A Vow of Silence
Did gold stolen by Croatian fascists reach the Vatican?
Through the nightmare of World War II that would end with 56 members of her family perishing in concentration camps, there were two days that Eta Najfeld will never forget. The first was April 10, 1941, when Najfeld, a 25-year-old Jewish medical student, watched as exuberant crowds lined the streets of Zagreb to cheer the Ustashas--the ultranationalist fascist party that the Nazis had just installed at the helm of an "independent" Croatian state. The other was three months later, when a band of Ustasha soldiers burst into her family's shop, an elegant emporium stocked with Oriental rugs, English linens, and French silks. "They took everything," says Najfeld, now 82 and living in Belgrade.
As the Nazis and their allies sent millions of Jews and others to their deaths, they stole billions of dollars from their victims. In the postwar chaos, and the horror of their anguish, Najfeld and most other survivors cast from their mind any thought of recovering the property they had lost. Najfeld still worries that any talk about lost wealth will somehow diminish the enormity of the Holocaust.
But in recent months, new evidence has forced victims and accomplices alike to confront that nearly forgotten question: What happened to the loot? The Nazi plunder has been traced to banks in Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, and other neutral countries that were secretly helping the Nazis stash stolen gold or launder it to buy war materiel. One state after another has opened its archives and banking records to aid the search, with one glaring exception: the Vatican.
Last week, the Vatican issued an official statement calling for repentance over the failure of some church members to do enough to aid Jews during the war. But the statement did not mention the mounting calls for an inquiry into the Vatican's financial dealings with the Nazis and their allies. So far, the Vatican has flatly refused to allow investigators access to its archives, despite repeated pleas from several nations and from Jewish groups.
The Vatican's continuing secrecy means the evidence is incomplete, but already declassified documents from the archives of the United States and other nations suggest that--with the aid of Croatian Catholic priests--Ustasha plunder made its way from Croatia to Rome, and possibly to the Vatican itself. Some of the stolen wealth was used to help Croatian war criminals flee to South America.
"We make no charges against the Vatican, but we keep building a very damning picture," says Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress. "Because of their silence in the face of accumulated evidence, the failure to uncover the truth can only be laid at the doors of the Vatican."
Next month, a task force headed by Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat that is investigating the role of the neutral countries is expected to issue a report that raises questions about the Vatican's wartime financial dealings. Among the documents reviewed: a declassified 1944 intelligence report noting a transfer of funds, via a Swiss bank, from Berlin's Reichsbank to the Vatican. Although there may be innocent explanations for such dealings--church assets being moved out of Germany, perhaps--the discovery of similar transactions by Swiss banks led to revelations of a huge Nazi operation to launder stolen gold with the help of neutral countries.
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