U.S. News & World Report
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March 30, 1998
SECTION: WORLD REPORT; Pg. 34
LENGTH: 2415 words
HEADLINE: A vow of silence
BYLINE: By Susan Headden; Dana Hawkins; Jason Vest
HIGHLIGHT:
Did gold stolen by Croatian fascists reach the Vatican?
BODY:
Through the nightmare of World War II that would end with 56 members of her
family perishing in concentration camps, there were two days that Eta Najfeld
will never forget. The first was April 10, 1941, when Najfeld, a 25-year-old
Jewish medical student, watched as exuberant crowds lined the streets of Zagreb
to cheer the Ustashas--the ultranationalist fascist party that
the Nazis had just installed at the helm of an "independent" Croatian
state. The other was three months later, when a band of Ustasha
soldiers burst into her family's shop, an elegant emporium stocked with
Oriental rugs, English linens, and French silks. "They took
everything," says Najfeld, now 82 and living in Belgrade.
As the Nazis and their allies sent millions of Jews and others to their deaths,
they stole billions of dollars from their victims. In the postwar chaos, and
the horror of their anguish, Najfeld and most other survivors cast from their
mind any thought of recovering the property they had lost. Najfeld still
worries that any talk about lost wealth will somehow diminish the enormity of
the Holocaust. But in recent months, new evidence has forced victims and
accomplices alike to confront that nearly forgotten question: What happened to
the loot? The Nazi plunder 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 materiel. One state after another
has opened its archives and banking records to aid the search, with one glaring
exception: the Vatican.
Last week, the Vatican issued an official statement calling for repentance over
the failure of some church members to do enough to aid Jews during the war. But
the statement did not mention the mounting calls for an inquiry into the
Vatican's financial dealings with the Nazis and their allies. So far, the
Vatican has flatly refused to allow investigators access to its archives,
despite repeated pleas from several nations and from Jewish groups.
The Vatican's continuing secrecy means the evidence is incomplete, but already
declassified documents from the archives of the United States and other nations
suggest that--with the aid of Croatian Catholic priests--Ustasha
plunder made its way from Croatia to Rome, and possibly to the Vatican itself.
Some of the stolen wealth was used to help Croatian war criminals flee to South
America.
"We make no charges against the Vatican, but we keep building a very
damning picture," says Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World
Jewish Congress. "Because of their silence in the face of accumulated
evidence, the failure to uncover the truth can only be laid at the doors of the
Vatican."
Next month, a task force headed by Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat
that is investigating the role of the neutral countries is expected to issue a
report that raises questions about the Vatican's wartime financial dealings.
Among the documents reviewed: a declassified 1944 intelligence report noting a
transfer of funds, via a Swiss bank, from Berlin's Reichsbank to the Vatican.
Although there may be innocent explanations for such dealings--church assets
being moved out of Germany, perhaps--the discovery of similar transactions by Swiss
banks led to revelations of a huge Nazi operation to launder stolen gold with
the help of neutral countries.
Church blessing. The Croatian connection, however, is the core of the new
evidence that suggests the Vatican might have directly handled funds stolen
from the victims of the Nazis and their allies. From 1941 to 1945, the Ustashas
exterminated an estimated 500,000 Serbs, Jews, and Romany (Gypsies) and looted
their property. They demanded ransom amounting to 1,000 kilograms of gold from
all the Jews in Zagreb, only to ship them to concentration camps and kill them
anyway. It is a matter of historical record that the Croatian Catholic Church
was closely entangled with the Ustashas. In the early years of
World War II, Catholic priests oversaw forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs
under the aegis of the Ustasha state; Franciscan friars
distributed Ustasha propaganda. Several high Catholic
officials in Yugoslavia were later indicted for war crimes. They included
Father Dragutin Kamber, who ordered the killing of nearly 300 Orthodox Serbs;
Bishop Ivan Saric of Sarajevo, known as the "hangman of the Serbs";
and Bishop Gregory Rozman of Slovenia, a wanted Nazi collaborator. A trial held
by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission in 1946 resulted in the conviction of a
half-dozen Ustasha priests, among them former Franciscan
Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, a commandant of the Jasenovac 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, however, one priest emerges as the most
significant player of all. The Rev. Krunoslav Draganovic, a Franciscan, had
been a senior official of the Ustasha committee that handled
the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs. In 1943, the Ustasha
arranged with the Croatian Catholic Church to send Father Draganovic to Rome.
