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.”
Vatican is a mafia given carte blanch by Mussolini to be tax free and with no accountability initially to stem the tide of communism in Italy pre WWII. Vatican is largest land owner and infrastructure owner and corporate owner in Italy. All assets are in off shore accounts. Helped develop Operation Gladio with CIA post WW II and still supports this mission in many countries today.
Read the work of Paul Williams to understand the venality and pure evil of the so called Church.
The Vatican will never release the information you cite. Purpose of the Vatican is world power in league with WEF. Humanitarianism is just a pose a ruse to deceive the unread masses into submission.
With the billions in its bank the Vatican has the potential to do great good but chooses to be in league with evil.
Look at Pope Francis’s actions in Argentina and how he sold out the liberation priests to the powers that ruled there. He has not changed his ways but was raised to the papacy because of his allegiance to power. Mussolini sealed the fate of the church by giving it unlimited power in perpetuity. Power corrupts and the church is no exception how else would it have survived all these centuries
In the interests of accuracy, it was alleged in 1946 that 200 million francs, not dollars, in gold were deposited in the Vatican bank from the Croatian regime, by a single, uncoroborated source.
This deposit would only be recorded in the archives of the Vatican bank if it had actually happened. Therefore turning over archives which did not show this deposit would only produce further allegations of falsified records.
Supposing this money existed and had remained in the Croatian national bank, it would have been likely to be appropriated by Tito's communist regime.
I would have see some evidence of this money moving from Croatia via Rome to South America to give this story any credence. Where are the Croatian records of this money? Where is the property purchased with it?
There are plenty of real scandals in history to write about before we resort to speculation.
Part of Chapter 12, "The Ratline," from my book God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican. This is a copy of the text from Kindle, but does not include the source notes, although you will see the numbers to those notes:
[[["As the war ended, the flow of suspect gold turned from a trickle to a flood. The Vatican did nothing to discourage it. U.S. intelligence had early reports after the formal truce that Ustašan leader Ante Pavelić and many of his henchmen had fled blood-soaked Croatia only after looting most of Zagreb’s banks, the Croatian state mint, and the National Bank.5 An American intelligence memo reported the Ustašan fugitives had stolen about 350 million Swiss francs of gold, most of it coins. In the weeks after the war, British troops seized about 150 million of the plunder at the Swiss-Austrian border.I The other 200 million (the 2014 equivalent of $530 million) entered the Vatican “for safe-keeping,” with unconfirmed rumors that it had “been sent to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican’s ‘pipeline.’ ”7 Giving credence to the possibility that the gold had been transferred to South America was a separate U.S. intelligence report. It concluded that German companies and banks such as the IOR may have moved upward of a stunning $450 million to Argentina.8 Emerson Bigelow, the investigating agent, suspected the Vatican was still somehow involved. He noted that the stories of the transfer to other countries might “merely [be] a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”9
William Gowen, a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officer based in Rome, monitored the Vatican to see if he could develop leads on Pavelić’s whereabouts.10 Gowen was one of the CIC’s best agents. A former Ustašan colonel told Gowen that in 1946 up to ten truckloads packed with gold traveled from Switzerland to Rome, where the precious metal was unloaded at the College of San Girolamo degli Illirici, the Croatian seminary, only a mile from the Vatican. The convoy reportedly arrived with Vatican license plates, accompanied by some men wearing stolen British military uniforms and others dressed as priests.11
Although several U.S. intelligence reports differ about the amount of gold that arrived in Rome, they agreed on a critical issue: any looted precious metal that came from Croatia ended eventually with an Ustašan Croatian priest, Krunoslav Draganović. When Gowen later interviewed Draganović, the priest admitted that the looted gold convoy had arrived in Rome under the control of an Ustašan lieutenant colonel.12
During the war Draganović had been a senior official of the Ustašan commission dedicated to the forced conversion of Serbs.13 In 1943, Pavelić had dispatched him to Rome as the secretary of San Girolamo. In addition to being a school for Croatian seminarians, San Girolamo was the center of Ustašan intelligence operations in Rome.14 Draganović was the highest-ranking Ustašan cleric in Rome and he was informally liaison to the Vatican. He cultivated connections with both Italian and Vatican intelligence agents.15
