On a quiet morning in early 1948 a man named Franz Stangl walked into the Pontificio Collegio Teutonico di Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German national church and seminary in Rome, and asked to see Bishop Alois Hudal. Stangl was forty-one years old. He had served until April 1943 as the commandant of the Sobibór killing centre and from August 1942 until the closure of the camp in October 1943 as the commandant of the Treblinka killing centre. The two camps under his command had killed approximately a million people. He was carrying a German army identity document in his own name, a small case of personal possessions, and approximately fifty United States dollars in cash. He had escaped from a British military detention camp in Linz, Austria, six weeks earlier and had been making his way south through Tyrol and northern Italy. He had been told in Linz, by a fellow former SS man who had also recently escaped, that the way to get out of Europe was to go to Bishop Hudal at Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome. Hudal would arrange the documentation, would provide a letter of introduction to the International Red Cross, would arrange for Argentine entry papers, and would arrange the passage on a small Italian shipping line that ran from Genoa to Buenos Aires. The cost would be approximately twenty pounds sterling per traveller, payable to the Anima funds. The journey would take about three months from arrival in Rome to landing in Buenos Aires.
Stangl saw Hudal that morning. Hudal received him politely. The arrangements were made as described. Stangl left the Anima with an International Red Cross travel document made out to a Slovak-sounding alias, an Argentine entry permit issued by the Argentine consulate in Genoa on the basis of the Red Cross document, a passage booked on the Italian liner SS Antoniotto Usodimare departing Genoa for Buenos Aires on 22 May 1948, and a letter of introduction to a German immigrant community in Buenos Aires that would help him to find work on arrival. He sailed on schedule. He arrived in Buenos Aires on 17 June 1948. He was met at the dock by representatives of the German immigrant community and was found work within a fortnight as a senior engineer at the Mercedes-Benz plant outside Buenos Aires. He worked there for eleven years before moving to São Paulo in 1959 to work for the Volkswagen plant. He was located by Simon Wiesenthal in 1967 after a tip from a former Vatican-side associate who had broken with the network. He was extradited to West Germany in June 1967 and was tried at Düsseldorf in 1970. He was convicted of the murder of approximately 900,000 people at Treblinka and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in his cell of heart failure on 28 June 1971 at the age of sixty-three, six months into his sentence. He was the most senior single perpetrator who passed through the Vatican ratline.
Stangl was not unusual. Approximately 200 to 300 senior SS, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht personnel passed through the Vatican-administered ratlines between 1947 and 1953, by the careful estimate of the historian Gerald Steinacher in his 2011 study Nazis on the Run, drawing on the declassified files of the United States Counter Intelligence Corps, the Vatican archives that have been progressively opened since 2006, and the Argentine immigration records. Approximately 9,000 SS and other German nationals passed through the wider Vatican network in the same period, of whom the great majority were lower-ranking personnel rather than senior figures. The total number of war criminals who used the Vatican network is, in the most considered assessment, larger than the number who used any other single ratline.
The Vatican context
The Vatican’s involvement in the postwar evacuation of senior Nazi personnel was the work of a small number of senior figures who had developed, during and immediately after the war, the institutional and personal relationships that made the operation possible. The most senior single figure was Cardinal Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI), who served as the Substitute for Ordinary Affairs at the Vatican Secretariat of State throughout the relevant period. The most operationally important single figure was Bishop Alois Hudal, the rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima from 1923 until his forced resignation in 1952. The most operationally active single figure was Father Krunoslav Draganović, a Croatian priest attached to the Pontifical College of San Girolamo degli Illirici, who ran the principal ratline operation for Croatian fugitives between 1946 and 1949 and who provided the operational template that Hudal, Father Anton Weber at the Pontifical Commission for Refugee Assistance, and others adapted for German fugitives. Smaller operations were run by other clerical figures including Father Edoardo Dömöter for Hungarian fugitives and Bishop Ivan Bučko for Ukrainian fugitives.
