Pope Paul VI.
Ustashe leaders also used the Vatican network.
Camera Press
Last update - 19:40 15/01/2006
Tied up in the Rat Lines
By Yossi Melman
It is possible that within a short time a court in the United States will
prohibit the publication of the account before us. In the meantime, Haaretz has
obtained the testimony given last month by William Gowen, a former intelligence
officer in the United States Army, at a federal court in San Francisco. The
testimony contains historical and political explosives. It links Giovanni
Battista Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI, to the theft of property of
Jewish, Serb, Russian, Ukrainian and Roma victims during World War II in
Yugoslavia. Many studies and stories have already been written about the
thundering silence of Pope Pius XII, who reigned in the Vatican during World
War II. Now the former intelligence officer's testimony has revealed that after
the war, Montini, who during the war served as the Vatican's deputy secretary
of state under the pope, helped hide and launder property that had been stolen
from, among others, Jews and was involved in the sheltering and smug!
gling of Croatian war criminals, such as the leader of the Ustashe movement,
Ante Pavelic.
The smuggling and hiding of Croatian war criminals was part of the extensive
network known as the Rat Lines. Senior officials at the Vatican were involved
in hiding and smuggling Nazi war criminals and their collaborators so they
would not be arrested and tried. Hundreds of war criminals were provided with
church and Red Cross papers that enabled them to hide in safe houses and then
flee from Europe, mainly to the Middle East and South America. Among them were
Klaus Barbie ("the butcher of Lyon"), Adolf Eichmann, Dr. Josef Mengele and
Franz Stengel, the commander of the Treblinka death camp.
The Vatican network was also used by leaders of the Ustashe - the nationalist
Croatian Catholic movement that was active in Croatia and collaborated with the
Nazi occupation. "The Reverend Dr. Prof. Krunoslav Draganovic seemed to be in
cooperation with the Ustasha network. And he was given a Vatican assignment as
the apostolic visitator for Croatians, which meant he reported directly to
Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini," states an American document based on a
report from the Italian police; the document was recently placed in evidence at
the court in San Francisco where Gowen testified.
The leaders of the Ustashe headed by Pavelic are the ones who stole the
victims' property: art and jewelry - silver and mostly gold. After the war they
fled with the treasure and laundered it with the help of Vatican institutions.
According to Gowen's testimony, Montini, who in 1964 became the first pope to
visit the State of Israel, was also involved in the Vatican's help in
laundering the wealth.
Still terrified
In 1999 a suit was filed at a court in San Franciso against the Vatican Bank
(Institute for Religious Works) and against the Franciscan order, the Croatian
Liberation Movement (the Ustashe), the National Bank of Switzerland and others.
The suit was filed by Jewish, Ukrainian, Serb and Roma survivors, as well as
relatives of victims and various organizations that together represent 300,000
World War II victims. The plaintiffs demanded accounting and restitution.
One of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs is Jonathan Levy. "Many of the
plaintiffs have been reluctant to be pictured, after all these years," says
Levy. "Many are still terrified of the Ustashe, the Serbs particularly. Unlike
the Nazi Party, the Ustashe still exist and have a party headquarters in
Zagreb."
The Ustashe was founded in 1929 as a Croatian nationalist movement with a deep
connection to Catholicism. From the day it was founded the movement made its
aim the establishment of an independent Croatian state and declared to fight
the monarchy in Yugoslavia. The movement was banned and its founders, Pavelic
and Gustav Percec (who was later murdered at Pavelic's orders) were condemned
to death in their absence. The Ustashe was linked to the assassination of
Yugoslav King Alexander and French foreign minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles
in 1934.
Upon the occupation of Yugoslavia, the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists
formed an "independent" state in Croatia, which was basically a Nazi puppet
state. Pavelic was appointed poglovnik, the leader of the country. He hastened
to meet with Hitler and allied himself with the Fuehrer. When Hitler invaded
the Soviet Union, Pavelic sent Ustashe units to fight alongside the Nazis and
then joined the declaration of war against the United States. Ustashe leaders
declared they would slaughter a third of the Serb population in Croatia, deport
a third and convert the remaining third from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism.
Anyone who refused to convert was murdered.
Immediately upon the establishment of its puppet government, the Ustashe set up
militias and gangs that slaughtered Serbs, Jews, Romas and their political
foes. Catholic priests, some of them Franciscans, also participated in the acts
of slaughter. The cruelty of the Ustashe was so great that even the commander
of the German army in Yugoslavia complained.
