Alois Hudal

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Alois Hudal (also known as Luigi Hudal; born 31 May 1885 in Graz, Austro-Hungarian Empire; died 13 May 1963 in Rome, Italy) was a Rome-based bishop of Austrian descent. He is infamous for his 1937 book The Foundations of National Socialism, in which he praised Hitler and some of his policies, and for the "ratline" he helped to establish after the end of World War II, allowing prominent Nazi war criminals to escape trial.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 A career in Rome 1.2 Winds of nationalism and anti-Semitism 1.3 Bolshevism and Liberalism as enemies 1.4 "Good" and "bad" National Socialism 1.5 Ratline organizer 1.6 Resignation and death 2 Closeness to the Vatican 3 Notes 4 Selected works of Alois Hudal 5 Bibliography 6 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] A career in Rome

Bishop Alois Hudal was born on 31 May 1885, the son of a shoemaker in the Austrian city of Graz, where he studied theology (1904-1908) and was ordained to the priesthood in July 1908. Though the professorate promised to him at Vienna's university was never given, Hudal became a noted specialist on the liturgy, doctrine and spirituality of the Slavic-speaking Eastern Orthodox Churches. He ministered as a parish chaplain in Kindberg, before leaving to study in Rome. In 1911 he became a Doctor in Theolgy in Graz. After completing his doctorate studies, he entered the Teutonic College of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome where he was a chaplain (1911-1913), attending courses in Old Testament at the Biblical Institute. There he took his second doctoral degree, on Die religioesen und sittlichen Ideen des Spruchbuches ("The religious and moral ideas of the Book of Proverbs"). This dissertation was published in 1914. He took residency in the faculty for Old Testament Studies at the University of Graz in 1914. He was an assistant military chaplain during a period of service in the First World War. In 1917 he published his sermons to the soldiers, Soldatenpredigten (see below his selected works), in which he expressed the idea that "loyalty to the flag is loyalty to God", though also warning against "national chauvinism" at that time ^[1]. In 1923 he was nominated rector of the Collegio Teutonico di Santa Maria dell'Anima (or simply "Anima") in Rome, a theological seminary for German and Austrian priests where he had lodged as a doctorate student^[2]. In 1930 he was appointed a consultant to the Holy Office by Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, whom Hudal in his memoirs considered a "grand seigneur of the Church" ^[3]. In June 1933 Hudal was ordained Titular Bishop of Aela by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who succeeded Merry del Val as the cardinal protector of the German national church at Rome ^[4]. Hudal was also a protégé of Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, ten years his elder and Archbishop of Vienna from 1932 to 1955.

[edit] Winds of nationalism and anti-Semitism

From 1933 on, Hudal embraced publicly the pan-Germanic nationalism he had previously condemned, proclaiming on July of that year that he always wished to be a "servant and herald" of "the total German cause" ^[5]. His invectives against the Jews also became more frequent, linking the so-called "Semitic race" - which allegedly "sought to set itself apart and dominate" - with the nefarious movements of democracy and cosmopolitanism and even denouncing an alleged Jewish conspiracy to become "the financial masters of the Eternal City" ^[6]. His opportunism and duplicity are patent in several moves he made at the time. For example, he was capable of writing a preface to an Italian biography of Engelbert Dollfuss in 1935 without mentioning that the Austrian politician with whom he sympathized had been murdered by Austrian Nazis in the previous year. ^[7]

[edit] Bolshevism and Liberalism as enemies

Hudal was a committed anti-Communist, but he also vehemently opposed Liberalism. Before Nazism, he was already highly critical of Parliamentary Democracy. His ideas were most similar to the political and economic ideas of his fellow Austrians Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, as well as Franz von Papen in Germany, Salazar in Portugal and, in a less clear way, of Benito Mussolini in Italy. According to an author, "Hudal squarely fitted into a formula current at the time, the category of Clero-Fascism."^[8] Don Luigi Sturzo, the exiled Italian Catholic priest and Christian Democrat leader coined the term 'Clerical-Fascism' in the mid-20s to refer specifically to the faction of the Catholic party Italian People's Party (Partito Popolare Italiano-PPI) who chose to support Mussolini. It was used afterwards to describe various authoritarian situations and regimes supported by members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, including Dollfuss's politics (see also Clerical Fascism and Austrofascism).