The wider Vatican policy on the operations was, on the documentary record now available, ambiguous. The senior Vatican leadership did not formally authorise the ratline operations. The senior Vatican leadership also did not, on the available record, make any sustained effort to stop them. The institutional relationships through which the operations functioned, including the Pontifical Commission for Refugee Assistance, the International Red Cross, and the network of national colleges and seminaries in Rome, were Vatican institutions. The funding for the operations passed through Vatican-controlled bank accounts. The operational decisions were taken by the figures named above, working with substantial institutional support from the wider Vatican apparatus.
The justification offered by the relevant clerical figures for the operations was the postwar anti-Communist position of the Vatican. The argument was that the men being evacuated were anti-Communist Europeans whose continued availability for political work in the West, and particularly in Latin America, would be of value in the wider postwar struggle against Communism. The argument was, in some specific cases, supported by the wartime conduct of the figures involved; the Croatian fugitives administered by Draganović had been members of the Ustaše, the wartime Croatian fascist movement that had killed perhaps half a million Serbs, Jews, and Roma at Jasenovac and other locations, and that had also been an actively anti-Communist movement during the postwar Yugoslav civil conflict. The argument was, in most other cases, an inadequate justification for the actual conduct of the men being evacuated. Stangl, Eichmann, Mengele, Roschmann, Rauff, and the other senior German fugitives evacuated through the Vatican network had not been distinguished anti-Communists. They had been operational managers of mass murder. The Vatican’s evacuation of them on the basis of their anti-Communist potential was a misreading of who they were.
Bishop Alois Hudal
Hudal had been the rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima since 1923. He was, in 1945, sixty years old. He had been an open sympathiser with the National Socialist movement in the 1930s, had published in 1937 a book titled Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus (The Foundations of National Socialism) that had attempted to argue for a Catholic accommodation with the Nazi movement, and had been formally censured by the Vatican on its publication. The censure had been substantial; Hudal’s planned promotion to the cardinalate had been blocked, and his subsequent career had been confined to the Anima rectorate. He had not lost his sympathies. His engagement with the postwar evacuation operations was the continuation, in altered circumstances, of his prewar position.
The Anima operation that Hudal ran between 1947 and 1952 evacuated, on his own subsequent acknowledgment in his 1976 posthumously published memoir Römische Tagebücher, approximately thirty senior SS and Wehrmacht figures and several hundred lower-ranking personnel. The figures included Stangl, Eichmann (who passed through Rome in 1950 on his way to Argentina), Walter Rauff, Erich Priebke, Gerhard Bohne (the T4 administrator), and several others. The methodology was the methodology Stangl had encountered: International Red Cross travel documents under false names, Argentine entry permits, passage on Italian shipping lines from Genoa, letters of introduction to German immigrant communities in Argentina.
The funding for the Anima operation came in part from the German Catholic emigrants in Argentina, who paid into a fund administered by Hudal in Rome that covered the cost of the documents and the passage. The funding also came in part from sources within the German emigré community in Italy. The funding did not, on the available evidence, come from any Vatican-level source; the Anima had its own institutional resources sufficient for the operations. The Anima had property income that was substantial, including holdings in Rome and in central Italy that produced rental income.
Hudal was forced to resign from the Anima rectorate in 1952 after sustained pressure from the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference, which had become uncomfortable with the public profile his activities were attracting. He retired to Grottaferrata in the Roman countryside and lived in retirement until his death in May 1963. His memoirs, prepared during his retirement and published posthumously, give a substantial account of his postwar work. He claimed in the memoirs that the wider Vatican leadership had been generally aware of his activities and had given them tacit approval. The claim is consistent with the documentary record but cannot be definitively confirmed from currently available Vatican sources.
