Still Running Off at the Keyboard

VATICAN BANK AND FRANCISCAN ORDER IN COURT

Filed in the United States District Court, Northern District of California, the Institute and the International Union of Former Juvenile Prisoners of Fascism of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, the Republic of Serbian Krajina in Exile, Plaintiffs vs. the Vatican Bank aka Institute of Religious Works, and the Croatian Franciscan Order and Croatian Confraternity of the College of San Girolamo Degli Illirici, Defendants. The case was filed February 14, 2006, of all days.

Based on international law and the laws of the United States, the suit concerns the treatment of Holocaust Survivors by the regime known as The Independent State of Croatia under the authority of Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha Party, controlled by present day Croatia and parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia and militarily occupied sectors of the former Soviet Union. The charge is that the defendants concealed, hypothecated, converted, laundered, profited from, and retained a significant portion of the illegally looted wealth of the Ustasha Regime. In essence the Vatican Bank is being accused of confiscating the wealth of the Ustasha, wealth collected by confiscating the assets, including glasses and gold fillings, of Jews who were held in the Yugoslavian concentration camp during the war. It was through the Ratlines--those underground means of escape provided by the Vatican for Nazi war criminals--that the treasure is said to have been funneled out of Croatia and into the Vatican Bank. The story is not a pretty one. The 33 pages of the court document can be read here.

Information on the case is being provided at the website of the plaintiff's attorneys, including a press release dated August 5, 2006, headlined "Vatican Lawyers Claim Nazi Regime Violated No Law in Genocide of 500,000 Serbs, Jews, & Roma".

The basis of the claim is supposedly spelled out in a book by Mark Aarons and John Loftus titled UNHOLY TRINITY, pictured at the attorney's website. I've ordered it, but it has not yet arrived. According to Wikipedia, John Joseph Loftus "is an American author, a former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer. A graduate of Boston College and Suffolk University, he served in the US Department of Justice in 1977 and in 1979 joined their Office of Special Investigations, which was charged with prosecuting and deporting Nazi war criminals in the US."

Loftus is also the author or co-author of books on the Nazis, on espionage, and on the Jews, making Loftus' charges credible based upon his expertise. The organization behind the prosecution is Jewish, The Root and Branch Association, Ltd., Chairman Rabbi Yehoshua Friedman, Founder.

A more balanced picture of the events can be had by reading E. Michael Jones' book THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION, which demonstrates that this event took place during a time of war and that there was barbarity on both sides, as is inevitable during war. Jones writes:

Virtually all of the atrocity stories involing the Church's collaboration with the Ustasha are traceable to Franciscan priests. "Fra Satona," Father Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, the butcher of Jansenovac, the Ustasha concentration camp, was a Franciscan. The only question which remains to be clarified was whether he had been excommunicated at the time he committed the atrocities attributed to him. In the period following World War II, the Franciscans went from being avid supporters of the Ustasha to being the first religious group to join Dobri Pastir, the communist-sanctioned priest's association. When Archbishop Stepinac was serving his term in jail at hard labor for not collaborating with Tito, the Franciscans had already become members of Dobri Pastir and were eligible for government pensions. Pius XII was so enraged at the behavior of the Franciscans in Herzegovina that he wrote an order excommunicating them, a decision which, for whatever reason, never got promulgated.

Reports over just what happened in Siroki Brijeg [the Franciscan monastery] are still contested, like just about every other incident in recent Yugoslavian history, and still controversial because of the Franciscans' involvement in the alleged apparitions at Medjugorje... . In his pro-Medjugorje version of the incident, David Manuel claims that the Partisans' advance party murdered the 12 friars at the monastery and then put on their robes and deliberately fired on their own troops to defame the memory of the Franciscans as traitors. Richard West's account is less far-fetched and less flattering to the Franciscans. He claims that "the Franciscan Order played a leading role in the slaughter in Bosnia-Herzegovina" and that "the center of operations was the monastery at Siroki Brijeg, the Alma Mater of many leading Ustasha." One of the Siroki Brijeg alumni who had a leading role in the Ustasha government was Andrija Artukovic, head of the hated secret police. According to West, "the SS and Ustasha Franciscans fought side by side and literally to the last man to defend the monastery at Siroki Brijeg"... . Lending credence to West and refuting Manuel is a plaque at Siroki Brijeg commemorating the battle.

