Shimon Samuels, the head of international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre - which has brought numerous former Nazi criminals to book - also said that Pius XII, who was Pope during the Second World War, had "sold the soul of the Church to the Nazi Devil"...
Mr Samuels said the seminar on Judaism was an "incestuous exercise" behind closed doors to which "not a single Jew has been invited". He said the only way to "come to terms with the past" was to open up the Vatican archives "to shed light on what really happened during the war years". He said he had asked the Pope to open the files, but Vatican officials had told him there were "no plans to do so"...
Jewish groups have long maintained that Vatican officials helped former Nazi officers to flee to Latin America and that Catholic monasteries and convents gave them refuge. It was alleged during the trial in Rome this year of Erich Priebke, a former SS captain extradited from Argentina and convicted of a wartime massacre of 335 men and boys, that he had taken refuge in an Italian monastery at the end of the war before being spirited to Buenos Aires.
It has also been claimed that gold taken from Jews by the Fascist wartime regime in Croatia, a Catholic country, was transferred to the Vatican for safe-keeping, although the Vatican has denied this.
"I have personally seen documents in the Buenos Aires archives showing that Ante Pavelic, the Croat Fascist leader, arrived in Argentina dressed as a priest and carrying a certificate of safe conduct from the Vatican," Mr Samuels said.
He added that the fate of persecuted Jews - and of Jewish gold - was becoming clearer as the archives of the KGB, the Stasi, the Swiss banks and Argentina were all opened, but said: "The Vatican remains the missing link."