Pope Francis and the Dirty War

Hagiographies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio may soon obliterate what was written before the media created Pope Francis Superstar. This is an effort to preserve this information along with some background as to what took place during the Argentine dictatorship.

All European fascist governments and movements, except the latter German Nazis, were supported by the Catholic Church.

Austrian Bishop Hudal’s ratline concentrated on assisting highly-placed German and Austrian officers to escape post-war prosecution but others paid their way into the ratline. War criminals such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Franz Stangl, Alois Brunner and Walter Rauff sailed from Genoa to Barcelona and on to Buenos Aires. (Michael Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War)

Numerically, the largest ratline was operated by Vatican agent and Croatian Ustasha priest, Krunoslav Draganovic, and “reveals the direct involvement of Pope Pius XII himself,” according to Phayer. The Catholic Ustasha executed, tortured, starved, buried alive and burned to death 750,000 Croatian and Bosnian Serbs, Jews and Roma between 1941 and 1945 with the full knowledge of Pius XII. After the collapse of the Nazi-puppet Ustasha regime, Draganovic established escape routes for Croatian war criminals, mostly to South America.

Juan Peron, who had trained under Mussolini, came to power in Argentina in the spring of 1943 assisted by Fifth Column activity organized by SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg. In 1946, the archbishop of Freiburg told a U.S. military interrogator that he “considered the SS to be the most respectable of the Nazi Party organizations.” (Charles Higham, American Swastika: The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst from 1933 to the Present Day)

“The Vatican, naturally, backed Peron completely.” (Phayer)

Peron welcomed these war criminals to Argentina. “An American diplomat working in the Buenos Aires embassy wrote to the State Department deploring the fact that ‘the Vatican and Argentina [are conniving] to get guilty people to haven in latter country.’” (John Moors Cabot, June 11, 1947, cited by Phayer)  (more...)

Pope Francis and the Dirty War