Reply on Jews 'is clear enough'

A TOP American Jewish official has formally asked Pope John Paul to investigate and answer assertions that Catholic officials of the Vatican helped Nazi war criminals to emigrate illegally and escape prosecution for their crimes.
Julius Berman, chairman of The New York-based Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, made his request in a telegram to the Pope last week after The New York Times published an investigative report on allegations of such Church aid to Nazis.
The Vatican so far has declined to comment on the allegations, saying that Church historians had already given a "sufficiently clear reply" to the charges. The historians, appointed by Pope Paul VI to study Vatican documents relating to the war, have denied the accusations in the report.
Vatican agencies, the Times report said, played a key role specifically in the escape from Europe of Walter Rauff, a former Nazi SS officer now living in Chile who allegedly was responsible for preparing and equipping mobile vans that gassed an estimated 200,000 Jews during the Second World War.
The Times cited two main sources for its story: a "top secret" 1947 United States State Department report, recently declassified and released at the weekend, and statements by ,Serge Klarsfeld, a Paris lawyer who has specialised in tracking down fugitive Nazis.
The State Department report, by Stephen La Vista, a United States foreign service official in Rome, called the Vatican "the largest single organisation involved in the illegal movement of emigrants.'. It said the Vatican applied pressure, particularly in Latin America, to provide havens for former Nazis and Fascists, "so long as they are anti-Communist."
The new assertions add another chapter to a longstanding controversy over four basic issues: • Whether the Vatican, in the course of its massive efforts to help resettle displaced persons after the second world war, actually did help some Nazi officials or collaborators to escape from possible prosecution for war crimes in Europe; • Whether the Vatican as a matter of policy consciously sought to resettle persons with known Nazi or Fascist sympathies (but not necessarily criminals) in Latin America out of a concern to combat world communism; • Whether, if either of the first two cases is true, the Vatican participated knowingly in the illegal escape of war criminals or was only an unwitting partner in those illegal acts; • Whether priests or other Catholic officials who may have knowingly abetted the escape of war criminals were acting as Vatican agents or with Vatican knowledge or approval, or whether they engaged in such activity on their own, with neither the knowledge nor the approval of authorities in the Holy See.