New evidence of Roman Catholic Church protection of brutal Nazi puppet leaders in Croatia is bringing a U.S. government appeal for the opening of Vatican archives to Holocaust researchers.
A report by the State Department cites intelligence documents showing that leaders of the Ustasha, accused of exterminating more than 700,000 people in Croatian concentration camps, used Vatican ties to escape from Europe after World War II with a possible fortune in plundered gold.Researchers acknowledged, however, that they could not tie down reports that up to $80 million in gold - much of it from murdered Serbs, Gypsies and Jews - was kept by the Ustasha in Austria, Switzerland and the Vatican.
Vatican authorities told U.S. investigators they could find no records that shed light on the Ustasha and Nazi gold question, the report said. Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls dismissed the report. "I don't have anything to add to what was said in the past," he said, referring to past denials by the Vatican.
While no evidence has been found that Pope Pius XII or his advisers were directly implicated in covert activities of the Ustasha in Italy, "it seems unlikely that they were entirely unaware of what was going on," the report concluded.
The account of a possible Vatican link in the protection of Ustasha leaders and their fortune is part of the second U.S. report on Nazi gold, which focuses on how neutral nations like Sweden, Portugal, Spain and Turkey provided Germany with materials for weapons and goods during World War II.
"A full accounting should be made now to achieve a complete understanding of these issues," Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizen-stat said, referring to what the report said is an "imperfect understanding of the fate of the wartime Ustasha treasury." He called for the opening of Vatican, Croatian and Serbian archives.
Eizenstat said Vatican officials told him such a search would be difficult.
But the report concluded: "A full accounting of the events of the Ustasha period in Croatia and the postwar flight of its leaders, funded to some extent by the remains of the Ustasha treasury, has to be found in the archives of other nations and possibly the Vatican."
Last year, the Vatican dismissed a report, based on U.S. intelligence documents, that said 200 million Swiss francs (about $47 million) "was originally held in the Vatican" before being moved to Spain and Argentina.
That allegation also was cited in the new report, but it said some of the intelligence estimates of the extent of Ustasha gold kept in post-war Europe are "uncorroborated and speculative."
The report noted that ruler Ante Pavelic, in an alleged 1947 interview cited by U.S. intelligence, claimed the exiled Ustasha had no more than $25,000 in all of Italy.
The report cited documents alluding to $5 million to $6 million in Ustasha gold entering British-occupied Austria, where Pavelic and 1,500 Ustashas were reported held for a time.