Report Summary: U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations With Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury.The Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury
The so-called independent state of Croatia, established on April 10, 1941, as part of the German conquest and dismemberment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was denounced by the U.S. Government. Throughout World War II, it was U.S. policy to avoid any action that might imply acknowledgment of the Croatian protectorate, and to support the guerrilla forces seeking to overthrow the German-backed regime.
The Fascist Ustasha political movement in power in wartime Croatia carried out a murderous campaign aimed at Serbs, Jews, and others. As many as 700,000 victims, mostly Serbs, may have died in the camps. The Ustasha Croat campaign started with the internment of 35,000 to 40,000 Croatian Jews in the spring and summer of 1941, followed by the deportation of remaining Jews to Germany in 1942 and 1943. Only a few thousand Croatian Jews escaped after first finding temporary sanctuary in the Italian portion of the Croatian protectorate.
The Ustasha regime in Croatia accumulated a treasury that apparently included valuables stolen from the dispossessed and deported Jewish and Sinti-Romani victims of the ethnic cleansing campaign. A variety of wartime and postwar U.S. intelligence reports confirm a Ustasha regime treasury of some size, but no authoritative quantification proved possible. Nor was it ever clear how much came from Croatian Jewish victims -- although one U.S. intelligence report speculated that it might be as much as $80 million in gold, mostly coins. Official and postwar information does confirm that the Croatian regime transferred gold to Switzerland toward the end of the War, and at least 980 kilograms of gold (worth about $1 million), taken by the Croat officials from the Sarajevo branch of the Yugoslav National Bank in 1941, was transferred to the Swiss National Bank in 1944. In July 1945 the Swiss National Bank returned the gold to the new Yugoslav Government.
After the Ustasha regime collapsed at the end of the War, its leader, Ante Pavelic, and some companions fled to the British zone of occupation of Austria from where, according to intelligence reports, he escaped or was released after surrendering some or all of a quantity of gold he had brought from Croatia. Intelligence reports vary widely in the amount of gold Pavelic brought -- $600,000, $5-$6 million, or even $35 million. None of the information on the amount or makeup of the gold Pavelic was carrying or turned over to the British, some of which has the quality of legend, has been confirmed. What is known is that no gold was reported by British authorities to have been recovered, and none was turned over to the Tripartite Gold Commission for restitution. Pavelic made his way to Rome, where he arrived in early 1946.
U.S. and British intelligence reports agree that the College of San Girolamo degli Illirici in Rome served as a place of refuge and support for the Croatian refugees. San Girolamo, which is located outside the walls of the Vatican and pays Italian State taxes, provided living quarters for Croatian priests studying at the Vatican. After the War, it was the reported center of an extensive and effective underground that assisted Ustasha fugitives, including Ante Pavelic, to flee from Europe to South America. Pavelic hid in Rome at various locations from 1946 until his flight to Argentina in November 1948 without any decisive action by the U.S. or British authorities to apprehend him and make him available for a war crimes trial.
A prime mover of the Ustasha activity in Rome was Father Krunoslav Dragonovic, secretary of the College of San Girolamo. Taking advantage of his contacts inside the International Red Cross, Dragonovic helped Ustasha fugitives emigrate illegally to South America by providing temporary shelter and false identity documents, and by arranging onward transport, primarily to Argentina. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps and the Ustashi collaborated in running a "rat line," an escape route for defectors or informants who had come to Austria from the Soviet zone of Germany or from Soviet bloc countries. In 1951 the anti-Communist informer and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie escaped to South America over the rat line. Some intelligence reports indicate that gold from the Ustasha treasury may have been used to finance the postwar underground activities involving Father Dragonovic at San Girolamo. There is no evidence in U.S. archives that the Vatican leadership knew of or gave support to the Ustasha activities outside its walls, but, given the location of the College, troubling questions remain.
The postwar fate of Croatian Ustasha fugitives, with or without portions of their wartime treasury, depended to a significant extent upon U.S. as well as British policies regarding Croatian Ustasha war criminals and escapees. In the first postwar months, U.S. and British policy was to turn over to the new Yugoslav Government of Marshal Tito anyone for whom the Yugoslavs could make a prima facie case of collaboration with the Nazis. This policy began to change in 1946 as the prisoner of war camps emptied. The standards for turning over Croatian prisoners of war steadily rose, and few were returned to Yugoslavia by late 1946. By May 1947 the U.S. Government became convinced that the Yugoslav Government was meting out unduly harsh treatment to its political enemies and perverting justice. U.S.-Yugoslav relations had cooled as a result of the Yugoslav regime's hostile actions, including harassment of U.S. Embassy personnel and accusations of espionage, the arrest and trial of Yugoslav employees of the Embassy on charges of espionage, attacks on unarmed U.S. aircraft over Yugoslavia, Yugoslav efforts to annex Trieste, and Yugoslav unwillingness to settle outstanding claims of American citizens for confiscated property. In addition, the U.S. and British intelligence services were relying increasingly on former Ustashi as sources of information and were consequently reluctant to antagonize these informants by extraditing their leaders to Yugoslavia. As a result, the policy of surrendering Ustashi was ended -- a policy with which the British concurred. Even when the Allies learned the precise location of Ante Pavelic, the leader of the murderous Ustashi regime, they refrained from taking any action to bring him to justice.
U.S. official records provide only an imperfect understanding of the fate of the Croatian Ustasha treasury and the uses to which it may have been put. Evidence presented by the Croatian delegation to the December 1997 London Conference on Nazi Gold gives encouragement that more can be learned from Croatian sources. The bizarre circumstances attending the movement of Croatian State gold to Switzerland during the War and the flight of Ustasha leaders to Austria at War's end as well as the underground activities of Ustasha priests in Rome give rise to the hope that more information on the fate of Croatian Ustasha gold, including any possible victim gold, may come from the records of the Swiss National Bank and the British occupation forces and intelligence organizations, as well as from the archives of the Vatican and the Croatian State Archives.