Haaretz
Tevet 15, 2006
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 smuggling 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.