...The same article in the Paris daily, after inventing relations between Hitler and the Nuncio Pacelli, mentions an article in the Sunday Telegraph of July 1997 which accuses the Holy See of having used Nazi gold to help war criminals flee to Latin America, especially the Croat, Ante Pavelic: "Certain studies give credit to this theory". It is remarkable how easily journalists can be satisfied with documenting their own assertions. Historians, who often work for hours to check their references, would be envious of them. One can understand a journalist trusting a colleague, especially when the English title of the paper gives it an appearance of respectability. But there are still two assertions which deserve to be examined separately: that Nazi gold, or more precisely, Jewish gold stolen by the Nazis, was deposited in Vatican accounts, and that it was used to help Nazi war criminals escape to Latin America.

Indeed, certain American newspapers had produced a document from the Department of the Treasury in which the Department is informed that the Vatican had received Nazi gold of Jewish origin via Croatia. A "document from the Department of the Treasury" can sound impressive but one has to read below the headline and then one discovers that it is a note taken from the "communication of a trustworthy Roman informer". Anyone who takes such assertions as truth should read what Fr Graham wrote on the cleverness of Scatolini, an informer, who lived on information he invented and which he passed on to all the embassies, including that of the United States, which faithfully transmitted it to the State Department. In our research in the Secretariat of State's archives, we found no mention of gold stolen from Jews which was supposedly deposited in Vatican accounts. It is obviously the duty of those who make these assertions to supply documented proof, for example a receipt, which would not have remained in the Vatican archives, such as Pius XII's letters to Hitler. What is recorded instead is Pius XII's prompt intervention when the Jewish communities of Rome were subjected to blackmail by the SS, which demanded 50 kg. of gold from them; on that occasion the Chief Rabbi turned to the Pope to ask him for the 15 kg. they still needed, and Pius XII immediately gave orders to his officials to do what was necessary. Recent investigations have discovered nothing more.

Furthermore, the report of the Vatican supposedly helping Nazi criminals escape to Latin America is not new. We obviously cannot exclude the ingenuity of a Roman ecclesiastic who made use of his own position to facilitate the escape of a Nazi. The sympathies of Bishop Hudal, rector of the German national church, for the Great Reich, are well-known; but on this basis to imagine that the Vatican organized a large-scale flight of Nazis to Latin America means attributing a heroic charity to Roman ecclesiastics. In Rome the Nazi plans for the Church and the Holy See were well-known. Pius XII mentioned them in his address in the Consistory of 2 June 1945, recalling how the regime's persecution of the Church had been further aggravated by the war "when its supporters even entertained the illusion that, as soon as the military victory had been won, they would be done with the Church forever". Nevertheless, the authors to which our journalist refers have a somewhat elevated idea of the forgiveness of wrongs practiced in the Pope's circles, if they imagine that a number of Nazis were taken in by the Vatican, conducted to Argentina, protected by the dictatorship of Peron, and from there taken to Brazil, Chile and Paraguay, to save what could be saved of the Third Reich: a "Fourth Reich" would have been born on the pampas.