Croatian connection remains most debated
aspect of Vaticans World War II legacy
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
In the quest to document the whereabouts of assets looted during
World War II, the most contested issue touching the Catholic church concerns
its role in Croatia under the fascist Ustasha movement.
In 1941, Croatia declared itself independent with the support of
the Nazis -- and with the blessing of Catholic leaders. The church had for
centuries functioned as a bearer of Croatian national pride, suppressed under
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later as part of Yugoslavia.
The Ustashi carried out mass deportations and executions of Serbs,
Jews and Gypsies. Exactly what church officials knew about these atrocities and
whether its denunciation of them was energetic enough continues to be
debated.
The controversy gained new life with John Pauls decision to
beatify Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac Oct. 3, despite opposition from Jewish
groups. Primate of the Croatian church during the war, Stepinac was later
convicted by Yugoslavias Socialist government of war crimes for
collaboration with the Ustashi. Defenders dismiss the conviction, pointing to
Stepanics public criticism of the regimes brutality.
New evidence suggesting a tie between the Vatican and the Ustashi
surfaced last July. The key finding was an intelligence report, quoting a
reliable source, that looted Ustasha gold, worth approximately $170
million in todays dollars, had been held at the Vatican for safekeeping
at wars end, then moved to Spain and Argentina.
The report escaped the attention of U.S. investigators but was
uncovered by researchers working on a documentary for the A&E cable
channel.
The Holy See has denied the charges. Regarding the gold
looted by the Nazis in Croatia, searches done in the Vatican archives confirm
the inexistence of documents related to the subject and thus refute any kind of
supposed transaction related to the Holy See, papal spokesman
Joaquín Navarro-Valls told the Associated Press in December 1997.
Greg Bradsher, director of the Holocaust-era Assets Project for
the American government, acknowledged that the evidence linking the Vatican
with Ustasha gold is tenuous.
I wouldnt call it flimsy, he told NCR. But
the evidence in many respects is raw intelligence data from primarily OSS
[Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. World War II military intelligence
agency] reports. These are not necessarily long reports -- oftentimes its
just a one-page intelligence document.
You have to figure out what the source is, how reliable it
is, is this the first time this person has supplied information. Theres
just a piece of paper here, a piece of paper there and theyre just being
uncovered one by one. Were talking about millions of documents, millions
of pages.
On the other hand, Bradsher noted that the final U.S. report on
the matter of the Ustasha treasury concluded, It seems unlikely they [the
Vatican] were entirely unaware of what was going on.
Bradsher said the general outlines of the relationship between the
Vatican and the Ustashi are well-established and set out in the same U.S.
report.
The College of San Girolamo degli Illirici, which housed Croatian
priests studying in Rome, was a center of Ustasha activity during the war.
Afterward, Fr. Stefano Dragonovic lived there as a representative of the Red
Cross. Dragonovic was a former Ustasha colonel and an official of the
Ministry for Internal Colonization, the Croatian office responsible
for confiscating Serb property in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Exploiting his Red Cross contacts, Dragonovic arranged the escape
from Europe of scores of Ustasha personnel sought by the allies as war
criminals. According to the U.S. report, Dragonovic also played a role in the
escape of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, who for years after
the war acted as a U.S. intelligence agent. The United States ended that
relationship only in 1962.
Bradsher said that evidence simply proves that the Ustashi were
operating out of a papal facility. It does not prove conclusively that the Holy
See knew about, or connived in, the goings-on.
Researchers told NCR that they doubt that even unfettered
access to Vatican archives would settle the question in a way that would
satisfy everybody.
Is there a smoking gun? said Francis Blouin,
Americas leading expert on the archives. My guess is that its
unlikely. A judicious reading of the documents could lead you in certain
directions, but Im less certain there is a huge cache of documents that
will scream out at you and solve these questions. Blouin spoke to
NCR by telephone Sept. 23.
More likely, Blouin said, studying the documents would give
researchers a general impression of the Vaticans attitude towards the
Ustashi.
National Catholic Reporter, December 4,
1998
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