Ratlines
excerpted from the book
Blowback
America's recruitment of Nazis,
and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy
by Christopher Simpson
Collier / Macmillan, 1988
p176
Ratlines, in espionage jargon, are networks of agents who smuggle
fugitives or undercover operatives in and out of hostile foreign
territories. These escape and evasion routes, as they are sometimes
called, are a standard part of the clandestine operations of every
major power, and there were hundreds of such ratlines snaking
out of the Soviet-occupied territories in Eastern Europe in the
wake of World War II.
The story of one of these ratlines is of special interest
here because it reveals the manner in which the United States
became entangled in the escape of large numbers of Nazi and Axis
criminals, many of whom remained ardent Fascists as contemptuous
of American democracy as of Soviet-style communism. In hindsight
it is clear that many of the ratlines used by the United States
during the cold war began as independent, unsanctioned Nazi escape
organizations that later turned to selling their specialized services
to U.S. intelligence agencies as a means of making money and protecting
their own ongoing Nazi smuggling efforts. Some of the exiles involved
in this dangerous work did it for money; some, for ideological
reasons, some, for both.
The most important Western ratlines that have come to light
thus far, including those that smuggled Nazis, operated in and
through the Vatican in Rome. Unraveling the reasons why and how
the Catholic Church became involved in Nazi smuggling is an important
step in understanding the broader evolution of the postwar alliances
between former Nazis and U.S. intelligence agencies. One organization
is worthy of close scrutiny. It is the prominent Catholic lay
group known as Intermarium. During its heyday in the 1940s and
early 1950s leading members of this organization were deeply involved
in smuggling Nazi fugitives out of Eastern Europe to safety in
the West. Later Intermarium also became one of the single most
important sources of recruits for the CIA's exile committees.
This can be said with some certainty because about a score of
Intermarium leaders ended up as activists or officials in Radio
Free Europe, Radio Liberation, and the Assembly of Captive European
Nations (ACEN), each of which the U.S. government has since admitted
as having been a CIA-financed and -controlled organization.
For much of the Catholic Church's leadership, it will be recalled
World War II had been an interlude in a deeper and more important
struggle against "atheistic communism" that had been
raging for decades. This more fundamental struggle had closely
aligned the Vatican hierarchy with a half dozen conservative Christian
Democratic and clerical-Fascist political parties that were willing
Nazi pawns during the war, even when the Church of Rome was itself
under ideological attack from the German Nazi party. The majority
of the Nazis' Axis partners in Eastern Europe, as well as Vichy
France, had been led by Catholic political parties during the
war. The puppet government in Slovakia, for example, was run by
a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Croatia, a terrorist
breakaway state from Yugoslavia, described itself as a "pure
Catholic state" whose leader, Ante Pavelic, had been personally
received by the pope, while clerics in Admiral Nicholas Horthy's
Hungary enjoyed a more profound influence in that country's wartime
government than did its own parliament. It is well established,
of course, that some Catholic Church leaders bravely resisted
Nazi crimes sometimes at the cost of their lives. Even so, it
is also true that the church-based political parties mentioned
above played a central role in Axis military aggression. These
organizations used the mantle and the moral authority of the church
to help carry out the preparations for, and in some cases the
actual execution of, the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
As Nazi Germany collapsed during late 1944 and early 1945,
many senior church officials helped organize a massive campaign
of refugee relief for millions of Catholics fleeing from Eastern
Europe. Once this was under way, few distinctions were made between
the Catholics responsible for the crimes against humanity committed
in the Axis states and those being persecuted simply for opposition
to the Soviets. The vast majority of the refugees who swept through
Rome in the wake of the war had left their homelands for reasons
that had nothing to do with war crimes, obviously; they had simply
been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the German or Soviet
armies had stormed through their villages.
At the same time, however, these refugee routes became the
most important pipelines out of Europe for Nazis and collaborators
fleeing war crimes charges. Factions within the church that had
long been sympathetic to the Nazis' extreme anti-Communist stand
organized large-scale programs to facilitate the escapes of tens
of thousands of Nazis and collaborators from Germany, Austria,
Croatia, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and a number of other Eastern
I European states. The pivotal role of the church in the escape
of the l Nazis has been emphasized by Luftwaffe Colonel Hans Ulrich
Rudel, the highly decorated German air ace who became an international
spokesman for the neo-Nazi movement after the war. "One may
otherwise view Catholicism as one wishes. But what the Church,
especially certain towering personalities within the Church, undertook
in those years [immediately after the war] to save the best of
our nation, often from certain death, must never be forgotten!"
Colonel Rudel exclaimed in a speech at Kufstein in 1970. "In
Rome itself, the transit point of the escape routes, a vast amount
was done. With its own immense resources, the Church helped many
of us to go overseas. In this manner, in quiet and secrecy, the
demented victors' mad craving for revenge and retribution could
be effectively counteracted."
The Vatican's principal agencies for handling refugees were
a group of relief agencies in Rome that divided the assistance
work according to the nationality of the refugee. Lithuanians
went to see Reverend Jatulevicius at No. 6 on the Via Lucullo,
for example, while Padre Gallov at 33 Via del Parione aided Hungarians
and Monsignors Dragonovic and Magjerec at the Istituto di St.
Jeronimus were in charge of Croatian relief, and so forth.
p179
According to a top secret U.S. State Department intelligence report
of May 1947, "the Vatican ... is the largest single organization
involved in the illegal movement of emigrants . . . [and] the
justification . . . for its participation in this illegal traffic
is simply the propagation of the Faith. It is the Vatican's desire
to assist any person, regardless of nationality or political beliefs,
as long as that person can prove himself to be a Catholic."
The classified study confirmed that Nazis and their collaborators
were not excluded from the effort: "[I]n those Latin American
countries where the [Catholic] Church is a controlling or dominating
factor, the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted
in the foreign missions of those countries taking an attitude
almost favoring the entry into their country of former Nazis and
former Fascists or other political groups, so long as they are
anti-Communist. That, in fact, is the practice in effect in the
Latin American Consulates and Missions in Rome at the present
time."
Blowback
- CSimpson
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