“There were conflicting reports regarding subject’s [Draganovic] activities during the period from April 1941 to August 1943. According to some accounts, shortly after the Independent State of Croatia was established in April 1941 by Ante Pavelic,…via support and approval of Nazi Germany, Subject became a leading figure in the Office for Colonization,…engaged in claiming the property of Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Croatia” in order to distribute the property to the Ustashas (military units). “Other reports identified him as a member of a committee that forcibly converted thousands of Serbians from the Serbian Orthodox to the Roman Catholic Church. (As a result of opposition to such forcible conversions, several hundred thousand Serbs living on the territory of the Independent Croatian State reportedly died at the hands of the Ustasha… This resulted in many Serbs, and even many Croats who were opposed to such inhuman methods, joining the Partisan guerrilla units to fight both the Germans and the Croat State.)…

“Many Serbs living outside Yugoslavia accused [Draganovic] of being personally responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 Serbs from Croatia, killed by the Ustashas as a part of their drive to exterminate the Serbs living in Croatia.”

The CIA file noted, “Subject has denied these charges, as well as the charge that he was Military Chaplain of the Domobran and Ustasha military units… According to his own statements, Subject was instrumental in setting up a Croat-Slovene Committee for the Relief of Slovene Refugees in Zagreb in the fall of 1941, and became president of the Committee. Subject evidently became involved in mid- 1943 in a feud with Eugen (aka [illegible]) Kvaternik, a major figure in the Government of Croatia and a close associate of…Ante Pavelic, the head of the Croatian State. He called Kvternik ‘a madman and a lunatic.’ This resulted in his ‘being kicked upstairs,’ which is to say, in August 1943 he went to Italy to represent the Croatian Red Cross on a mission to secure the release from camps or otherwise help Yugoslav internees. His sponsor was the…Archbishop of Zagreb. He returned to Zagreb at the end of 1943, but returned to Rome in January 1944, and was still in Italy when the Croatian State collapsed in mid-1945 at about the same time as the war ended in Europe.

“He continued to represent the Croatian Red Cross, but was also regarded as an unofficial Charge d’affairs of the Croatian State at the Vatican. Thus, when the Croatian State collapsed, he was in the ideal position to help the many Ustasha who fled Yugoslavia, and as Secretary of an organization known as the ‘Confraternite Croata’ in Italy he issued identity papers with false names to many Croats, primarily Ustasha who were considered to be war criminals, and is the individual most responsible for making it possible for the Ustasha to emigrate overseas, primarily to Argentina, but also to Chile, Venezuela, Australia, Canada and even the United States…

“He [Draganovic] was alleged to have provided some German Nazi war criminals with identity cards with false Croatian names, thus enabling the Nazis to emigrate from Europe and avoid standing trial in Germany… Subject’s activities in Rome were conducted from the Ecclesiastical College of San Girolamo degli Illirici,…a college sponsored by the Vatican and used by young Croatian Catholic priests as their home in Rome while pursuing various courses of study. It also became the sponsor of the San Girolamo Asylum for the Ustasha and other Croat emigres in Rome…

“Subject claimed credit for helping in the release of more than 10,000 Yugoslav internees in Italy during 1943, 1944 and early 1945. In 1949, he went to Argentina in the company of the late Ante Pavelic, but he returned to Rome shortly thereafter. In 1950 he was known to be using a Diplomatic Passport, issued by the Vatican.” “The Vatican steadfastly denied involvement in any of this, including the acquisition of Ustashi gold and other pilfered assets.”

With the end of World War II in sight, the Vatican became the hub of traffic in counterfeit identity papers, forged travel documents, passports, and money to assist Nazis and collaborators seeking to escape capture by the Allies. Rome also became the start of a conduit to freedom for ex-Nazis and known anticommunists deemed potentially valuable in a postwar confrontation that was expected to arise between a godless empire ruled from the Kremlin in Moscow and the nations of Christendom.

To what extent Pope Pius XII and the Vatican bureaucracy were involved in the exodus of high-and low-level Nazis and other wanted men remains sealed in the secret archives. As a result, documenting the escape mechanism and route has been left to historians, investigative authors, and Jewish organizations that track down war criminals. To varying degrees, they have all found pointers to the Vatican.

“When it became apparent that war criminals Klaus Barbie, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Mueller, Franz Stangl, and a whole list of others had escaped,” the central figure in aiding them was Bishop Alois Hudal. The Rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, he had “served as Commissioner for the Episcopate for German-speaking Catholics in Italy, as well as Father Confessor to Rome ’s large German community.” Born in Graz, Austria, in 1885, he studied theology (1904-08) and was ordained to the priesthood In 1911, he earned a doctorate in Theology in Graz and entered the Teutonic College of Santa Maria dell’Anima (Anima) in Rome where he was a chaplain (1911-13) and took courses in the Old Testament at the Biblical Institute. In World War I he served as an assistant military chaplain and published his sermons to the soldiers, Soldatenpredigten, in which he expressed the idea that “loyalty to the flag is loyalty to God.” In 1923 he was nominated as rector of Anima. In 1930 he was appointed a consultant to the Holy Office. In 1937, he published a book titled The Foundations of National Socialism, in which he gave enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler. When Pope Pius XI and future Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) expressed disapproval of the book, they broke off all contacts with Hudal. Having once been a popular and influential guest in the Vatican, he suddenly found himself in isolation in the Anima College while Mussolini became Hitler’s World War II ally.

Still in the post of rector at Anima when the war ended, Hudal was suddenly thrust into a position to provide assistance to war refugees in detainment camps because of an agreement by the Allies to a request by Pope Pius XII. His Holiness had asked that a representative of the Vatican be allowed to render “normal religious assistance to Catholic prisoners as well as to exercise that mission of charity proper to the Church by bringing some comfort to those in affliction.” The permission was conveyed to the Vatican by President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Personal Representative to the Pope.” A few weeks later, the Vatican asked that a representative be permitted to visit “the German speaking civil internees in Italy.” The request named the Holy See’s “Spiritual Director of the German people resident in Italy,” Bishop Hudal.

Describing this as a “very peculiar request,” Mark Aarons and John Loftus, authors of Unholy Trinity, found it “astonishing that the Holy See singled out the most notorious pro-Nazi Bishop in Rome for this extremely sensitive mission, when it was well known that these ‘civilian’ camps were teeming with fugitive Nazis who had discarded uniforms and were hiding among legitimate fugitives.”

As the existence of a bishop in Rome who was able to aid displaced persons became known throughout refugee camps, word spread among ex-Nazis that he was sympathetic to their plight, and that Hudal had the means to facilitate their escape. Among documentation he could supply were a Vatican identity card and Red Cross papers, along with travel passes and visas.