There he served as secretary of the Istituto San Girolamo, a seminary for
Croatian monks that was in fact a center of clandestine Ustasha
activity. Draganovic also became Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic's
unofficial emissary to the Vatican, and de facto liaison to the Pontifical
Relief Commission, a Vatican organization that aided refugees during and after
the war.
The 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.
The copies of memos filed by Gowen and other members of the counterintelligence
corps, now stored in U.S. Army archives at Fort Belvoir, Va., contain a wealth
of detail on suspicious comings and goings at San Girolamo. The dispatches
leave little doubt that the ancient walled compound at Via Tomacelli 132 was
more than an ordinary monastery. "San Girolamo is honeycombed with cells
of Ustasha operatives," Gowen wrote on Feb. 12, 1947.
"In order to enter this monastery, one must submit to a personal search
for weapons and identification. . . . The whole area is guarded by armed Ustasha
youths in civilian clothes, and the Ustasha salute is
exchanged constantly." From a source inside the compound, Gowen even
managed to obtain Draganovic's secret files, which, Gowen reported on Sept. 5,
1947, "indicate clearly [Draganovic's] involvement in aiding and abetting
the Ustasha to escape into South America."
Another Croatian priest living at San Girolamo was also active in smuggling war
criminals, documents show. A recently declassified memo, believed to have been
written in 1946 by an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--the
precursor of the CIA--reports that a priest called Father Golik was supplying
false passports and money to members of the Ustasha. Golik,
the memo says, was alleged to be "chief sponsor of all Croats resident in
Rome, with special attention to the needs of former Ustasha
members." The memo reports allegations that the Ustashas
"are given a monthly allowance of 6,000 lire per person [the equivalent of
$ 2,700 today], in addition to the privilege of cheap meals at the San Girolamo
mess."
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.
Newly declassified documents also show that Bishop Rozman was funneling money
to South America from a Swiss bank account set up "to aid refugees of the
Catholic religion." U.S. military attache Davis Harrington reported on
March 9, 1948, that Rozman "is going to Bern to take care of these
finances. The money is in a Swiss bank, and he plans to have most of it sent
through to Italy and from there sent to the Ustashas in
Argentina."
Further clues about the path of Ustasha gold are provided by
Croatian National Bank records uncovered last fall by an American historian of
Croatian descent. According to Jere Jareb, author of Gold and Money of the
Independent State of Croatia Moved Abroad, the documents show that 288
kilograms of gold was removed from the Croatian National Bank and the state
treasury on May 7, 1945--the day that Germany capitulated. By Draganovic's own
testimony, part of that treasure landed in his hands. The "Golden
Priest," as Draganovic was known, acknowledged to the Yugoslav War Crimes
Commission that he doled the money out to Ustasha soldiers and
Croatian civilian refugees. (Though called to testify, Draganovic was never
charged. He later returned to Yugoslavia and died there in 1983.)
When in Rome. But does any of the evidence implicate the Vatican itself? The
strongest indication so far is a memo that first prompted the State
Department's interest. The memo, dated Oct. 21, 1946, was discovered last
summer in the declassified files of the U.S. Treasury Department. Written by
OSS agent Emerson Bigelow, it reports that money sent by Ustasha
from Croatia to Rome after the war had been partly intercepted by the British,
but that 200 million Swiss francs--the equivalent of $ 170 million today--were
being held in the Vatican for safekeeping. According to "rumor," the
memo says, the money was being used to finance Croatian war criminals in exile.
When the Bigelow memo was released last year, the Vatican swiftly dismissed it,
insisting that the charges could not be true. But some researchers who have
studied World War II intelligence matters note that other archival documents
counter the notion that a Vatican-Ustasha link is implausible
on its face. One is a British diplomatic memo from Oct. 17, 1947, cited in the
1991 book Unholy Trinity by journalist Mark Aarons and former Justice
Department Nazi-hunter John Loftus. According to the memo, a San Giralomo
priest named Father Mandic was a "liaison to the Vatican" who was
involved in converting Ustasha gold, jewelry, and foreign
exchange into Italian lire.
