The Pope Gets a Free Pass on the Vatican's Holocaust Business Deals
President Biden canceled his trip to Italy and his meeting tomorrow with Pope Francis to focus on the federal response to the California wildfires.
The cancelled meeting is a missed opportunity for the second Catholic president in U.S. history to press the Pope to release the Vatican Bank’s World War II archives. Those documents hold the secrets about how the Catholic Church profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and the extent of its role as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds.
An organization of which I am a director, Antisemitism Watch, had joined with other groups in beseeching Mr. Biden to raise the Vatican Bank files with the 88-year-old Pope. Administration officials would not commit to putting it on the meeting’s schedule, nor did they say it was off limits. Biden would have had a chance to turn the meeting into a breakthrough on a dark chapter of history.
The Vatican has long stonewalled efforts to discover what is inside the Vatican Bank files. It has rejected for over a decade my requests for access. I wrote opinion pieces in 2015 in the Los Angeles Times (It’s High Time for Pope Francis to Open the Vatican Bank Files) and Washington Post (Open the Vatican’s Holocaust-era Archives), and the following year in The New York Times (How the Vatican Can Shed Light on the Holocaust) urging Pope Francis to release the secret wartime papers. At the time, the Vatican was the only European country that refused to open any of its Holocaust archives to independent historians. To his credit, in March 2020, Pope Francis finally opened the files about the church’s controversial wartime pope, Pius XII.
That fulfilled in part a promise Pope Francis had made in 2010, when he was the cardinal of Buenos Aires: “What you said about opening the archives relating to the Shoah [Holocaust] seems perfect to me. They should open them [the Holocaust files] and clarify everything. The objective has to be the truth.”
Pope Francis refused, however, to open the Vatican Bank files.
The Pope is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon in the Torrione di Nicoló V (Tower of Nicholas V). Pope Francis can order the release of the wartime Vatican Bank archives with with the speed and ease with which a U.S. president issues an executive order. That is easier said than done, however, in an institution with a well-deserved reputation for keeping files hidden sometimes for centuries. It took more than 400 years for the Church to release some of its Inquisition files and more than 700 years before it cleared the Knights Templar of a heresy charge and opened the trial records.
The Vatican Bank archives is more than a curiosity for historians. The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but it is unique among religions since it is a sovereign state. It declared itself neutral during World War II and after the war claimed it had never invested in Axis powers nor stored Nazi plunder. The Vatican was the only country that refused in 1997 to join the U.S. and a dozen other European nations in contributing to a Holocaust compensation fund for looted wartime assets.
It is not difficult to understand the church’s reluctance. In my 2020 history of the finances of the Vatican (God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican), I found company archives from German and Italian insurers — Alliance and Generali — that established the Vatican Bank had invested in both firms during the war. The Vatican made outsized profits when those insurers expropriated the cash values of the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps. After the war, when relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on those life insurance policies, they were turned away since they could not produce death certificates.
How much profit did the Vatican earn from the cancelled life insurance policies of Jews killed at Nazi death camps? The answer is inside the Vatican Bank archives.
Releasing the files will also resolve a mystery raised in a 1946 memo from a U.S. Treasury agent in which he reported that the Vatican Bank hid more than $200 million in gold stolen from the national bank of Nazi-allied Croatia. According to the Treasury memo, the Vatican had either smuggled the stolen gold to Spain or Argentina through its “pipeline” or used that story as a “smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].” What happened to that gold? Again, the Vatican Bank archives have the answer.
Releasing the Vatican Bank files would pay tribute to the families of victims of World War II who have for many decades demanded transparency and some semblance of justice. Instead, the cancelled meeting Mr. Biden and the Pope is a missed opportunity for long overdue accountability.
One good thing is that we all realize that Biden, who will be out of office in eleven days, is far too impaired to engage in the sort of moral suasion which may be necessary to secure the release of the files. I hope that the incoming Catholic vice president will be set to the task of doing it.
This is just sickening. My personal reaction is to be even more grateful for The Protestant Reformation as well as to be revolted by and contemptuous of the Vatican's corruption. Why does an image of Lucky Luciano hanging tough come to mind? The Church says that its primary aim is to make converts. Might it have more success in doing so if it were to release the information, apologize abjectly, then set about to pay reparations to descendants of the families who were looted?
I'm not smug. We Evangelicals have our black sheep, too. This keeps at least one independent journalist I know of well employed. Because we are decentralized, they are easier to catch, though, so there is that.
Excellent! Clearly this is frustrating because it’s an artificial dead end. It’s like bashing one’s head into the wall to get the Vatican to release the files with a Pope who definitely doesn’t want to release the files from the archive. The answers of ill gotten gains are in the Vatican Bank archives. They can continue to pretend that didn’t happen by denying access. IMHO The Pope knows.
Gerald Posner wrote of 2 examples. There are many more:
“How much profit did the Vatican earn from the cancelled life insurance policies of Jews killed at Nazi death camps? The answer is inside the Vatican Bank archives.”
Then there’s the “1946 memo from a U.S. Treasury Agent that reports that the Vatican Bank hid more than $200 million in gold stolen from the national bank of Nazi-allied Croatia. According to memo, the Vatican had either smuggled the stolen gold to Spain or Argentina through its “pipeline” or used that story as a “smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].” What happened to that gold? Again, the Vatican Bank archives have the answer.”
It’s all in the Vatican Bank archive.