazi collaborators who were just as guilty as their German sponsors... These were the people of most concern to Father Krunoslav Draganovic, Secretary of the Croatian Institute of San Girolamo in Rome. Draganovic was known for his deep sympathy for the Croatian Ustashi, even those who had committed war crimes. Many innocent Croatians had been cynically returned by the British to certain death at the hands of Tito's Communist government in May 1945. But many horrendously guilty war criminals escaped... The Ustashi were the first to be protected by Draganovic... Draganovic was in Rome since August 1943, negotiating for Pavelic... Pavelic's plan for smuggling network were already well advanced.

Draganovic was the key man in setting up this Ratline. He established contacts with [Pope] Pius XII, as well as senior officials of the Vatican Secretariat of State and Italian intelligence... In late 1944 the Vatican requested that he be permitted to visit the camps where his fellow countrymen were housed. Although Draganovic was well known to Western diplomats as a fanatic Ustashi, Allied intelligence gave him carte blance.

Mark Aarons and John Loftus "Unholy Trinity," St. Martin's Press, Edition 1992, pp 88-89, Chapter 5, titled "Ratline"

According to secret reports from the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), written just after World War II and since declassified, Draganovic and his collaborators at San Girolamo provided money, food, housing, and forged Red Cross passports for a number of Ustasha war criminals seeking to escape justice. Through an underground railroad of sympathetic priests, known as the "ratline," the Ustashas could move from Trieste, to Rome, to Genoa, and on to neutral countries--primarily Argentina--where they could live out their days unpunished and unnoticed. Along the ratline, virtually the entire Ustasha leadership went free. "All these people were escaping--and this at a time when just getting a meal in Rome was a major accomplishment," recalls William Gowen, a CIC officer in Rome after the war...

Croatian Catholic officials were funneling money to war criminals even after they escaped to Argentina, documents show. According to cable intercepts cited in a 1947 U.S. diplomatic report, Pavelic escaped in November 1947 to Buenos Aires, where he was said to have been met by a retinue of Catholic priests.

Susan Headden, Dana Hawkins, and Jason Vest "A vow of silence - Did gold stolen by Croatian fascists reach the Vatican?" US News and World Report, March 30, 1998

A leading Nazi-hunter yesterday attacked plans by the Pope to make an historic 'apology to the Jews' shortly as a 'cosmetic exercise' which would leave the 'true facts' about help given to Nazi criminals by the Roman Catholic Church hidden in the Vatican archives.

Jewish groups have long maintained that Vatican officials help former Nazi officers to flee to Latin America and that Catholic monasteries and convents gave them refuge...

It has also been claimed that gold taken from Jews by the Fascist wartime regime in Croatia, a Catholic country, was transferred to the Vatican for safe-keeping, although the Vatican has denied this.

'I have personally seen documents in the Buenos Aires archives showing that Ante Pavelic, the Croat Fascist leader, arrived in Argentina dressed as a priest and carrying a certificate of safe conduct from the Vatican,' Mr Samuels said.

Shimon Samuels is the head of international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre -- which has brought numerous former Nazi criminals to book...

He was appalled to learn that the Vatican was considering the beatification of Pius XII. This would be 'a morally inadmissible act.

Richard Owen, "Pope's apology to Jews attacked as empty gesture," The Times (London) Oct 30, 1997