Himmler of the Balkans
Under the leadership of Pavelic's right-hand man Andrija Artukovic, who earned
the nickname "the Himmler of the Balkans," the Ustashe set up concentration
camps, most notably at Jasenovac. According to various estimates, about 100,000
people were murdered at the camp, among them tens of thousands of Jews (it is
interesting to note that some of the heads of the Ustashe were married to
Jewish women). Throughout Croatia about 700,000 people were murdered. The
partisans, led by the Croat Communist Josip Broz Tito, and the Chetniks -
Nationalist Serb royalists - fought the Ustashe.
After the war, Pavelic and other Ustashe heads fled to Austria and, with the
help of the British intelligence and their friends in the Vatican, found refuge
in Italy. They hid in Vatican monasteries and were provided with false
documents that gave them a new identity. Secret documents that were disclosed
at the court in San Francisco show that at the end of the war, British
intelligence took Pavelic under its wing and allowed him and a convoy of 10
trucks that carried the stolen treasure to travel to the British occupation
zone in Austria. The British did this with the intention of using him as a
counterweight to the Communist takeover in Yugoslavia.
The Ustashe brought the treasure convoy to Rome, where they put it into the
hands of the Croatian ambassador to the Vatican, Rev. Krunoslav Draganovic.
Draganovic also saw to hiding Pavelic and his aides in Vatican institutions and
safe houses in Rome. American military intelligence located Pavelic's hiding
place. But according to a secret document Gowen wrote in July 1947, that was
submitted to the court, Gowen's unit received the instruction: "Hands off"
Pavelic.
This was an order from the American Embassy, stressed Gowen in his testimony.
It is also stated in the document, which is classified as top secret, that
Pavelic, via his contacts with Draganovic, was receiving Vatican protection.
From Italy, Pavelic was smuggled on the Rat Lines to Argentina, where he served
as a security adviser to president Juan Peron (Peron granted entry visas to
34,000 Croats, many of them associated with the Ustashe and Nazi supporters).
In 1957 there was an attempt to assassinate him, in which he was wounded. The
operation was attributed to Tito's Yugoslav intelligence, although the
possibility that this was an attempt at revenge by a Chetnik activist was not
dismissed. Pavelic had to leave Argentina and found refuge with the Spanish
dictator Franco. Two years later, in 1959, he died as a result of complications
caused by the wound. The Ustashe has continued to exist over the years and
until the 1980s its operatives were involved in acts of terror against
diplomats and other Yugoslav targets abroad.
Montini complains
The suit filed at the court in San Francisco is based on earlier investigations
and reports from American government agencies, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and
committees of historians who researched the matter of the Jewish property in
Swiss banks. The case was preceded by successful legal battles by attorney Levy
and his colleagues against the CIA and the American Army to obtain secret
documents. The defendants, on their part, led by the Vatican Bank and the
Franciscan order and others, deny the charges against them and made every
effort to have the charges dismissed. So far, the court has rejected these
efforts outright and determined that the deliberations would continue. But the
defendants are tenacious and now they are demanding that publication of Gowen's
testimony be prohibited.
After the end of the war Gowen served as a special agent, meaning an
investigations officer in the Rome detachment of American counter-intelligence.
This unit's role was to track down, among others, Italian Fascists, Nazi war
criminals and their collaborators, including the Ustashe leaders (Gowen said
another mission included, at the request of British intelligence, surveillance
of Irgun and Lehi activists). The code name for the unit's actions was
"Operation Circle."
Parallel to the counterintelligence unit, other American army intelligence
units, and mainly the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, from which the CIA
developed) and British intelligence were engaged in contradictory actions. They
made contact with Nazis and with the Ustashe people and enlisted them in their
service as agents, collaborators and informers, with the intention of forming a
front against the Soviet spread into Eastern Europe and the Balkans. "To try
and find Pavelic you had to discover how the Ustashe network in Italy was
constituted, how it operated, what were its bases," testified Gowen.
A key person in the Pontifical Croatian college was Rev. Draganovic, the
Croatian ambassador to the Vatican. Draganovic and the college issued false
papers to Croatian war criminals, among them Pavelic and Artukovic. "I
personally investigated Draganovic - who told me he was reporting to Montini,"
emphasized Gowen.
Gowen related that at a certain stage Montini learned, apparently from the head
of the OSS unit in Rome, James Angleton, who nurtured relations with Montini
and the Vatican, of the investigation Gowen's unit was conducting. Montini
complained about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated the
Vatican's immunity by having entered church buildings, such as the Croatian
college, and conducting searches there. The aim of the complaint was to
interfere with the investigation.
In his testimony, Gowen also stated that Draganovic helped the Ustashe launder
the stolen treasure with the help of the Vatican Bank: This money was used to
fund its religious activities, but also to fund the escape of Ustashe leaders
on the Rat Line.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/670245.html
Serbian News Network - SNN
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