Father Krunoslav Draganović
Draganović was the operationally most important of the ratline figures. He had been a senior Croatian Catholic priest attached to the Ustaše regime in Zagreb during the war and had served, in various capacities, in the regime’s church-state administration. He had been transferred to the College of San Girolamo degli Illirici in Rome in late 1943 as the wartime situation deteriorated. He had not returned to Yugoslavia after the war. He had remained at San Girolamo and had developed, in the period 1945 to 1947, the substantial operational network that would form the basis of the wider Vatican ratline operations.
Draganović’s network operated initially for the evacuation of Ustaše fugitives. The principal figures evacuated included Ante Pavelić, the Ustaše leader, who reached Argentina in 1948 through the Draganović network; Andrija Artuković, the Ustaše Interior Minister, who reached the United States through the network; and several hundred lower-ranking Ustaše personnel. The network’s methodology was the methodology that became standard: International Red Cross travel documents, false identity papers from sympathetic European governments (particularly Spain and Argentina), passage on Italian shipping lines, and reception by Croatian emigrant communities in Latin America.
The Draganović network’s most consequential single operational contribution was its 1951 assistance to the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps in the evacuation of Klaus Barbie from American custody in West Germany to Bolivia. The CIC paid Draganović approximately 1,400 dollars for the operation, which was carried out under the standard Vatican ratline methodology with Draganović’s standard documentation. The Barbie operation has been documented in detail in the 1983 Allan A. Ryan report to the United States Department of Justice, which produced a formal American apology to France for the role of American intelligence in the protection of a senior war criminal who had been condemned to death in absentia by a French court.
Draganović himself returned to Yugoslavia in 1967 in circumstances that have never been definitively explained. The most plausible reconstruction, based on the available Yugoslav and Vatican records, is that he had been recruited as an asset by the Yugoslav security services in the late 1960s and had returned to Yugoslavia under their auspices. He lived in Sarajevo from 1967 until his death in July 1983 at the age of seventy-nine. His Vatican-side colleagues regarded the return as a betrayal. The Yugoslav authorities used his return for sustained propaganda purposes, including the publication of statements by Draganović criticising the Vatican-side ratline operations.
The German national colleges
The German-language network in Rome that supported the Anima operation extended beyond Santa Maria dell’Anima itself. The Pontifical Commission for Refugee Assistance, run during the relevant period by Father Anton Weber, provided the formal Vatican channel for the documentary work. The Pontifical Collegio Germanico, the German-Hungarian seminary, provided some logistical support, particularly safe-house accommodation. The Pontifical Collegio Pio-Latino-Americano provided the connections to the Latin American Catholic networks that would receive the fugitives on arrival.
The methodology had three principal elements. The first was the production of International Red Cross travel documents under false names. The Red Cross had produced approximately 100,000 such travel documents in the period 1945 to 1948 for genuine refugees who had lost their normal documentation in the war; the Vatican-side network exploited this regular operation to produce documents for the fugitives. The Red Cross has subsequently acknowledged that its postwar documentary work was used in this way and has expressed regret for the consequences. The Red Cross internal investigation conducted between 2006 and 2010 and published in 2011 established that approximately 800 of the Red Cross travel documents issued in the period 1947 to 1953 had been used by senior war criminals.
The second element was the issuance of Argentine entry permits on the basis of the Red Cross documents. The Argentine government under Juan Perón had a sympathetic policy on the admission of European refugees and had agreed in 1947 to admit substantial numbers of European immigrants who could demonstrate appropriate skills. The Argentine consulate in Genoa, working under the supervision of Carlos Fuldner, a former SS officer who had become an Argentine immigration official under Perón’s patronage, administered the entry permits for the Vatican-side traffic. The processing was generally efficient and the documentation was generally accepted by Argentine port authorities at Buenos Aires.