At the beginning of May, 1945, three months after the massacre at Siroki Brijeg, Josip Broz, now known as Tito, soon to be known as Marshall Tito, was in Belgrade anxiously awaiting news from the Slovenian border with Austria. Having declared himself ruler of Yugoslavia, where he had waged a moderately effective guerrilla war against the Nazi occupation forces and their Croatian collaborators, Tito told his lieutenant Milan Basta that the Croation refugees under no circumstances should be allowed to cross the border, and at that time Tito's Partisan bands, which the Allies regarded with increasing contempt and concern as bandits, murders, and thugs, were pressing northward for some final confrontation. The Partisans were bent on revenge not just against the Uatasha leadership, most of whom would escape anyway, but, in a pattern which would repeat itself tragically throughout the region, against the Croatian nation as well, which had picked up just about everything it could carry--man, woman, and child--and loaded it into horse drawn wagons or piled it on top of bicycles or packed it into suitcases and headed north, to Zagreb, to await its fate together.

The Ustasha army, a fully armed force of about 210,000 men, faced three options. They could take their stand in Zagreb and fight to the last man; they could retreat into the Croatian forests and wage a guerrilla campaign much as Tito had done, or they could retreat to the Austrian border, specifically to a town called Bleiburg, where they would surrender to the British forces.

They chose to surrender at Bleiburg, together with thousands of civilians who left with them in the hope of escaping the Communists. They were betrayed thanks to infiltration of the British intelligence service by the Communists. Thinking they were surrendering to the British and would be taken to POW camps in Austria, the Partisans and the peasants with them were herded back into Yugoslavia and slaughtered at Bleiberg. Jones writes:

Auschwitz at the height of Hitler's extermination campaign against the Jews in its grimly mechanized and efficient fashion claimed 6,000 victims a day. At its height, Bleiburg claimed twice as many victims a day. Following the British betrayal of the Croatians in mid-May, 15,000 men, women, and children a day were slaughtered in an orgy of killing that lasted over a month. If word had gotten out, the occurrences at Bleiburg would have jeopardized the Nuremberg trials, because everyone responsible for them, including the future British Prime Minister, should have been put on trial alongside Goering and the other Nazis. But word did not get out, at least not in the fashion that publicized the concentration camps run by the SS. ...

Bleiburg had convinced both the Vatican and the Americans that a fair trial for Ustasha refugees was impossible and that sending them back to Yugoslavia meant certain death for the innocent and the guilty alike. Incidents like Bleiburg and the subsequent squabble over the status of Trieste likewise convinced the West that Yugoslavia was an expansionist state with which war was imminent. As a result, people who knew the language and the terrain might be useful, no matter what their past sins. As a result, the policy of de-Nazification came to an abrupt halt. The Americans were no longer interested in prosecuting potential allies who might be of use in the upcoming war with Communism, but they couldn't very well embrace their former enemies openly, and so a clandestine modus operandi involving the Vatican and its refugee relocation services came into being, as the first halting steps in a joint-venture anti-Communist crusade.

"Both Washington and London," write Arons and Loftus, "had entered into arrangements with the Holy See to assist many Nazi collaborators to emigrate via [Croatian priest Fr. Krunoslav] Draganovic's smuggling system. The Vatican was cynically being used as a respectable cover for the West's own immoral conduct.

That smuggling system became known as the Ratlines, and it is those Ratlines that feature in the current trial going on in San Francisco that is attempting to recover the property of Jews who had the misfortune of being caught in the Yugoslavian trip.
The events are spelled out in more detail in the first Chapter of Jones' book. The above quotes were taken from pages 1-11.

The Croatian Franciscans have a history of ignoring Vatican directives that would appear to go back to the events associated with World War II. Is the Vatican culpable in the atrocities perpetrated on the Jewish inmates of the concentration camp in Yugoslavia? It would certainly seem to be debatable given evidence of the excommunication. But is that evidence available?

Jones adds a further detail pertinent to the trial:

In September 1967 [Father] Krunoslav Draganovic was reported missing in the Croatian emigre press, allegedly the victim of a kidnapping by the UDBA. The man who had helped so many other people disappear in the aftermath of World War II had now disappeared himself, in the aftermath of the Cold War, or at least the Vatican's involvement in it. The mystery surrounding Father Draganovic's disappearance was soon cleared up when it became clear that he was living in Zagreb, unmolested by the Yugoslavian government in spite of the role he had played in organizing the Ratlines. The clarification surrounding the mystery of his disappearance was followed by the more profound mystery surrounding the motivation for his departure and the motivation behind the Yugoslav government providing one of its major Cold War enemies with what amounted to political asylum. Almost from the moment his disappearance had been explained, rumors began circulating that Draganovic had been a double agent from the beginning. (Page 29)

Was the Vatican doublecrossed by a Croatian priest? The story of the Yugoslavian concentration camp and surrounding events is a complicated one. Perhaps this trial will sort it out, or perhaps this will be another attack on the Vatican and the Catholic Church by her enemies.