U.S. News & World Report

November 15, 1999

SECTION: WORLD REPORT; Vol. 127 , No. 19; Pg. 44

LENGTH: 532 words

HEADLINE: Did a wartime pope anticipate a Nazi victory?

BYLINE: By Richard Z. Chesnoff

BODY:
Few states guard the secrecy of their archives more closely than the Vatican. But as the United States and other nations continue declassifying their World War II documents, more and more details of the behavior and attitude of the Vatican's wartime leader, Pope Pius XII, have come to light.

Now it appears that during some of the most crucial moments of the war, the Vatican believed that Nazi Germany would probably defeat the Allies. In a recently rediscovered coded cable sent to the State Department on June 29, 1942, Harold Tittmann, the U.S. envoy to the Holy See, reports that "a highly placed Vatican official has intimated to me for the first time . . . that he did not (repeat not) believe that the Allies were in a position to win the war in Europe." Tittmann goes on to say that he is especially concerned because the official in question "is in close touch constantly with the pope himself and has always professed to me his enthusiasm for the Allied cause." Tittmann and other Allied envoys feared that given this view, Pope Pius XII would push for a compromise Allied peace "settlement" and "that the pope's peacemaking ambitions might be exploited for their own ends by the Axis powers." Washington, Tittmann wrote, "should make every effort to disabuse him of any notion he might have that the Allies might agree to anything short of complete defeat of Hitler."

This latest insight into the Vatican view of Nazi power--combined with Pope Pius's obsessive fear of Soviet communism--lends new understanding to the wartime pope's refusal to unequivocally condemn the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. It also adds a new dimension to the controversy over the extent of the Vatican's participation in the postwar "rat-line," the odious underground railroad that smuggled "anti-Communist" Nazi war criminals and sympathizers from Europe to Latin America--together with major parts of loot plundered from Jews and other victims of Nazism.

A soon-to-be-released Argentine government report confirms the Holy See's hand in seeking Latin American visas for fleeing Nazis. According to newly declassified Argentine government archives, many such asylum requests were made directly to the Argentine ambassador by the Vatican Secretariat of State's Giovanni Montini. The report also says that Cardinal Eugene Tisserant appealed to Buenos Aires for visas for Vichy regime collaborators fleeing liberated France.

Booty. The Vatican especially interceded on behalf of Croatia's Ustasha Nazis, including Anton Pavelic, the Ustasha "fuhrer" who played a major role in the extermination of tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The new Argentine government report, the result of three years of intense research, confirms that senior Vatican "personalities" pressed for the postwar "escape to Argentina of Pavelic, together with a relatively important retinue of followers and looted assets." Included in those assets: almost $ 50 million in jewelry as well as gold coins and ingots, much of it plundered from Yugoslav Jews, and part of as much as $ 250 million in Ustasha booty believed stashed for "safekeeping" in the Vatican treasury at the end of the war.