CLAIMS that the Vatican was implicated in a network established to smuggle Nazis out of post-war Europe are based on false evidence in United States intelligence reports, a Vatican historian has said.
Jesuit Fr Robert Graham, a researcher into the Second World War at the Vatican archives, said claims made by John Loftus, onetime chief prosecutor for the US Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit, in a book published in the US this week, stemmed from planted documents.
The book, Unholy Trinity, says a secret group of right-wing priests inside the Vatican set up an escape route for Nazi war criminals, and that the network was infiltrated by Soviet spies, forging a de facto alliance between the Holy See, the Nazis and Moscow.