Ratlines (World War II)
These escape routes mainly led toward havens in the Americas, particularly in Argentina, though also in Paraguay, Colombia,[1] Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Switzerland.
[6] While consensus among Western scholars is that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler died by suicide in 1945, in the late 1940s and 1950s the U.S. investigated claims that he survived and fled to South America.
[7] As early as 1942, the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Maglione – evidently at the behest of Pope Pius XII – contacted an ambassador of Argentina regarding that country's willingness to accept European Catholic immigrants in a timely manner, allowing them to live and work.
[8] Anton Weber, a German priest who headed the Roman branch of Saint Raphael's Society [de], travelled to Portugal with intentions to continue to Argentina, seemingly to lay the groundwork for Catholic immigration.
[16] In his memoirs, Hudal said of his actions, "I thank God that He [allowed me] to visit and comfort many victims in their prisons and concentration camps and to help them escape with false identity papers.
All these experiences were the reason why I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my whole charitable work mainly to former National Socialists and Fascists, especially to so-called 'war criminals'.According to Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Hudal was the first Catholic priest to dedicate himself to establishing escape routes.
[18] They claim that Hudal helped the Nazi fugitives with money, and more importantly with false identity documents from the Vatican Refugee Organisation (Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza).
[citation needed] A small but influential network of Croatian priests, members of the Franciscan order, led by Father Krunoslav Draganović, organised a highly sophisticated ratline with headquarters at the San Girolamo degli Illirici Seminary College in Rome, with links from Austria an embarcation point in Genoa.
[21] A US State Department report of 12 July 1946 listed nine war criminals, including Albanians and Montenegrins as well as Croats, plus others "not actually sheltered" at San Girolamo Seminary who "enjoy Church support and protection".
[22] In February 1947, CIC Special Agent Robert Clayton Mudd reported ten members of Pavelić's Ustaše cabinet living either in San Girolamo or in the Vatican itself.
[23] He concluded that: DRAGANOVIC's sponsorship of these Croat Ustashes definitely links him up with the plan of the Vatican to shield these ex-Ustasha nationalists until such time as they are able to procure for them the proper documents to enable them to go to South America.
[citation needed] On 18 January 1946, Bishop Antonio Caggiano, leader of the Argentine chapter of Catholic Action, flew to Rome to be consecrated as cardinal by Pius XII.
[27][10] Over the spring of 1946, a number of French war criminals, fascists and Vichy officials made it from Italy to Argentina in the same way; they were issued passports by the Rome ICRC office, which were then stamped with Argentine tourist visas.
[28] Shortly after this Argentinian Nazi smuggling became institutionalised, according to Goñi, when Perón's new government of February 1946 appointed anthropologist Santiago Peralta as Immigration Commissioner and former Ribbentrop agent Ludwig Freude as his intelligence chief.
[30] Through the safehouse routes, the resistance movement transported Finnish Nazis and fascists, officers and intelligence personnel, Estonian and East Karelian refugees and German citizens out of the country.
[31][30] In 2014, over 700 FBI documents were declassified (as part of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act), revealing that the US government had undertaken an investigation in the late 1940s and 1950s as to reports of the possible escape of Adolf Hitler from Germany, as had been suggested by the Soviet Union after capturing Berlin.
The CIA report states that the agency was not "in a position to give an intelligent evaluation of the information" and that "enormous efforts could be expended ... with remote possibilities of establishing anything concrete", so the investigation was dropped.
