THE RATLINES
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rator general of the Catholic Order of German Knights. On May 1, 1933, in a Nazi-sanctioned celebration of the pagan Walpurgis holiday, Hudal made a particularly impassioned speech in Rome before assembled Church and Nazi leaders as well as the expatriate German community. βGerman unity is my strength, my strength is German might,β he told the crowd. It was, in fact, a Franciscan friar serving under Bishop Hudal who helped arrange a Red Cross passport and visa to Argentina in 1950 for Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann, the exterminator of Jews who had managed to slip away from American captors at the end of the war. Bishop Hudal, in his later memoirs, thanked God he was able to help so many escape with false identity papers. Many of these βfalse identity papersβ were documents issued by the Commissione Pontificia dβAssistenza, or the Vatican Refugee Organization. While not full passports themselves, these Vatican identity papers were used to obtain a Displaced Person passport from the International Red Cross, which, in turn, was used to gain a visa. Supposedly, the Red Cross checked the backgrounds of applicants, but usually it was sufficient to have the word of a priest or a bishop. This method of aiding escaping Nazisβthe one favored by Bishop Hudalβcame to be known as the βVatican ratlines.β For example, Ante Pavelic, the wartime pro-Nazi fascist dictator of Croatia, who was given a private audience with Pope Pius XII shortly after taking power in 1941, escaped to South America after the war with a Red Cross passport gained through a Vatican document.
O NE OF THE countries in which the Auslandsorganisation worked with particular success was Argentina. βThere it has been able to operate without any disguise or front. All of the more than 200,000 Argentine Nazis are members, not of an Argentine suborganization of the Nazi Party, but of the German Party itself, and hold membership cards signed by Robert Ley, leader of the German Workersβ Frontβwhich means, quite obviously, that Berlin considered, and still considers, Argentina not so much an independent foreign country as a German Gau [district],β noted Curt Reiss.