By Stephen Bailey.
It is a misconception, popularised by the 1974 film ‘The O.D.E.S.S.A. File’ that members of the Nazi S.S. got together and formed a single organisation, called the O. D. E. S. S. A. as a single, centrally controlled structure that all escaping war criminals (Nazi, Italian Fascist or other fascist) were sent down to escape justice for their crimes.
In reality, there were a number of separate organisations, controlled by various groups that operated escape routes, or ‘ratlines’ as they were dubbed.
At the end of World War Two, the Allies made a commitment to pursue and bring to justice the perpetrators of war crimes that had been committed by Axis and associated powers. There were roughly 150,000 people determined to have undertaken crimes during the hostilities, but only 50,000 of them were apprehended whilst 100,000 escaped.
In order to try to understand how some of the worst mass murderers and criminals of the Second World War could escape justice, it’s necessary to become familiar with the dislocation and chaos caused by the conflict which prevailed in Europe after 1945.
Every German ally or associated government in World War Two was complicit to varying degrees of participation in various ways in crimes against numerous groups of people. In German dominated Europe after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, most civilians died in the extermination centres (death camps) set up by the Nazis after the decision taken at the Wannsee Conference held in January 1942 to pursue ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’, or the genocide of the Jewish race, as well as by the actions of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile extermination units that carried out mass exterminations in the field in occupied areas).
In World War Two Croatia, Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše movement were responsible for the mass murder of half a million Orthodox Christians, Jews, and others in extermination centres that even shocked some Nazis for their bestiality and cruelty.
At the close of hostilities, Pavelić and his associates simply disappeared from public view and evaded justice for their crimes.
Documents released from various Western intelligence services and Government departments have brought to light how he was enabled to do this. The Americans uncovered a secret network of Vatican priests which included two Popes that enabled fleeing war criminals to evade justice. Pavelić is the key to this network, the escape routes which American intelligence dubbed ‘ratlines’.
A central player in all the escape routes used by war criminals after 1945 was the Vatican, including two Popes and several serving priests.
Indeed, many layers of the entire Vatican hierarchy are implicated to varying degrees in these activities.
During the inter-war years, the Balkan Republic of Yugoslavia, established after the First World War from the previously separate countries of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro suffered from considerable internal political tensions as certain sections of her society housed a desire to establish separate states.
The Croatian Nationalist Party fought for independence from Yugoslavia and the exiled Pavelić organised the campaign to achieve this, employing terrorist tactics to do so. He organised the assassination of Yugoslavian King Alexander and was declared guilty of conspiracy, forcing him to flee to Italy, where he received the protection and patronage of Mussolini.
It was in Italy that Pavelić established the Ustaše Movement, a fascist paramilitary group, whose symbol was the Croatian red and white chequerboard coat of arms and whose aim was the destruction of the Yugoslavian state. In secret training camps they bided their time preparing for establishing a separate Croatian state. In a sinister echo of other European fascist movements they swore an oath to ‘blood and soil’.
The outbreak of the Second World War severely exacerbated the existing tensions in Yugoslavia. In 1941 there was a strike by workers designed to overthrow the pro-German government of Yugoslavia, which forced Hitler to intervene militarily to prevent this happening, delaying the start of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.
The Yugoslavian Army was crushed in just 10 days. Hitler was so enraged by this delay to his plans for Russia that he ordered a savage reprisal on the capital, Belgrade, which was destroyed by German forces. Hitler was justified in his anger over this delay in that it meant that Barbarossa was pushed from a late Summer operation into a Winter one, something that ultimately ground down his Russian campaign and enabled its final failure and perhaps even his overall defeat in the war itself as the Germans never recovered from their Russian setback and the Russians were enabled to rally their forces and begin a four year march to aid the defeat of Nazism in 1945 along with the Western Allies.
In the wake of the German invasion, Yugoslavia was divided up into separate independent states. The Nazis occupied Serbia. Pavelić’s dream came true as the Nazis allowed him to establish a separate Croatia with an Ustaše government and him as Head of State, or Poglavnik (the Croatian Führer, or Leader).