Hudal was most concerned about the class conflict tearing apart European society, in particular the rise of the international Communist movement and worker parties in Austria. Fear of "Bolshevism", as he called it, was his starting point, but this feeling turned into an aggressive political doctrine towards Russia: "Essential to understanding Hudal's politics is his fear that Bolshevist military forces would invade Italy through Eastern Europe or the Balkans and would be unstoppable until they destroyed the Church. Like many within the Church, he embraced the bulwark theory, which placed hope in a strong German-Austrian military shield to protect Rome. This protection involved a pre-emptive attack on godless Communism, Hudal believed, and so he felt an urgent need for a Christian army from Central Europe to invade Russia and eliminate the Bolshevist threat to Rome" ^[9].

However, Communism was not his sole (and surely not his oldest) concern about Russia, since he was aiming at Eastern Christianity as well. In fact, Hudal's long-term goals were also "the reunification of Rome with the Eastern Orthodox Church and the conversion of the Balkans from the Serbian Orthodox Church to Catholicism" ^[10]. He expected that the invasion of the Soviet Union would also serve these fundamental aims. Especially since Pope Benedict XV and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which crushed the Russian Orthodox Church and was regarded by Catholics as a historical opportunity, Rome was anxious about ending the thousand-year East-West Schism that separated Christianity ^[11].

[edit] "Good" and "bad" National Socialism

Hudal is said to have received a Golden Nazi Party membership badge ^[12], but the fact is disputed. In 1937, in Vienna, Hudal published a book entitled The Foundations of National Socialism, with an imprimatur from Archbishop Innitzer, which was an enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler. Hudal sent Hitler a copy with a handwritten dedicacy praising him as "the new Siegfried of Germany's greatness" ^[13]. Nevertheless, the book was not allowed to circulate freely in Germany by the Nazis — who generally detested the Roman Catholic Church and did not wish its leading members to "clericalize" their ranks — though it was not banned. During the Nuremberg trials, Franz von Papen declared that, at first, Hudal's book had "very much impressed" Hitler, whose "anti-Christian advisers" were allegedly to blame for not allowing a free German edition. "All I could obtain was permission to print 2,000 copies, which Hitler wanted to distribute among leading Party members for a study of the problem", Von Papen said.^[14]

Hudal was highly critical of the works of several Nazi ideologues, like Alfred Rosenberg or Ernst Bergmann, who despised Christianity and considered it "alien to Germanic genius" ^[15]. The condemnation in 1934 by the Holy Office of Reich secretary Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century and, shortly thereafter, of Ernst Bergmann's The German National Church had in fact been based on Hudal's secret assessment of both works ^[16] In his own 1937 book, Alois Hudal proposed a reconciliation and a compromise between Nazism and Christianity, leaving the education of the youth to the Churches, while the latter would leave politics entirely to National Socialism. This had been the line followed by prominent German Catholic politician and former Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen too. In the autumn of 1934, Hudal had already explained this strategy to Pius XI, who received him in audience: the "good" ought to be separated from the "bad" in Nazism. The bad - that is Rosenberg, Bergmann and others - according to Hudal represented the "left wing" of the Nazi party. The "conservatives" - headed, he believed, by Hitler - should be redirected toward Rome, Christianized and used against the Communists and the Eastern danger ^[17]. This may help explain why Hitler's hate-filled book, Mein Kampf was never put on the Index by Rome, as censors continually postponed and eventually terminated its examination, balking at taking on the "legal" chancellor of Germany ^[18]. Hudal saw the danger in Hitler's entourage, not in his person. More than Hitler, he feared Baldur von Schirach's influence over the German youth.

