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Chapter 14
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THE USA AND VATICAN SECRET CAMPAIGN TO
RESCUE WAR CRIMINALS
By Avro Manhattan |
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.
Footnotes
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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