Chapter14
THE USA AND VATICAN SECRET CAMPAIGN TO RESCUE WAR CRIMINALS
While Vatican City and its many extraterritorial buildings in Rome turned into the protective semi-official refuge for hundreds of war criminals, the USA's State Department became busy integrating many of them within its multi-varied branched subterranean machinery, operating outside official officialdom. The operations, although secretive, eventually became known. The immediate result was increasing opposition to them all. Because of this, thousands of fleeing war criminals were diverted hastily to South American countries, with the connivance of the secret services of the USA. Many were helped to enter the USA itself and to settle there, under different names and phony identities.The State Department and the Secret Services tried to minimize the disclosures which meanwhile had begun to leak ever more frequently via the media to a shocked postwar world. To millions of war veterans and war victims of both continents, the whole policy of protection of war criminals became offensive. It was repudiated and condemned by all, with few exceptions. The spearhead of such universal condemnation were the Jews. The disclosure of the Nazi concentration camps had shocked the world and, of course, world Judaism. The European Jews, many of whom had emigrated into the USA, were certainly not going to accept the ambiguous form of American Catholic appeasement towards their former tormentors. The decades of the Fascist nightmare were still too vivid to be forgotten, forgiven, or to be relegated to past history.
The terrorized and wounded Jewish soul thirsted for prompt merciless revenge. This became encapsulated into the atavistic slogan of "an eye for an eye." The experience of the concentration camps, and many of their survivors, maximized the slogan into "one thousand Arian-Christian-Nazi eyes for one Jewish eye." Their thirst for revenge, far from remaining encapsulated into a mere verbal blood curdling rhetorical Biblical quotation, became their solid menacing policy from the very beginning. It helped to shape the policies of the postwar world, even before the Second World War had ended. This was done via the activities of the Jewish Lobby in Washington. A presence which no State Department, Secret Service, political party, or even American President would ignore at their own peril.
The emergence of Israel as the Messianic fulfillment of the Judaic dream, in addition to adding tangible religious dimension to World Judaism outside America, made the American Jews the most pervasive ethnic influence of America. This was so since American Judaism, like American Catholicism, having penetrated both political parties, could affect the policies of any USA administration. The Jewish campaign, conducted with hammering persistence via a national media, a large proportion of which was controlled by Jewish interests, affected the policy of the USA. The operations directed at helping and recruiting war criminals were curtailed. Discretion became the watchword of both the State Department and the U.S. Secret Service. The more so, since the Jews set out to hunt war criminals, wherever and whenever they could, often with striking results, independently of them both.
At the Vatican the campaign had been most unwelcome, the more so since the Jews had openly condemned the Pope, not only for not having helped them during the Hitlerite terror, but also for having been pro-Nazi. The Vatican, however, resented the Jewish campaign because of its long-range political implications. That is, it was imperiling the secret joint Vatican-USA preparation for an anti-Russian crusade, to be eventually identified with the Cold War. Because of this Jewish interference with their plans, the Vatican and the State Department then formulated a joint, most secretive promotional campaign of recruitment, whose watchword became "immense prudence." The new policy permitted their recruitment to operate, as in the past, with efficiency and with impunity, notwithstanding Jewish vigilance.
The Vatican-USA new campaign soon became identified with the passing of a massive promulgation of equivocal legislation meant to deal with all kinds of information connected with recent and current recruitment and protection of war criminals. Legislative measures, thus once law, closed the door for good to any curious or mischievous investigator.
The result of such bolting of the door with legal nails was that identification of war criminals, already in the USA or about to arrive there, became even more difficult. Even more significant, it became a protective legal umbrella under which potential and real war criminals could take cover and avoid detection. The task of having them identified and arrested became almost an impossible one, protected as they were by obscure official specifications. Many of these never saw even the light. In fact, hundreds became so secret that none, with the exception of certain military or intelligence mandarins, could ever lay their hands on them. Most of such documents, that is those dealing with war criminals, were declared "classified," that is, they were made inaccessible to anybody except the USA Intelligence.
As the years and the decades went by, however, such "classification" became "declassified." "Declassification" revealed what had been suspected all the time, namely that the USA and the Vatican had helped and indeed had "shipped" thousands of war criminals to Australia, Latin America and indeed to the USA and Canada, even before the war had ended.
"Declassification," although helpful, nevertheless continued to be obstructed by rigid legislation which permitted only a glimpse of light to be seen as the time limit expired. As it happened during a news conference, in May 1986, for instance when USA Army Counter-intelligence Corps documents were "declassified" and interpreted.[1]
The spokesman, who had been tracing U.S. government involvement in helping Nazi war criminals for seven years, said that investigation of war criminals conducted by the USA after the War, "had been a joke."
As of May, 1986 there were probably 6,500 of an estimated 10,000 Nazi collaborators who had been assisted by the pro-war criminals organization, still living in the U.S.
According to The Times of London. "The U.S. had classified the documents until now in order to protect allied governments and the Vatican from the embarrassing revelations in them", it said.
"They showed that the intelligence agencies of France and Britain, immediately after the war, revived a former Nazi organization, called Intermarium, he said. The organization was formed originally by a Russian tsarist general shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in order to fight communism.
"The intelligence agencies of France, Britain, Australia, Canada, Austria, West Germany, and Italy, as well as high Vatican officials, had then become involved in recruiting former Nazi war criminals for the organization. They rearmed and funded them while helping them to emigrate, Mr. Loftus said.
"The central governments of these countries apparently did not know about their intelligence agencies' activities.
"The U.S. Army Counter-intelligence Corps found out about the allied involvement in 1947, and the U.S. decided to get involved itself and to keep the entire operation secret." [2]
Intermarium was only one of the many organizations meant to help war criminals. The U.S. Intelligence had at least a dozen, several of which are still in operational use. Many of them are disguised under equivocal names. The Vatican, however, was the senior partner since it had the multiplicity of such agencies. This was so because it had the advantage of the Catholic Church, which permitted the Vatican to apparel its organizations under the disguise of religion. The result was that it became practically impossible to track down their identity or nature of operations, whether they had been classified, or declassified. The efforts would have stirred up a hornet's nest in the American Catholic World. A hornet's nest, which even the American Jews had considered prudent not to disturb. Such religious or semi-religious organizations are still dispensing what amounts to war pensions to elderly war criminals, or to their families, under the disguise of charitable bodies. The official exchange of USA-Vatican ambassadors, in 1984, dealt with the problem to the satisfaction of both parties. This is one of the many secret items of which the U.S. public knows nothing.
1. The Times, London,
December 5, 1986. Also UPI, Rockland, Massachusetts, 11 May, 1986
- about USA war documents, declassified before Christmas 1985. [Back]
2. Declarations of one John
Loftus, UPI, May 15, 1986.[Back]
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