The reaction of Rosenberg to Hudal's ideas was violent, and eventually the circulation of the Foundations of National Socialism was restricted in Germany. "We do not allow the fundaments of the Movement to be analyzed and criticized by a Roman Bishop" - said Rosenberg ^[19]. In 1935, even before he wrote the Foundations of National Socialism Hudal had said about Rosenberg: "If National Socialism wants to replace Christianity by the notions of race and blood, we will have to face the greatest heresy of the twentieth century. It must be rejected by the Church as decisively as, if not more severely than [...] the Action Française, with which it shares some errors. But Rosenberg's doctrine is more imbued with negation and creates, above all in the youth, a hatred against Christianity greater than that of Nietzsche" ^[20].

Despite the restrictions imposed on his book, and despite many harsh National Socialist restrictions against German monasteries and parishes, and effective attempts by the Nazi government to forbid Catholic education at schools, going as far as banning the crucifix in schools and other public areas (see the Oldenburg crucifix struggle of November 1936), even despite the Nazi dissolution and confiscation of Austrian monasteries and the official banning of Catholic newspapers and associations in annexed Austria ("Ostmark"), Bishop Hudal remained close to some of the Nazi regime's officials, as he was convinced that the Nazi new order would nevertheless prevail. Hudal was particularly close to Franz von Papen, who as the Reich's ambassador in Vienna prepared the German-Austrian agreement of 11 July 1936, which paved the way for the Anschluss. This agreement was enthusiastically backed by Hudal in the Austrian press, against the position of several Austrian Bishops.^[21] The former Centre politician Von Papen, who was considered dangerous and disliked by the Nazis for his Catholicism, was later on sent to the German Embassy in Ankara.

[edit] Ratline organizer

At the end of the war, Hudal, who was already "Commissioner of the Episcopate for German speaking Catholics in Italy, as well as Father Confessor to Rome’s German community"^[22], became involved with processing displaced persons. In 1944, when the Pope's Pontifical Commission of Assistance (PCA) was divided into some 20 regional subcommittees, the Austrian section (Assistenza Austriaca) was placed under Hudal's control.^[23] This allowed him and other PCA priests to piece together their network and organise the escape of war criminals such as Franz Stangl, commanding officer of Treblinka. Stangl himself told Gitta Sereny ^[24] that he went looking for Hudal in Rome, because he had heard that the bishop was helping the Germans. Hudal arranged quarters in Rome for him till his papers came through, then gave him money and a Red Cross passport with a visa to Syria. Stangl then left for Damascus, where the bishop had found him a job in a textile factory^[25]. Other highly prominent Nazi war criminals helped by the Hudal network were SS captain Edward Roschmann, known as the "Butcher of Riga", doctor Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, Gustav Wagner, commanding officer of Sobibor, Alois Brunner, organizer of deportations from France and Slovakia to German concentration camps, and above all Adolf Eichmann, the man who had been put in charge of implementing the murder of European Jewry^[26]. In 1994 Erich Priebke, a former SS captain, told Italian journalist Emanuela Audisio, La Repubblica, that bishop Hudal helped him reach Buenos Aires, which was later admitted by Vatican historian Robert Graham SJ ^[27].

In 1945 Hudal gave refuge in Rome to Otto Wächter, who had played a leading role in the July Putsch of 1934 in Austria, which led to the assassination of Dollfuss. In 1938-1939, he headed the "Wächter-Kommission", the government body named after him that was responsible for the dismissal and/or compulsory retirement of all Jewish officials in Austria.^[28]. From 1939 on, as governor of the Cracow district, Wächter organized the persecution of the Jews and ordered the establishment of the Cracow Ghetto in 1941. Wächter is mentioned as one of the leading advocates in the General Government who were in favor of the Jewish extermination by gassing and as a member of the SS team who under Himmler's supervision and Odilo Globocnik's direction planned Operation Reinhard, the first phase of the Final Solution, leading to the death of more than 2,000,000 Polish Jews^[29]. After the war Wächter lived in a Roman monastery "as a monk"^[30], under the protection of Bishop Hudal. He died on July 14, 1949, in the Roman hospital of Santo Spirito "in the arms" of Bishop Hudal^[31].