Once established in power Pavelić revealed the true face of his regime. His government passed anti-Semitic laws which were even more severe than the Nazi Nuremberg Laws and two months later they began their assault on the Serbians in Croatia. They initiated an extensive programme of deportation, forced conversion to Roman Catholicism and the extermination of two million Orthodox Serbian Christians which was the beginning of a four year long programme of mass murder that left half a million people dead.
A prime example of the attitude of the Pavelić regime towards those groups of people it disliked is highlighted by Doctor Mile Budak, the Croatian Minister for Faith and Education.
When asked by a journalist what his government’s policy would be on non-Croats, and racial and religious minorities, he answered:
‘For them we have 3 million bullets.’
In another extremely sinister echo of Nazism, the Pavelić regime had its own concentration camps, the most notorious being Jasenovac on the banks of the River Sava where hundreds of thousands of people were murdered with unbelievably primitive cruelty in a medieval fashion. The guards used wooden hammers and daggers to carry out these murders.
On one occasion in 1942, camp guards held a competition (on which they bet money) to see how many prisoners they could kill in one night.
The winner was called Petar Brasic, who slaughtered 1360 camp prisoners with a special knife.
28 death and concentration camps existed in the Independent State of Croatia in World War Two. Most of them were operated by the Croatian Ustaše authorities, but some were operated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
When Pavelić met Hitler for the second time, he boasted about solving the ‘Jewish problem’ in Croatia before Hitler had succeeded to in Germany.
Shortly after the end of the war in 1945, Pavelić, with a column of loyal Ustaše and some of those who had collaborated with them fled Croatia under cover of darkness. They headed for the Austrian border in May 1945, passing into the British occupied zone in Maribor, unnoticed by the British authorities under Field Marshal Alexander and simply disappeared entirely from public view. The most wanted war criminal in Yugoslavia had disappeared without trace.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies had agreed to repatriate war criminals, but in 1945, this was easier said than done, as post-war Europe was in more or less complete chaos. The defeated Germany was in ruins and most administrative functions of government had completely or mostly collapsed, making the job of those hunting war criminals next to impossible. The government of the countries in the rest of Europe had also broken down more or less completely in many cases. Ante Pavelić had disappeared somewhere into this chaos.
From the Baltic to the Adriatic, Europe was flooded with refugees.
Several million people were guided by the Allied administrations in Europe to refugee camps where their identity could be established, verified and certified.
Some were the victims of fascism, some were war criminals and collaborators. The big question was, however, who was who?
Among the millions of refugees in Europe, there were Nazis, some of whom were war criminals as well as war criminals from other Axis or associated countries, such as Croatia and Hungary. They did not use their real names, and they hadn’t any identity papers as they had obviously destroyed them to prevent detection so they were registered as refugees.
Consequently, many such war criminals were free, and it was extremely difficult to establish their real identity in order to apprehend them.
In November 1946, the U.K. Foreign Office stated that:
‘It is becoming increasingly apparent that many of the most famous war criminals found refuge in the [Roman Catholic] Church.’
Thanks to declassified intelligence documents, it is now possible to determine just how so many war criminals managed to slip through the Allies’ hands.
Pavelić’s way through the escape routes is typical of thousands of other war criminals, German (primarily) and others who escaped justice.
In December 1946, it was announced by intelligence sources in Austria that it was increasingly likely that Pavelić was in Italyand that a residence had been organized for him by Father Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović, a Roman Catholic priest in Rome and no one else.
Father Draganović offered Pavelić help in escaping justice and provided him with fake documents.In April 1946, Pavelić left Austria, accompanied by an Ustaše lieutenant. Both were disguised as Roman Catholic priests. In Milan, Pavelic used the documents provided by Draganović to get a Spanish passport under the name of ‘Don Pedro Golla’.
In May 1946, Pavelić managed to get to Rome, the epicentre of the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, Pavelić had found a place in the Vatican to hide away from justice for his crimes.