The third element was the passage on Italian shipping lines from Genoa. The principal ships used were the Italian liners SS Antoniotto Usodimare, SS Conte Biancamano, and SS Argentina. The shipping companies were aware of the nature of the traffic; the senior Italian shipping line executives were sympathetic to the operation, in some cases on anti-Communist grounds and in some cases for the financial benefits of the regular bulk traffic. The passage was paid for in dollars or in Swiss francs, drawn from the Anima funds and from the German emigrant community resources in Argentina.
The Vatican archives
The Vatican Secret Archives (renamed the Vatican Apostolic Archive in 2019) have been the principal documentary source for the historical reconstruction of the operations. The archives covering the pontificate of Pius XII (1939 to 1958) were progressively opened to researchers from 2006, with the most substantial single tranche opened on 2 March 2020. The opening produced a substantial body of new evidence on the operations.
The new evidence has confirmed the broad outlines of the historiographical reconstruction that had been developed before the opening. It has not, however, produced any direct evidence of formal Vatican leadership authorisation of the operations. The senior Vatican figures, including Pius XII himself and Cardinal Montini, do not appear in the documentary record as having issued direct instructions on the ratline operations. They appear as having been generally aware of the operations and having tolerated them. The institutional position of the Vatican, in the strictest sense, was that the operations were the private work of individual clerics rather than authorised activities of the Holy See. The institutional position was, on any reasonable assessment, an inadequate response to the conduct of figures like Hudal and Draganović. The Vatican has not, in the period since the opening of the archives, undertaken any formal apology or acknowledgment of the operations beyond the general statements made by John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the wider question of the Catholic Church’s wartime conduct.
What the Vatican network shows
The Vatican-administered ratlines were the most operationally substantial of the postwar evacuation networks for senior war criminals. They moved a larger number of fugitives, with a higher operational success rate, over a longer period than any of the alternative networks. The men and women evacuated through the Vatican network included most of the senior figures who reached safe havens in Latin America and the Middle East: Eichmann, Stangl, Mengele, Rauff, Priebke, Pavelić, and many others.
The wider lesson of the Vatican network is the lesson of institutional capture by a particular ideological reading of the postwar situation. The Vatican leadership did not, on the available record, formally authorise the operations. The Vatican leadership also did not act, in any substantive way, to prevent them. The institutional resources of the Holy See, including its diplomatic, financial, and ecclesiastical networks, were used by individual clerics to evacuate men whose conduct during the war had been the operational opposite of every value the Catholic Church professed. The operations were tolerated because they were understood to serve a wider anti-Communist purpose, and because the institutional figures involved were members of the Vatican community who could not easily be confronted within the institution’s own working practices.
The result was the survival, into the postwar period, of approximately two to three hundred senior figures of the killing apparatus who would otherwise have faced trial in Europe. The deaths of perhaps a million people at Treblinka, Sobibór, the Croatian killing camps, and the various Einsatzgruppen and police battalion operations went unaccounted for in the postwar period in part because the men responsible had been evacuated to Latin America with the operational assistance of an institution that should have been the most natural opponent of the conduct it had assisted in evading consequences for. The Vatican’s postwar engagement with the question has been incomplete. The historical record is now, with the opening of the Vatican archives in 2020, substantially clearer than it had been for the previous fifty years. The institutional reckoning with what the record shows has not been undertaken.
See also
- Franz Stangl
- Argentina Brazil and Paraguay as Nazi Destinations
- Ustaše, Croatia
- Italy
- Yugoslavia
- Adolf Eichmann
Sources
- Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice, Oxford University Press, 2011
- Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Granta, 2002
- Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks, St. Martin’s Press, 1991
- Allan A. Ryan, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, U.S. Department of Justice, 1983
- Alois Hudal, Römische Tagebücher: Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs, Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1976
- International Committee of the Red Cross, The ICRC and the Issuance of Travel Documents to Nazi War Criminals, internal review, 2011
- Vatican Apostolic Archive, files of the Pontifical Commission for Refugee Assistance, opened 2 March 2020
- Guy Walters, Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, Bantam, 2009