Other reports mention Ustashas meeting with Vatican officials
or even living in the Vatican. The British Foreign Office reported in January
1947 that Pavelic himself, by that time a wanted war criminal, was living
"within the Vatican City." An earlier report by Gowen, in October
1946, noted that Pavelic was in Rome and in contact with Draganovic.
Documents include accounts of Ustashas being hidden at the
pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo and being seen driving in Rome in
cars with Vatican license plates. The recently declassified Golik memo reports
that Ustashas ate at the papal mess and that Father Golik was
"declared to be in close contact with the Vatican."
The Vatican's tolerance of the Ustasha during the war was no
secret. On the recommendation of Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac--who had
blessed Pavelic at the opening of the Croatian parliament--the pope established
informal diplomatic relations with the independent state of Croatia, and his
envoy made regular rounds of Ustasha headquarters. In 1941 and
in 1943, at a time when his excesses were known, Pavelic was granted two
private audiences with Pius XII. The pope explained that he received the Ustasha
leader simply as a Catholic, not as head of the Croatian state. The pontiff's
decision was widely reported--and widely deplored--at the time. In July 1941,
Francis D'Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican, wrote:
"[Pius's] reception of Pavelic . . . has done more to damage his
reputation in this country than any other act since the war began."
Bound to silence. What all this intelligence means is at the heart of the State
Department-led investigation. Vatican officials insist they are hiding nothing
because they have nothing to hide. But they say they cannot allow outside
researchers free access to their archives because the collection contains
sensitive personnel files. As a general rule, the Vatican releases church
documents only after about 75 years. "I am bound to silence," said
the Rev. Marcel Chappin of the Vatican Secretariat of State, when pressed to
comment. Chappin said that the Vatican has already published a voluminous
account of its role in World War II, including a discussion of the controversy
surrounding Pius XII, who kept silent on the Nazi atrocities because he
believed provocation of the Nazis would lead to more persecution and because he
considered the greater enemy to be atheistic communism. Vatican defenders note
that the church saved tens of thousands of Jews during the war, and they urge
that current suspicions be viewed in the context of the chaotic times: Refugees
were streaming into Vatican City after the war, and it is quite possible that
funds intended for these refugees were used to help war criminals without the
pope's knowledge.
"The question is what did the Vatican's own leadership know?" says
William Slaney, the State Department's historian and author of the Nazi gold
reports. "We want the Vatican . . . to deal with [its] share of this
dreadful event."
The Rome connection
Istituto San Gironlamo--a Roman Catholic seminary on Via Tomacelli about 1 mile
from the Vatican--served as a safe house where fleeing Croatian war criminals
received money, shelter, and forged passports immediately after World War II.
[Map labels]
CROATIA, Zagreb, Jasenovac concentration camp, GERMANY, SPAIN, Atlantic Ocean,
ITALY, Rome, Genoa, Mediterranean Sea, Rome, Via Tomacelli, Vatican City, St.
Peter's Basilica, Tiber River
[Map is not available.]
GRAPHIC: Picture, Pius XII. Defended by Vatican (AKG Paris);
Map, The Rome connection (Richard Gage--USN&WR); Picture, Church and state.
Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (right), at an official Croatian ceremony
in 1941 (Jewish Historical Museum of Yugoslavia, courtesy of USHMM); Picture,
Genocide. Ustasha soldiers pose with the corpses of five
Serbs. By war's end, they would slaughter hundreds of thousands more. (Muzej
Revolucije Narodnosti Jugoslavije, courtesy of USHMM); Picture, Forced
conversion. The Ustashas promised Serbs that they would be
spared death if they converted from Eastern Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism.
Thousands converted, only to be killed anyway. (Muzej Revolucije Narodnosti
Jugoslavije, courtesy of USHMM); Picture, Waiting for restitution. Elderly
Holocaust survivors, many of whom lost entire families in concentration camps,
listen as Jewish leaders in Zagreb explain the process for filing claims for
restitution from Swiss banks that received Nazi gold. (Edward Serotta--Centropa
for USN&WR)