Father Draganović was a Croatian Roman Catholic priest who lived in Rome. He was the Secretary of the Brotherhood of San Girolamo and San Girolamo was the Pontifical Croatian College connected to the Vatican:
‘I think there is no doubt that many Croatian priests and the clergy from that college were distinctly chauvinists and therefore very much inclined towards those who asked them for help [war criminals, especially Croatians]’ – Father Graham, official Vatican Archivist.
Draganović had an extremely dark past. During the war he held an official position in the Ustaše government. Tito’s Yugoslavia officially declared him a war criminal. Despite this the Allies allowed him to enter the refugee camps.
Ostensibly, Draganović visited these camps in order to ‘carry out the Church’s ‘mission of mercy’ and minister to Roman Catholics (he was a serving priest, under the authority of the Vatican at the same time that he was engaged in helping war criminals escape justice), but intelligence sources provide a different motive for these actions.
American intelligence reports present a highly detailed account of Father Draganović’s activities. In the summer of 1945, Draganović personally visited the refugee camps and made contact with the main Ustaše representatives. His close collaborator was Montagne, who maintained contact between San Girolamo and the Ustaše groups throughout Italy and Austria.
This led to the establishment of a Vatican headed political intelligence service which provided loyal Ustaše in the camps with fake documents.
The value of these documents in the post-war years cannot be underestimated. They were the papers of the International Red Cross, which served in place of identity documents as most people didn’t have passports or any other verifiable official forms of identification.
There were two organisations for helping people with such documents – the Vatican Commission for refugees, which could vouch for an individual,and the national representative of the Red Cross. The Croatian representative of the Red Cross was none other than Father Draganović and the Croatian hand of the Vatican Committee for refugees was the College of San Girolamo.
According to American Intelligence files about Draganović, the Croatian Confraternity issued false identity cards to Ustaše war criminals. With such documents and with the aprroval of the Vatican Pontifical Commission, passports could be obtained from the International Red Cross, where Draganović had a very significant influence in securing their issue.
Due to the work of Draganović and other Vatican and associated operatives, such as Ivo Omrcanin, a former Croatian diplomat living in Rome who had a leading role in securing visas for ratline escapees, Pavelić and other Croatian war criminals had a new identity and a safe haven in the Vatican.
Pavelić’s, his fellow Ustaše war criminals’ (and many others from Germany, Hungary and other Axis and associated powers’) route from Austria to Rome began in the refugee camps. There Draganović distributed fake documents for Italyand the neutral territory of the Vatican, so avoiding Allied interrogators and those hunting them for their crimes.
While searching for war criminals, the Allies slowly began to unearth the ratline networks, mostly organised by Vatican operatives. Their investigation into fake documents and Pavelić’s whereabouts led to Father Draganović. Although Pavelić was not arrested, the C.I.C., the American Counterintelligence Corps., was at his heels. The Rome branch of this service wanted to arrest him, had he not been protected by the Vatican.
In 1947 the American Intelligence files showed it was an open secret among Western intelligence services that the Vatican protected the Ustaše refuges and hid Pavelić.
The ‘La Vista Report’ of May 15th, 1947, was a top – secret U.S. Army Intelligence report documenting the Vatican’s role in aiding the escape of numerous high-ranking Nazi war criminals, among them Franz Stangel, Commander of Treblinka, Eduard Roschmann, ‘the Butcher of Riga’, Klaus Barbie, ‘the Butcher of Lyon’, S.S. General Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas truck, Adolf Eichmann, ‘architect of the Holocaust’, and tens of thousands of others.
Sir Fitzroy MacLean (Commander of the British Military Mission in Yugoslavia during The Second World War) stated:
‘I think that most people in the Rome interested in those things knew that to a certain extent, especially Father Draganović, did everything possible to save those Ustaše, those with a high rank, including Pavelić himself, to transfer them from Rome to safer places.’
