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Dr. Jonathan Levy is licensed in California and the District of Columbia and has represented organizations and individuals in a variety of Holocaust and Second World War related lawsuits including banking, insurance, and slave labor matters. Jon is also a member of the International Criminal Bar in The Hague and has a PhD in Political Science. The link for the class action suit is here.
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By Dr. Jonathan Levy
May 16, 2007
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While the debate about proposed sainthood for Pius XII rages between the Vatican and its critics, a lawsuit pending since 1999 against the Vatican Bank and its ultimate disposition may prove the case for or against Pius.
The pending lawsuit, Alperin v. Vatican Bank (USDC ND CA No. C99-4941), filed in federal court in San Francisco and backed by a coalition of Serbian, Jewish, Roma and Ukrainian individuals and organizations seeks compensation for Axis plunder from Yugoslavia laundered through the Vatican Bank in 1946, well after the atrocities of the Second World War were revealed in full.
The funds in question were the proceeds of genocide by the Ustasha, Nazi allied Croatian forces, who murdered over 500,000 Jews, Serbs, and Roma in former Yugoslavia 1941-1945 and plundered their possessions. In addition to the money and gold in question, the Vatican also sheltered the top Ustasha leadership including wanted war criminals.
So far, testimony in the Alperin case by a former US Army counterintelligence agent, William Gowen, who investigated the Ustasha in Rome in 1947 for the US Army, has stopped short of directly implicating Pius, instead pointing to Montini, Pius' Undersecretary of State, who later became Pope Paul VI. According to the witness, a top Vatican official tasked with overseeing Croatian affairs in Rome, Monsignor Draganovic, who reported directly to Montini, admitted being the mastermind behind the smuggling and deposit of the Ustasha "treasure" at the Vatican bank.
To date, the Vatican attorneys have taken a hard line with the case, insisting that the Vatican Bank's money laundering scheme for Axis plunder violated no international law since the Ustasha's victims, mainly Orthodox Christian Serbs, were technically citizens of "Independent" Croatia. The unrepentant tone of the Vatican bodes poorly for Pius XII and the current controversy involving his elevation to sainthood.
While Jewish organizations like The Anti-Defamation League have concentrated on Pius' wartime record, the Vatican's sheltering of the perpetrators of genocide and their funds after the Second World War may be even more significant.
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