Josip Broz Tito and his communist rebels had come to power in a unified Yugoslavia a month before the war ended. Without a church-friendly government in Belgrade, the Vatican appointed Draganović as the Apostolic Visitator for Pontifical Assistance for Croatians. That made him a Vatican official who reported directly to Monsignor Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI) in the Secretary of State’s office.16 Draganović met frequently with Montini, and the Vatican’s Pontifical Assistance Commission ensured that the Croatian had plenty of identity papers.17 When Montini learned that Gowen was snooping around looking for Pavelić and also asking about the Monsignor’s own connections to Draganović, Montini complained to Angleton about the nosy American CIC officer. The result was a CIC order by which Gowen’s team was told “hands off” when it came to Pavelić and the Croatian priests.18
An American Foreign Service officer privately told Gowen that his probe was ordered closed because he had “violated Vatican extraterritoriality.”19 (Much later, when Gowen learned that his operation was shut down the same month that Draganović began helping U.S. intelligence, Gowen came to believe that Angleton had engineered it all as a favor to Montini).20
Despite that directive, Gowen continued accumulating intelligence. He eventually concluded that Draganović had turned the Croatian gold and other loot over to the Vatican Bank, even driving some of it in a convoy to St. Peter’s Square.21 Before he shut down his probe, Gowen had interviewed not only Draganović but also half a dozen other top Ustašan officials. The IOR, he concluded, had accepted the Croatian gold since the church classified it conveniently as “a contribution from a religious organization,” and then hid its existence by “convert[ing] this without creating a record.”22
At the same time U.S. intelligence was trying to determine if the Ustašan gold might still be inside the Vatican, it also was probing whether the church had received gold of questionable provenance from a prominent Italian family. Dr. Francesco Saverio Petacci had been Pius XI’s personal physician. Petacci’s daughter, Clara, was Mussolini’s longtime mistress. And Petacci’s son, Marcello, was a fascist official who was murdered in 1945 as he tried crossing into Switzerland with crates of cash (neither the killer nor the money was ever found). Allied investigators discovered that Marcello had been the middleman brokering large deals between foreign companies and Mussolini’s fascist state. The younger Petacci had earned commissions in Spain alone that totaled a then staggering 50 million pesetas (the 2014 equivalent of $340 million).23 A substantial amount of gold that Petacci had evidently accumulated was missing. American investigators followed leads to Spain to see if the family had moved the gold there, but determined it was “not likely.” Instead, Vincent La Vista, a senior Rome-based officer in the U.S. Division of Foreign Activity Correlation, concluded, “if the Petacci family had any vast hoard of gold, it would have been, and in all probability is, put away for safekeeping in Vatican City.”24 La Vista directed Operation Safehaven, the ambitious U.S. multiagency effort to retrieve looted assets. He ran into a solid roadblock of noncooperation when he tried pushing his inquiry. An informant told him why: “Petacci had, and still has, very dear and close friends high in the inner councils of the Vatican. . . . He is personally held in very high regard by influential personages close to the Holy See.”25 La Vista closed the Petacci investigation without any resolution about the missing gold.]]]
Thanks for the additional detail, but I see only rumour here. If the Croatian gold was already in Switzerland in 1946 it was out of Tito's hands. Why take the risk of moving it from Switzerland to a seminary outside the Vatican if it was destined for the Vatican bank? The number plates only suggest the Vatican owned the trucks, not that it was hiding the gold.
Switzerland in one account. An early detailed accounting about the Ustaša looting of gold reserves is a January 1946 intelligence report from James Jesus Angleton. He reported that Ustašan fugitives had fled into Austria with two crates of gold.
There are many unproductive investigative leads on the gold. And, whatever happened to it is unlikely to be definitively resolved 80 years later. However, the Vatican Bank is the one central bank of a small European sovereign that has not had its archives opened to inspection. Even San Marino, Lichtenstein, and Monaco, have cooperated with investigators.
The Vatican, by the way, has steadfastly denied storing the looted gold. Maybe that is true but for now, we only have the word of a succession of bank officials. The records might be the better evidence.
I don't doubt that significant money was moved out of Croatia in the 1940s. The Italian surrender in 1943, when it became clear that Tito's partisans were likely to win the three-way war, would have signaled the impending end of private property for Croats. However Angleton was by all accounts mad, and not at all a reliable source. He lied for a living.
Some evidence of Croatian fascists living the high life in South America would help support your claims. Why wouldn't the German forces which occupied Croatia notice a large shipment of gold moving towards Rome, a city which was no longer under Axis control after 1943?
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.
Thank you!