U.S. C.I.C. agent William Gowen was able to gain entry to the Croatian College in Rome under cover. He reported that San Girolamo was:
‘…honeycombed with cells of Ustaše operatives. In order to enter this monastery, one must submit to a personal search for weapons and identification. All doors are locked, and those that are not, have an armed guard. A password is necessary to go from one room to another. The whole area is guarded by armed Ustaše youth in civilian clothes, and the Ustaše salute is exchanged constantly.’
Furthermore, according to the C.I.C., Draganović also held secret meetings with ex-high ranking ministers of the former Ustaše regime. San Girolamo was not just a residence for protecting refugees, but for hiding a putative future Ustaše government in exile.
In January 1947, the Americans revealed Pavelić was in San Girolamo.
In February they found him in the monastery of San Sabina on the left bank of the River Tiber. They called a secret meeting on April 11th, 1947 to plan Pavelić’s arrest, but were strongly determined to avoid a diplomatic incident and so couldn’t arrest him on Vatican soil.
Pavelić lived in Rome at an address which the Americans believed to have been the Vatican Library. Their files show that Pavelić was always one step ahead of people that wanted to arrest him, moving between several Vatican residences. When travelling he drove a car registered to the Vatican with Draganović’s help.
Pavelić managed to remain at large with Draganović’s assistance. He was able to do this as Draganović was in direct contact with an American intelligence operative who kept him up to date with developments in the efforts of the authorities to arrest Pavelić.
However, the main reason for the failure to arrest Pavelić was a mysterious reluctance by the authorities to actually act. In July the Chief Operating Officer of the C.I.C. was ordered to arrest Pavelić, but a week later that order was changed with the handwritten instruction ‘hands off’ on the file.
This unexplainable breathing space enabled Pavelić to leave Rome, the final stage of his escape down the ratline.
In Autumn 1947, Pavelić moved to Geneva, Switzerland with a fake passport that Draganović had provided him under the name of ‘Pale Aranios’, supposedly a Hungarian refugee. In Geneva, another Croatian Roman Catholic priest was the last link in the chain of the ratlines. Father Petranović was a suspected war criminal. He provided escaping war criminals with berths on ships headed for South America and informed Draganović of any free beds available in the cabins. Draganović would then send that number of ratline escapees from Rome, for onwards transmission to safety in places like South America, the Middle East and Spain, among others.
The details of Pavelić’s escape from Rome are extremely unclear, however it is known that he left Italy by sea and set sail for the safety and security of Buenos Aires, Argentina and the welcoming fascist regime of Brigadier – General Juan Perón. Perón appointed Pavelić as one of his security councillors. He also approved 35, 000 entry visas to Croats in order to create a powerful block against communism (the stock raison d’être given by Western Powers after 1945 for using Axis/ ex-fascist war criminals in their efforts against the Soviet Cold War threat – ‘it’s Realpolitik as these people have knowledge and experience that can help us fight communism’).
All of the above raises the following questions:
- Why did the Roman Catholic Church protect a man like Pavelić who was responsible for the murder of 500, 000 people?
- Why would Roman Catholic priests (like Draganović) protect Pavelić, a war criminal responsible for gross crimes against humanity and pursued by all the Allied armies of Europe?
- Why did a supposedly Christian institution like the Croatian Collegeof San Girolamo tolerate such activities as the aiding of war criminals?
- Why didn’t the Vatican control its clergy and other people who worked for it?
The answer to the last question could be ‘perhaps it did’.
Croatia was one of Vatican’s most favoured countries because it served as a buffer against the Eastern Orthodox Church.
During the war Pavelić’s regime was extremely strongly pro-Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church and the Ustaše were very close. In the Independent State of Croatia, Draganović had been a member of the Committee for Forcible Conversions (from other religions to Roman Catholicism).
Father Petranovć had served at a concentration camp. Archbishop Stepinac, another Roman Catholic priest, had been a member of the Croatian Parliament. The Roman Catholic Church’s support of Pavilićcontinued during his dictatorship. One of the first decrees of the Ustaše regime was to outlaw the Orthodox Church and legalise deportation and killing in the name of the Roman Catholic faith.
