It is absurd to believe
that 30,000 fugitive Nazis escaped to South America on the few U-Boats
remaining at the end of the war, or that they all made their own travel
arrangements. Modern popular culture has presented the escape of the
Nazis in an adventurous, almost romantic light. The most popular Nazi
smugglers are odessa and Die Spinne,
although other mysterious groups are also mentioned from time to time.
But in the main these stories owe more to the fertile imagination of
scriptwriters and novelists than to historical research and accuracy.
The truth is much more ordinary, almost mundane. It is all the more
shocking as a result. For whatever successes odessa
achieved, they were mere amateurs at Nazi-smuggling when compared with
the Vatican. Draganovic’s Ratline [the name given to the Vatican’s
smuggling operation] was truly professional, ensuring that many guilty
war criminals reached safe havens. Often they did not end up in the
remote jungles of South America, but settled instead in Britain, Canada,
Australia and the United States. …
The Vatican has consistently claimed that they were unaware of the
identity of those who were undeserving of their humanitarian assistance.
But some influential priests not only knew who the Nazis were, they
actively sought them out and provided extra-special treatment. …
In 1948 Franz Stangl wearily trudged along the road to Rome. Three
years earlier he had been an important man: Commandant of the Treblinka
extermination camp. He was meticulous in his work. When the boxcars
crammed full of deported men, women and children arrived … Stangl
insisted on order. The passengers were told to disembark for a routine
rest stop and showers. … It was all so swift, so organized, so deadly.
The showers were actually a gas chamber where 900,000 people, mostly
Jews, were murdered immediately upon arrival. Unlike Auschwitz, no work
was done here. Treblinka existed for one purpose only: mass murder of
human beings. Franz Stangl had commanded the Third Reich’s most
efficient death factory. …
Stangl said that when he came to Rome he was in fact looking for
[Roman Catholic] Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the Pontificio Santa
Maria dell’Anima, one of three seminaries for German priests in Rome. It
was Hudal’s name that had been whispered throughout the Nazi
underground: “The bishop came into the room where I was waiting and he
held out both his hands and said, ‘You must be Franz Stangl. I was
expecting you.’”
Stangl described the power and influence of Hudal’s extensive
smuggling network for fugitive Nazis. It was Hudal who arranged
“quarters in Rome where I was to stay till my papers came through. And
he gave me a bit more money—I had almost nothing left.” After several
weeks, Hudal “called me in and gave me my new passport—a Red Cross
Passport … [he] got me an entrance visa to Syria and a job in a textile
mill in Damascus, and he gave me a ticket for the ship. So I went to
Syria.” …
[Monsignor Karl Bayer, Rome director for Catholic relief
organization Caritas] admitted, “Perhaps Hudal did get batches of
passports for these particular people.” Finally he conceded that the
money Hudal gave Stangl would certainly have come from Vatican funds.
“The pope did provide money for this; in driblets sometimes, but it did
come.”
Was Stangl an isolated case, a regrettable but unavoidable accident
by a legitimate Catholic charity? Or was he one of many who escaped via
Hudal’s secret church connection? Simon Wiesenthal, who was responsible
for Stangl’s eventual recapture in Brazil in 1967, believes that a
sophisticated Vatican network was involved. …
Wiesenthal is convinced that Hudal was also responsible for
smuggling the most infamous war criminal of them all: Adolf Eichmann,
the chief architect of the Holocaust. As head of the SS Department for
“Jewish Affairs,” Eichmann’s careful supervision ensured that men like
Brunner, Stangl and Wagner ran the machinery of death at peak capacity.
Wiesenthal believes that Hudal equipped Eichmann with a new identity as a
Croatian refugee called “Richard Klement,” and sent him to Genoa. There
Eichmann was apparently hidden in a monastery under Archbishop Siri’s
charitable control, before finally being smuggled to South America.
Someone so notorious could not be protected forever. Eichmann was
eventually tracked down in Argentina by Israeli intelligence, kidnapped,
tried and executed in Jerusalem in 1962. What angers Wiesenthal is that
a Catholic relief organization, Caritas, “paid all of the traveling
expenses for Eichmann” to reach South America.
Official Vatican historian Father Robert Graham admits that Hudal
might have helped “a handful, a mere handful of Nazi war criminals to
escape”: “When Eichmann was arrested it was alleged he passed through
Rome and got some help from Bishop Hudal. Hudal was asked about this and
said, ‘I don’t know, I helped a lot of people and Eichmann may have
been among them.’” …
If Eichmann was a case of unauthorized assistance, he was certainly
not the only instance. Hudal seemed to make mistakes with frightening
regularity. Wiesenthal recalls, “During my search for Eichmann I found
out that many [war criminals] were living in monasteries, equipped by
Hudal with false documents,” showing they were refugees. One point is
certain: Many war criminals who escaped to South America have gratefully
acknowledged that they owed their freedom to the Austrian-born bishop. …
It is not surprising that Wiensenthal accuses Hudal. The bishop’s
pro-Nazi views were well known. Even Father Graham concedes the point:
“Hudal was rather notorious in Rome for being openly philo-Nazi. He had
this idea that it was his divine call to settle relations between the
Nazis and the Catholic Church.” By the early 1930s, Hudal openly
supported Hitler, traveling widely through Italy and Germany to address
large crowds of German-speaking Catholics. From the very beginning of
Nazi rule, he warmly embraced the new government as his own. …
Hudal gave a speech at the Anima in Rome. Among the invited guests
were members of the German Diplomatic Corps, as well as local
representatives of various Nazi organizations. The bishop [Hudal] told
his approving audience that “in this hour of destiny all German
Catholics living abroad welcome the new German Reich, whose philosophies
accord both with Christian and national values.” … In 1936 he published
a “philosophical” treatise, The Foundations of National Socialism. …
[T]he book was fulsome in its praise for the ideas, program and actions
of the Nazis …. Hudal was not the only cleric to hold these views. The
primate of the Austrian Church, Cardinal Theodore Innitzer, was at that
time strongly pro-Nazi. It was natural, therefore, that he gave Hudal’s
book an “imprimatur,” or official church permission for publication. The
cardinal glowingly endorsed it “as a valuable attempt to pacify the
German people’s religious situation.” …
Apparently Hudal’s high Nazi profile did not harm his Vatican
career. Since 1930 he had been a consulter in the Holy Office, a senior
Vatican tribunal working “in the most rigorous secrecy,” as U.S.
intelligence reported. … [A]s Hudal’s views grew more stridently and
publicly pro-Nazi, nothing was done either to discipline or remove him
from this powerful post. Instead the Vatican promoted him in June 1933
from priest to titular bishop, an extremely rare honor for a relatively
lowly rector of a teaching college. …
Father Jacob Weinbacher … has no doubt that “Hudal was very close to
[Pope] Pius xii … they were friends.” …
Far from being just another anonymous cleric on the fringes of the
Vatican, “Hudal may well have been the sounding board for the pope in
the German-speaking countries.” …
By early 1944 when the Allies landed in Sicily, even Hudal could see
that Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” was doomed. As long as the Nazi
armies were winning, he had proudly driven around Rome with a “Greater
Germany” flag on his car ….
Hudal had nothing but contempt for the American victors who helped
him: “… I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my whole charitable work
mainly to former National Socialists and fascists, especially to so
called ‘war criminals.’”
Hudal’s self-confessed activities are all the more controversial
because he operated with the full authority of the Vatican. •