According to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the rat line that Bishop Hudal ran facilitated escapes for Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the “final solution of the Jewish problem” by extermination in death camps; Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka camp; Alois Brunner, deputy commandant of Sobibor; Gustav Wagner, deputy commandant of Sobibor; and Walter Rauff, a friend of Hudal, who had been an ambitious SS officer who oversaw a development program for mobile gas vans.
In Gitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, based on seventy hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, he described “how Bishop Hudal had been expecting Stangl…and that he was arranging passports, an exit visa, and work permits for South America. Hudal arranged Stangl’s sleeping quarters, transportation, via by car, plane, and ship and seemed to have ample money for…bribes and emergencies that might arise.” Stangl and other “Nazi fugitives could obtain an identity card from Hudal and apply to the office of the International Red Cross for a passport. If, however, a fugitive Nazi had functioned in some capacity in the murder of Jews, then an intermediary would be sent to the Red Cross office to obtain the needed documents, because there were dozens of Jews in the office every day… The danger was acute that a Jewish survivor might recognize a former concentration camp official… Once fugitives had obtained new identification, they could safely venture to a soup kitchen run by the Vatican, Red Cross, or the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Association,” then mingle with other refugees and move around Rome until time came for them to begin a circuitous route to a foreign destination, usually in South America and primarily in Argentina.
Regarding the rat line, Bishop Hudal and Father Draganovic, the official Vatican historian, Father Robert Graham, asserted, “Just because he’s [Draganovic] a priest doesn’t mean he represents the Vatican. It was his own operation. He’s not the Vatican.”
In October 1946, a Treasury Department official, Pearson Bigelow, informed the department’s director of monetary research that pro-Nazi Croatian fascists had removed valuables worth $240 million at current rates from Yugoslavia at the end of the war. The declassified document, dated October 21, 1946, said, “Approximately 200 million Swiss francs was originally held in the Vatican for safe-keeping.”
Other documents established that Bigelow received reliable information from the OSS on Nazi wealth held in specific Swiss bank accounts. The Bigelow memo quoted a “reliable source in Italy ” “as saying the Ustasha organization, the Nazi-installed government of Croatia during the war, had removed 350 million Swiss francs from Yugoslavian funds it had confiscated. The memo said 150 million Swiss francs were impounded by British authorities at the Austria-Swiss border and the balance was held in the Vatican,…and that rumors said that a considerable portion of Vatican-held money was sent to Spain and Argentina through a Vatican pipeline.”
Fifty years later after a conference in London on the topic of Nazi gold that might have gone to the Vatican bank, “the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls,…commented, “As far as gold taken by Nazis in Croatia, research in the Vatican archives confirms that there is no existence of documents relating to this, thus ruling out any supposed transaction on the part of the Holy See.”
Steadfastly denying reports that it had stored money and gold for Croatian fascists after World War II, the Vatican said it had no plans to open its archives for the period, and that a search of the archives confirmed no documents existed relating to any “supposed” gold transaction “on the part of the Holy See.”
“A lawsuit was filed in Federal Court in San Francisco in November 1999. The plaintiffs were concentration camp survivors of Serb, Ukrainian, Jewish, background and their relatives, as well as organizations representing over 300,000 Holocaust victims and their heirs. The plaintiffs sought an accounting and restitution of gold in the Ustasha Treasury that, according to the U.S. State Department was illicitly transferred to the Vatican, the Franciscan Order and other banks after the end of the war. Defendants included the Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order. These defendants combined to conceal assets looted by the Croatian Nazis from concentration camp victims, Serbs, Jews, Roma [gypises] and others between 1941 and 1945.”
“There is one known witness to this alleged Vatican and Franciscan money laundering: former U.S. Army Counterintelligence special agent William Gowen. According to his deposition, Vatican official Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic had admitted to Gowen that he received up to ten truckloads of loot in 1946 at the Franciscan-controlled Croatian Confraternity of San Girolamo in Rome. Gowen also testified that the leader of the treasure convoy, Ustashe Colonel Ivan Babic, boasted to Gowen of using British uniforms and trucks to move the gold from Northern Italy to Rome. As for the Ustasha Treasury’s ultimate destination, Gowen said that it could have gone nowhere but the Vatican Bank…
“According to Gowen, Draganovic…admitted being the mastermind behind the smuggling and deposit of the Ustashe Treasury at the Vatican bank,” and that Draganovic reported directly to Cardinal Giovanni Montini (the future Pope Paul VI).
In January 2006, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz posted an online article in which it used Gowen’s testimony to accuse Cardinal Montini of involvement in the laundering of money for fugitive Nazi war criminals to escape by way of the “rat lines.”
In a speech to a convention of the Serbian Unity Congress in Toronto in October 2000, Jonathan Levy, an attorney for twenty-eight Serbs, Jews, and others “who lost their parents and grandparents to Ustashe terror” in Croatia in World War II said the subject of a class-action lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco against the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan Order was “the immense amount of property, money, gold, land, factories, and other loot stolen by the Ustashe and their Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945.”
Levy asserted, “The Ustashe movement stole immense wealth from its victims. The genocide in Croatia and Bosnia against Serbs was not only the most barbaric of the century but had a profit motive. The war criminals made sure that Serb property was seized right down to the gold teeth and wedding rings of concentration camp victims at Jasneovac. As the war was winding down, the Ustashe financial apparatus was gearing up. Top Ustashe were positioned in Rome and Switzerland, bank accounts were opened with the Swiss National Bank.”
The loot included “gold, silver, jewels, and currency worth tens of millions,” said Levy. “Other Ustashe reached Italy where help from the Franciscan Order was waiting in the form of safe houses, forged papers, and money.” Croatian leader Ante Pavelic “struck a deal with the British, money changed hands, and a killer of 700,000 Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies became an honored guest at the Vatican, was chauffeured around Rome in a car with Vatican diplomatic license plates, and lived safely in his own compound with Ustashe guards attending to his personal security.
“The Ustashe were masters of smuggling, secret codes, and financial dealings… Almost immediately, the Ustashe with the help of their Franciscan and Vatican sponsors,…formulated a bold plan…to fuel a mass migration of war criminals.” Some historians have written that the purpose in aiding the Nazis in escaping was rooted in the desire of men such as Draganovic eventually to organize a force to resist a Soviet takeover of the Balkans.
In opposing the lawsuit, the Vatican asserted that American courts had no jurisdiction to take on the case. Agreeing to that claim, the federal district court in San Francisco dismissed the suit, but the ruling was reversed in 2005 by a decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In December 2007, “the district court dismissed the Vatican Bank, this time on grounds of sovereign immunity,” based on the recognition of the Holy See as an independent state under the Lateran Treaty with Italy. While the plaintiffs again appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the case against the Franciscans proceeded in the district court.