Death squads even crucified some blasphemers. Added to this, after ten months of such gruesome crimes the start of the Croatian Parliament was blessed by Archbishop Stepinac and Papal delegate Marconi. Archbishop Stepinac officiated at an Ustaše ceremony and blessed volunteers for these Ustaše groups with Ustaše symbols – a gun, a dagger, and a bomb – on the altar.
Franciscan monks actively participated in military campaigns. Monasteries were used as military strongholds. Franciscan monks served in the Jasenovac death camp.
Immediately after coming to power in 1941, Pavelić went to the Vaticanfor a private audience with the Pope Pius XII. Giovanni Montini, Assistant Secretary of State, confided to the Ustaše representative that the Vatican could not imagine a Croatian who was not a Roman Catholic. Pavelić enacted a severe policy of Catholicizing Croatia by forced conversion and murder of non Roman Catholics and this greatly satisfied the Vatican.
In May 1943, Pius XII received Pavelić again in a private audience. Pavelić publicly portrayed these meetings with the Pope as a Papal recognition of his regime and therefore also of everything that went on under his regime, including the murders and other crimes. Although official recognition was postponed, the Vatican received official Croatian representatives on several occasions. Thus, Pius XII is deeply implicated in giving moral support to the crimes against humanity committed by Pavelić’s regime.
The communist victory in Yugoslavia in the Second World War marked the end of the political power of the Roman Catholic Church in that country and the victory of fiercely anti-religion Stalinist Communism generally in large parts of Europe also greatly worried the Vatican. However, whilst Tito’s victory separated Croatia from the Ustaše, it didn’t separate the Ustaše from the Roman Catholic Church or from Draganović.
One of the priests who worked with Draganović in 1946 gave a recorded statement to investigators in the 1990s. Monsignor Simcić revealed that Draganović often talked about the activity of San Girolamo in helping war criminals escape justice with Monsignor Montini, the Assistant Secretary of State in the Vatican. He was its Operative Director and the Pope’s right hand in the state Secretariat for Humanitarian Activeties. Draganović went to Montini to ask for advice on certain issues. Their relations were extraordinarily good. Draganović asked Montini to get more visas, to open the way for the thousands of war criminals in the camps to escape justice. Montini often asked Draganović to save certain individuals, including many war criminals. Draganović, through Montini, had an excellent personal relationship with Pious XII, who greatly appreciated his efforts in protecting war criminals as he also thought they could be useful in fighting communism.
Added to this, Montini became Pope Paul VI, thus implicating a second Pope in giving moral and material support to the crimes against humanity committed by Pavelić’s regime.
Why did the Vatican allow Draganović to help Pavelić and other war criminals to escape through the ratlines, and what did it expect to gain from these actions?
U.S. C.I.C. agent William Gowen uncovered a secret anti-communist group called ‘Intermarium’ (‘between the seas’) which holds the answer to this question.
In the 1920s and 30s, the Vatican supported a policy of creating a federation of Roman Catholic countries, stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic, which existed to oppose communism.
The final chapter in the ratlines scandal was brought to light by Gowen through the confession of a former Hungarian Nazi and war criminal, Terence Laite, whose credentials as an informer could hardly have been better as, before the war he was an active member of Intermarium. He had escaped to Rome through the ratlines.
The end of the war in 1945, crushed all hopes of stopping communism The Soviet Red Army had occupied Eastern Europe, leading to the dominance of communism across large parts of the Continent. Nationalists, the Vatican and the democratic West had to resign themselves to the fact that now Stalin and fiercely anti-religion communism was in charge there.
Consequently, the countries of Intermarium became the communist block and the ‘Catholic Curtain’ of Intermarium became the Iron Curtain.
Pavelić had been protected by anti-communists in the Vatican. The Vatican had renewed their relationship with these strongly pro-Roman Catholic and equally strongly anti-communist fascists after the war.