Vatican is a mafia given carte blanch by Mussolini to be tax free and with no accountability initially to stem the tide of communism in Italy pre WWII. Vatican is largest land owner and infrastructure owner and corporate owner in Italy. All assets are in off shore accounts. Helped develop Operation Gladio with CIA post WW II and still supports this mission in many countries today.
Read the work of Paul Williams to understand the venality and pure evil of the so called Church.
The Vatican will never release the information you cite. Purpose of the Vatican is world power in league with WEF. Humanitarianism is just a pose a ruse to deceive the unread masses into submission.
With the billions in its bank the Vatican has the potential to do great good but chooses to be in league with evil.
Look at Pope Francis’s actions in Argentina and how he sold out the liberation priests to the powers that ruled there. He has not changed his ways but was raised to the papacy because of his allegiance to power. Mussolini sealed the fate of the church by giving it unlimited power in perpetuity. Power corrupts and the church is no exception how else would it have survived all these centuries
Well Trump is now President. So there’s another opportunity for a discussion on this very important topic.
The pope is despicably evil, no question about it. Same as it's always been.
In the interests of accuracy, it was alleged in 1946 that 200 million francs, not dollars, in gold were deposited in the Vatican bank from the Croatian regime, by a single, uncoroborated source.
This deposit would only be recorded in the archives of the Vatican bank if it had actually happened. Therefore turning over archives which did not show this deposit would only produce further allegations of falsified records.
Supposing this money existed and had remained in the Croatian national bank, it would have been likely to be appropriated by Tito's communist regime.
I would have see some evidence of this money moving from Croatia via Rome to South America to give this story any credence. Where are the Croatian records of this money? Where is the property purchased with it?
There are plenty of real scandals in history to write about before we resort to speculation.
Part of Chapter 12, "The Ratline," from my book God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican. This is a copy of the text from Kindle, but does not include the source notes, although you will see the numbers to those notes:
[[["As the war ended, the flow of suspect gold turned from a trickle to a flood. The Vatican did nothing to discourage it. U.S. intelligence had early reports after the formal truce that Ustašan leader Ante Pavelić and many of his henchmen had fled blood-soaked Croatia only after looting most of Zagreb’s banks, the Croatian state mint, and the National Bank.5 An American intelligence memo reported the Ustašan fugitives had stolen about 350 million Swiss francs of gold, most of it coins. In the weeks after the war, British troops seized about 150 million of the plunder at the Swiss-Austrian border.I The other 200 million (the 2014 equivalent of $530 million) entered the Vatican “for safe-keeping,” with unconfirmed rumors that it had “been sent to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican’s ‘pipeline.’ ”7 Giving credence to the possibility that the gold had been transferred to South America was a separate U.S. intelligence report. It concluded that German companies and banks such as the IOR may have moved upward of a stunning $450 million to Argentina.8 Emerson Bigelow, the investigating agent, suspected the Vatican was still somehow involved. He noted that the stories of the transfer to other countries might “merely [be] a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”9
William Gowen, a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officer based in Rome, monitored the Vatican to see if he could develop leads on Pavelić’s whereabouts.10 Gowen was one of the CIC’s best agents. A former Ustašan colonel told Gowen that in 1946 up to ten truckloads packed with gold traveled from Switzerland to Rome, where the precious metal was unloaded at the College of San Girolamo degli Illirici, the Croatian seminary, only a mile from the Vatican. The convoy reportedly arrived with Vatican license plates, accompanied by some men wearing stolen British military uniforms and others dressed as priests.11
Although several U.S. intelligence reports differ about the amount of gold that arrived in Rome, they agreed on a critical issue: any looted precious metal that came from Croatia ended eventually with an Ustašan Croatian priest, Krunoslav Draganović. When Gowen later interviewed Draganović, the priest admitted that the looted gold convoy had arrived in Rome under the control of an Ustašan lieutenant colonel.12
During the war Draganović had been a senior official of the Ustašan commission dedicated to the forced conversion of Serbs.13 In 1943, Pavelić had dispatched him to Rome as the secretary of San Girolamo. In addition to being a school for Croatian seminarians, San Girolamo was the center of Ustašan intelligence operations in Rome.14 Draganović was the highest-ranking Ustašan cleric in Rome and he was informally liaison to the Vatican. He cultivated connections with both Italian and Vatican intelligence agents.15
