Exposing Christianity

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah I better like the fact that many of the Nazi butchers who got away—Mengele, Eichmann, Bormann—got away thanks to an underground which shuttled them from one monastery to another and then smuggled them onto boats which took them to South America.
It was an underground operated by Franciscan priests and monks.

Sources, please.

The Franciscan monastery in Bolzano was also a well-known asylum address for ‘senior Nazis’. Adolf Eichmann enjoyed its hospitality for a few weeks. In the 1960s the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her report on the Eichmann trial, mentioned the new South Tyrolean identity of the Nazi perpetrator and the help of the Franciscan priest. The Franciscan monastery in Bolzano constantly sheltered guests in the first years after the war, often church members in transit. As a result, guests such as Eichmann did not stand out particularly.

Well you can find them in lots of places like memoirs of certain people and Nazi trials. For instance Simon Wiesenthal in his "Justice Not Vengeance: Memoirs" made these concise and telling remarks about escape assistance:
the most important escape route, the so-called ‘monastery route’ between Austria and Italy, came into being. Roman Catholic priests, especially Franciscans, helped [. . .] channel [. . .] fugitives from one monastery to the next, until they were received by the Caritas organisation in Rome. Best known was a monastery [. . .] in Rome, a monastery under the control of the Franciscans, which became a veritable transit camp for Nazi criminals. The man who organized this hideout was no less than a bishop and came from Graz: [. . .] Alois Hudal.

Or Eichmann wrote in his diaries about his escape:
For years [the priest] had helped all kinds of refugees. Once it had been Jews, now it was—Eichmann! I was most grateful to receive my suitcase from this excellent, cycling priest about a kilometre and a half behind the Italian border, and allowed myself the now traditional swig of alcohol to celebrate my success. This time it was a red, South Tyrolean wine! The priest directed me to a taxi-driver, who first took me to his flat. Here I left my Tyrolean costume and put on less conspicuous street clothes.
This was how Adolf Eichmann described his escape via the Brenner to Italy and the help given to him by a South Tyrolean priest in illegally crossing the border: the obscene and ruthless juxtaposition of ‘Jews—Eichmann’ that he made in his notes during his trial in Israel in 1961 needs no further comment. Eichmann’s South Tyrolean ‘taxi-driver’ first lodged the mass murderer in his house in Vipiteno for a few days. Eichmann then moved to the Franciscan monastery in the South Tyrol’s provincial capital of Bozen, where he stayed for a considerable time.
By way of confirmation, Eichmann’s application was signed by a Franciscan priest. This was Father Edward Dömöter of the PCA in Rome.

Bishop Alois Hudal was indeed one of the most crucial people in orchestrating Nazis to escape Europe working with Caritas and Red Cross that provided fake documents for these assholes. Hudal, like many dignitaries of the time, was fascinated by the rise of National Socialism. After the ‘seizure of power’ (Machtergreifung) by Hitler, whose ‘servant and herald abroad’ he planned to be, Hudal wanted to side entirely with the German cause. According to Hudal, the Church was a natural ally of Hitler’s Germany; it truly embodied the real ‘principle of leadership (Führerprinzip)’. While it would be easy to judge Hudal as singularly biased, one must remember that Hudal’s religious anti-Judaism was shared by large sections of the clergy at the time.
After the war Hudal had relief committee which became a contact point for many desperate homeless people, among them Nazi war criminals. The Assistenza Austriaca was based at the Anima church at 20 Via della Pace in Rome. Four to five Nazi refugees were always hiding with Hudal at the Anima. Their rooms were handily close to a secret passage leading to a tower and then to the church crypt. According to Hudal’s confidant Joseph Prader, it was an ‘ideal hiding place’. Most of the Anima employees didn’t know the precise background of the hidden individuals, but the identities of senior fascists, carabinieri officers, or SS men were hard to hide. Events at the Anima were an open secret in Rome. The Vatican had, at first, tolerated them in silence. On 4 April 1949 Giovanni Montini, on behalf of the Vatican’s Secretary of State, wrote to Hudal: ‘Most Reverend Excellency, I have the pleasant duty of passing on to your most reverend Excellency the sum of 30,000 lire, which please find enclosed, as an extraordinary support that the Holy Father is generously minded to give to the Austrians.’
He went on to inform Hudal that ‘the Pope blesses Hudal’s work’. The blessing was for his refugee relief, which indirectly included the Nazi refugees. Refugee relief focused on the acquisition of travel documents, for it was the most important precondition for flight. Even when people managed to get hold of an assurance of a visa and raise the money for the journey, without a travel document these preparations were entirely useless. But Hudal and the relief committees were easily able to help with the travel documents.
Bishop Hudal supplied numerous Nazi refugees with these coveted Red Cross papers. According to Gertrude Dupuis, the ICRC delegate in Rome, ‘it was relatively easy for [Hudal] to achieve this. You mustn’t forget, he was a bishop [. . .], and how could we deny the word of a priest?’ With the help of a national church relief committee and the receipt of a Red Cross travel document and food cards, the refugee could apply for a residence permit from the Italian authorities.

