Mark Aarons and John Loftus
Heinemann, London, 1991, £16.99
Mark Aarons, author of Sanctuary! Nazi Fugitives in Australia, was largely responsible for convincing the Australian government to reopen their war crimes investigations; John Loftus, author of The Belarus Secret is a former attorney for the US Justice Department Office of Special Investigations who investigated the activities and war crimes of Byelorussian Nazi collaborators. In Ratlines they describe, in considerable detail, how the Vatican established a network for smuggling Nazi war criminals and East European collaborators out of Europe, mainly to Argentina; and how Britain, and, later, the United States recruited many of them as “freedom fighters’, spies and saboteurs. They also describe how the Soviets were able to infiltrate many of the anti-communist organisations who were ostensibly working for Western intelligence.
At the end of World War II, the American, British and French zones of Austria and Germany, as well as northern Italy, were teeming with Displaced Persons. Most of them were former slave workers, inmates of Nazi concentration camps and ordinary people whose countries were, by then, under Soviet control and did not wish to return. Many were Catholics. But among these people, however, were many Nazis and collaborators from the Baltic states, Byelorussia, Ukraine and Croatia. They had to get away — and as far and as fast as possible. The authors mention the popular Nazi-smugglers ODESSA and Die Spinne and other lesser known groups, but compared to the Vatican these were mere amateurs. The (Catholic) Croatian Ustashi were the first to be protected by the Vatican. Although Britain and the United States had apparently decided that Ustashi war-time atrocities against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were so horrific that all known members would be handed over to Tito, this was never actually implemented.
A Father Dragonovic was the key man in setting up the Ratlines. Although well-known to Western diplomats as a fanatical Ustashi, Allied intelligence gave him carte blanche: the Americans gave him US travel documents and the use of one of their cars. He made contact with Ustashi leaders in Northern Italy and on the Austrian-Yugoslav borders, as well as with pro-Ustashi priests who organised the Ratlines. The smuggling operation began in Austria. False identity cards issued to fugitive Ustashi war criminals were printed at the Franciscan printing press in Rome. Both the US Counter Intelligence Corps CIC) and Britain’s military intelligence knew what was happening. Indeed, CIC agent Robert Mudd had a spy within Dragonovic’s organisation. The CIC arranged a burglary of Dragonovic’s office and photographed his records. Mudd concluded that “all this activity stems from the Vatican’.
Aarons and Loftus, however, demonstrate that Father Dragonovic, together with quite a lot of supposed anti-communist activists working for the Vatican and Western intelligence, were not quite what they seemed to be. Many of them served two, and sometimes three or more masters. In 1967 Dragonovic, the man who knew everything about the Vatican’s ratlines, suddenly disappeared from the Vatican and turned up in Yugoslavia, where he gave a press conference in which he praised Tito and his government, and settled quietly in Sarajevo. The authors also detail the activities of Prince Anton Vasilevich Turkul, a Russian nobleman who was a leader of numerous anti-Bolshevik and anti-communist organisations. He is now known to have been probably the Soviets’ most successful double agent, fooling the Germans, the British, the American and, of course, the Vatican.
To me the most interesting section of Ratlines is the account of how the Vatican, with considerable assistance from the British, saved what the authors call “The Catholic Army of the Ukraine’; or, to give them their correct title, Waffen Grenadier Division der SS (Galizien). As Nazi Germany collapsed, the Galizien SS made for Austria and surrendered to the British Army. The outfit changed its name to the Ukrainian National Army, removed all its insignia and German SS officers, and acquired a new Ukrainian commander, “General’ Pavel Shandruk. The British did not put them in a POW cage, but actually gave them some additional weapons and sent them to Rimini in Italy, to camp 374, for “Separated Enemy Personnel’. Some of the Ukrainians fell into American hands, and a few were sent on to the Soviets. One or two were discovered with distinctive SS tattoo marks. The Catholic Church did all it could to save what it called these “poor refugees’: Bishop Ivan Bucko, with help from the Pope, acted on their behalf in much the same way as Father Dragonovic did with the Croatian Ustashi.
After “basking in the sun’ in Italy for two years, the British arranged for the 8,000 members of the Galizien SS to move to Britain. Then, with more help from influential Catholics in Britain and Canada, most of them were sent to Australia and Canada. Only 200 were actually screened before moving from Italy and becoming “poor refugees’. Just how many of them were war criminals nobody knew — or cared. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West had begun in earnest and many Ukrainians were soon to become anti-communist “freedom fighters’. Some were sent by both Britain and the United States into Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland as agents and would-be saboteurs. Most were immediately captured, partly — but not exclusively — through the activities of Kim Philby.
The authors have chapters on “The Philby Connection’ and Klaus Barbie and the “American connection’, but, largely rehashing the work of Costello, Cave Brown, Pincher, David Martin, Thomas Powers et al, these are unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, whether or not one agrees with the authors’ political judgements, they are to be congratulated on uncovering a lot of new information on the departure from Europe of thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators, and the recruitment of some of them as “freedom fighters’ against the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.
Peter E. Newell.