Josip Broz Tito and his communist rebels had come to power in a unified Yugoslavia a month before the war ended. Without a church-friendly government in Belgrade, the Vatican appointed Draganović as the Apostolic Visitator for Pontifical Assistance for Croatians. That made him a Vatican official who reported directly to Monsignor Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI) in the Secretary of State’s office.16 Draganović met frequently with Montini, and the Vatican’s Pontifical Assistance Commission ensured that the Croatian had plenty of identity papers.17 When Montini learned that Gowen was snooping around looking for Pavelić and also asking about the Monsignor’s own connections to Draganović, Montini complained to Angleton about the nosy American CIC officer. The result was a CIC order by which Gowen’s team was told “hands off” when it came to Pavelić and the Croatian priests.18
An American Foreign Service officer privately told Gowen that his probe was ordered closed because he had “violated Vatican extraterritoriality.”19 (Much later, when Gowen learned that his operation was shut down the same month that Draganović began helping U.S. intelligence, Gowen came to believe that Angleton had engineered it all as a favor to Montini).20
Despite that directive, Gowen continued accumulating intelligence. He eventually concluded that Draganović had turned the Croatian gold and other loot over to the Vatican Bank, even driving some of it in a convoy to St. Peter’s Square.21 Before he shut down his probe, Gowen had interviewed not only Draganović but also half a dozen other top Ustašan officials. The IOR, he concluded, had accepted the Croatian gold since the church classified it conveniently as “a contribution from a religious organization,” and then hid its existence by “convert[ing] this without creating a record.”22
At the same time U.S. intelligence was trying to determine if the Ustašan gold might still be inside the Vatican, it also was probing whether the church had received gold of questionable provenance from a prominent Italian family. Dr. Francesco Saverio Petacci had been Pius XI’s personal physician. Petacci’s daughter, Clara, was Mussolini’s longtime mistress. And Petacci’s son, Marcello, was a fascist official who was murdered in 1945 as he tried crossing into Switzerland with crates of cash (neither the killer nor the money was ever found). Allied investigators discovered that Marcello had been the middleman brokering large deals between foreign companies and Mussolini’s fascist state. The younger Petacci had earned commissions in Spain alone that totaled a then staggering 50 million pesetas (the 2014 equivalent of $340 million).23 A substantial amount of gold that Petacci had evidently accumulated was missing. American investigators followed leads to Spain to see if the family had moved the gold there, but determined it was “not likely.” Instead, Vincent La Vista, a senior Rome-based officer in the U.S. Division of Foreign Activity Correlation, concluded, “if the Petacci family had any vast hoard of gold, it would have been, and in all probability is, put away for safekeeping in Vatican City.”24 La Vista directed Operation Safehaven, the ambitious U.S. multiagency effort to retrieve looted assets. He ran into a solid roadblock of noncooperation when he tried pushing his inquiry. An informant told him why: “Petacci had, and still has, very dear and close friends high in the inner councils of the Vatican. . . . He is personally held in very high regard by influential personages close to the Holy See.”25 La Vista closed the Petacci investigation without any resolution about the missing gold.]]]
Thanks for the additional detail, but I see only rumour here. If the Croatian gold was already in Switzerland in 1946 it was out of Tito's hands. Why take the risk of moving it from Switzerland to a seminary outside the Vatican if it was destined for the Vatican bank? The number plates only suggest the Vatican owned the trucks, not that it was hiding the gold.
Switzerland in one account. An early detailed accounting about the Ustaša looting of gold reserves is a January 1946 intelligence report from James Jesus Angleton. He reported that Ustašan fugitives had fled into Austria with two crates of gold.
There are many unproductive investigative leads on the gold. And, whatever happened to it is unlikely to be definitively resolved 80 years later. However, the Vatican Bank is the one central bank of a small European sovereign that has not had its archives opened to inspection. Even San Marino, Lichtenstein, and Monaco, have cooperated with investigators.
The Vatican, by the way, has steadfastly denied storing the looted gold. Maybe that is true but for now, we only have the word of a succession of bank officials. The records might be the better evidence.
I don't doubt that significant money was moved out of Croatia in the 1940s. The Italian surrender in 1943, when it became clear that Tito's partisans were likely to win the three-way war, would have signaled the impending end of private property for Croats. However Angleton was by all accounts mad, and not at all a reliable source. He lied for a living.
Some evidence of Croatian fascists living the high life in South America would help support your claims. Why wouldn't the German forces which occupied Croatia notice a large shipment of gold moving towards Rome, a city which was no longer under Axis control after 1943?