Hudal was not apologetic about his activities and pursued them with great diligence.
Given the openness with which Hudal conducted his escape aid, it is not surprising that others had knowledge of the extent of his assistance. Joseph Prader, then a church secretary in Rome who was constantly in the Anima, now openly admits that after 1945 he and Hudal had also helped well-known National Socialists: ‘Yes, we did that; afterwards the clerics were needed again, and we helped. We issued denazification certificates and letters of recommendation by the dozen.’

Not only was Hudal active in escape aid, he also intervened several times in war crimes trials. On 10 September 1946 he issued a denazification certificate for General Kurt Mältzer, the former Stadtkommandant of Rome, on the grounds that Mältzer had always treated his prisoners well. The General was jointly responsible for the shooting of 335 Italian hostages in March 1944. This was a reprisal for the killing of thirty-three German soldiers in Via Rasella in Rome. In 1951 similarly, Hudal asked US President Harry S. Truman for support for former German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath.

While the Vatican had endured Hudal’s assistance to Nazi fugitives and war criminals, once that assistance became public, it was forced to act. The case of SS Sturmbannführer Otto Gustav Wächter, who was responsible for war crimes in Cracow and eastern Galicia, brought the issue to a head. At the end of the war Wächter went into hiding in Rome, where in 1949 he died in his monastery hiding place. After Wächter’s death, Italian newspapers reported for the first time on the assistance that Hudal gave the former governor of Galicia as he tried to make his escape. Pope Pius XII skilfully and publicly distanced himself from the Nazitainted Hudal in order to avoid any awkward situations. But he did nothing about Hudal’s commitment to former National Socialists. After his demission in 1952 he retired to his little villa in Grottaferrata near Rome.

ALSO in his book "Hitler’s Priests", the US historian Kevin Spicer shows that around 150 Catholic priests were members of the German National Socialist Party (NSDAP) and how many others were unregistered sympathizers. They saw no conflict between their membership in the NSDAP and the teachings of the Catholic Church. The ideological principles that led them to turn to National Socialism included radical German nationalism, anticommunism, and anti-Semitism. After Hitler’s seizure of power, National Socialist priests acted as open propagandists for the Nazi party. Men such as Richard Kleine, a cleric and teacher of religion from Duderstadt, or Johann Pircher, a parish priest from the South Tyrol, built up a conspiratorial network of National Socialist priests. ‘Nazi Pircher’ tirelessly fought for reconciliation between the Church and the NSDAP in Vienna, and in 1938 Kleine and Pircher formed the ‘Group of National Socialist Priests’—by no means the only organization for Nazi clerics.

Philipp Häuser was another convinced Nazi and confidant of Hitler’s, and also a priest. Invited as a guest of honour to the Nuremberg rally in 1939, he received a silver medal from Hitler in person. After the war, this history was quickly hushed up.