During his time in power, Pavelić’s regime had stolen a very substantial amount of gold from murdered Ustaše victims. A part of this gold never left Yugoslavia and was later given to Draganović, who hoped to use it to fund the removal of communism from Yugoslavia.
In 1947 an agreement with Tito was concluded in which the Allies agreed to return high ranking officials of the Pavelić regimebut not the lower ranks.
The refugee camps in Europe were full of anti-communists who had fought against the Soviets during the war. They proved to be a fruitful recruiting ground for the agents of Intermarium, including as they did many extremely strongly pro-Roman Catholic and equally fiercely anti-communist war criminals and so had a large potential to assist in the revivification of Intermarium as a network against the new communist threat.
The most pressing practical problem was how to protect these new Intermarium agents, who were war criminals, from the constant danger of arrest by those pursuing them for war crimes. The Americans needed secret channels to save their new friends from such depredations, so they employed the only too willing Father Draganović and many other equally willing clerico-fascists and other Vatican associated operatives to assist them in this.
Both Alan Douglas and James Angleton, who later became head of the C.I.A., used the ratlines to smuggle fascist scientists and experienced agents from Germany to America (this was named ‘Operation Paper clip’).
What’s more, Draganović was not alone in aiding this highly morally dubious effort. Clerics from Germany, Italy, Austria, and Hungary had their own ratlines. Many serving Roman Catholic priests had been active participants on the fascist side in the Second World War, some committing war crimes, including murder.
A prime example of this was Austrian Roman Catholic bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathiser, who was rector of the Pontificio Istituto Teutonico Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, a seminary for Austrian and German priests, and ‘Spiritual Director of the German People resident in Italy’.
After the end of the war in Italy, Hudal became active in ministering to German speaking prisoners of war and internees then held in camps throughout Italy. In December 1944, the Vatican Secretariat of State received permission to appoint a representative to ‘visit the German-speaking civil internees in Italy’, a job assigned to Hudal.
Hudal used this position to aid the escape of wanted Nazi war criminals. All of the many crimes against humanity committed by fascism during the war were well known to the Vatican, but it still allowed its priesthood to protect the culprits.
Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo Chief in Lyon, France during the war, who was responsible for the most serious of war crimes (he was called ‘the Butcher of Lyon’) had used the Vatican operated ratlines to escape justice at the cessation of hostilities. He had been employed by the American Counterintelligence Corps. in Munich after the war. When Barbie met Draganović after the war he asked why he had helped him escape, and he answered that he saved various war criminals (Ustaše, Nazi and other fascist) because ‘we needed to have a sort of reserve which we would use in the future.’
That statement reveals the truth behind the Roman Catholic Church’s actions in aiding known war criminals who had committed the grossest war crimes – they were prepared to ignore such matters, despite the massive moral implications of doing this as they prioritised the struggle against communism above morality and Christian ethics.
Select bibliography:
‘God and the Fascists: The Vatican alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic’, Karlheinz Deschner 1965, 2013 edition.
‘The Catholic Church and the Holocaust’, Michael Phayer, 2000, Indiana University Press.
‘Pious XII, the Holocaust and the Cold War’, Michael Phayer, 2008, Indiana University Press.
‘Croat Himmler Finds U. S. Haven’, Drew Pearson, Washington Post, October 16th 1963.
‘Genocide In Satellite Croatia, 1941-1945: A Record of Racial and Religious Persecutions and Massacres’, Edmond Paris, 1961.
‘Terror Over Yugoslavia : The Threat to Europe’, Avro Manhattan, 1953.
‘The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought The Nazi War Criminals To Argentina’, Uki Goñi, Granta books, 2003.
Other sources:
Report by Vincent La Vista, U.S. Foreign Service Officer in Rome, 1947.
‘History of the Italian Rat Line’, 10th April 1950, document signed by ‘IB Operating Officer’ Paul E. Lyon, 430th Counterintelligence Corps (C.I.C.), Headquarters of the U.S. Forces in Austria.
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