[edit] Resignation and death

Hudal's activities caused a press scandal in 1947, after he was accused of leading a Nazi smuggling ring by the Passauer Neue Presse, a Catholic newspaper, but he only resigned as rector of Santa Maria dell'Anima in 1952, under pressure from the German and Austrian bishops and the Holy See. In January 1952, the Bishop of Salzburg told Hudal that the Holy See wanted to dismiss him. In June Hudal announced to the cardinal protector of Santa Maria dell'Anima that he had decided to leave the College, though disapproving of the Church allegedly being governed by the Allies.^[32] He resided afterwards in Grottaferrata, near the city of Rome, where in 1962 he wrote his embittered memoirs called Römische Tagebücher. Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs (Diaries of Rome. The Confession of Life of an Old Bishop), published posthumously in 1976. Until his death in 1963, he never gave up in trying to obtain an amnesty to Nazis.^[33] Despite his protests against anti-Semitism in the 1930s, in his memoirs, with full knowledge of the Holocaust as of 1962, the "Brown Bishop" ^[34] said of his actions in favour of war criminals and genocide perpetrators and participants: "I thank God that He opened my eyes and allowed me to visit and comfort many victims in their prisons and concentration camps and [to help] them escape with false identity papers" — where these so-called "victims" were in fact Axis prisoners of war and their "concentration camps" Allied detention camps.^[35]

[edit] Closeness to the Vatican

Hudal's promotion to Bishop has been cited as evidence that he had close ties to members of the Roman Curia, particularly Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val (an ex-Secretary of State who died as early as 1930), and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII who had previously been Papal Nuncio in Germany. Given Hudal's open sympathy for National Socialism since the 1930s, it is very meaningful that he was given work with refugees after the war, and that he was chosen to minister to German internees in Italy. The Vatican, which was involved in a great deal of post-war humanitarian work concerning displaced persons, arranged for him to have an Allied travel pass for this purpose. One may wonder why the head of a Roman college would be given this task. Hudal's successor as rector of the Anima in 1952, Father Jakob Weinbacher, future Auxiliary Bishop of Vienna (1962-1985), recalled in an interview with Gitta Sereny that "Hudal was very close to Pius XII... they were friends".^[36] A more recent rector, Dr. Johannes Nedbal admitted instead that Hudal was very close to Pius XI.^[37]

Some historians take the view that Hudal was only a small player whose Ratline activities did not reflect any official policy at all. In particular, Catholic historians like Robert A. Graham (1913-1997) - an American Jesuit and a longtime Vatican operative who was co-editor of the 11-volume Acts and Documents of the Holy See relative to the Second World War^[38] - estimated Hudal as "small fish" and as someone who was acting on his own behalf.

In 1999, however, Italian researcher Matteo Sanfilippo revealed a letter drafted on 31 August 1948 by Bishop Hudal to Argentinian President Juan Perón, requesting 5,000 visas, 3,000 for German and 2,000 for Austrian «soldiers» ^[39]. In the letter Hudal explained that these were not (Nazi) refugees, but anti-Communist fighters whose wartime «sacrifice» had saved Europe from Soviet domination. ^[40] According to Argentine researcher Uki Goñi, the documents he uncovered in 2003 show the Roman Catholic Church was also deeply involved in the secret network. "The Perón government authorized the arrival of the first Nazi collaborators [in Argentina], as a result of a meeting in March 1946 between Antonio Caggiano, a [newly elevated] Argentine cardinal, and Eugène Tisserant, a French cardinal attached to the Vatican".^[41]

A French Jesuit historian, Fr. Pierre Blet, another co-editor of the above-cited Acts and Documents, only mentioned Hudal to signal his role, at the direct request of the pope's nephew Carlo Pacelli, for the contacts of the Vatican with the Nazi authorities in October 1943, in order to end the razzias and spare the life of thousands of Jews sheltered in the priories and convents of Rome, after the city was occupied by the Germans in September of that year. His intervention, which was preceded by diplomatic contacts between Cardinal Maglione and German ambassador in Rome Weizsäcker, was apparently successful. Several thousand Jewish lives were saved by this initiative of the pope, according to Blet. According to another author, however, the idea of Hudal's intervention came from the German ambassador himself, who asked the rector of the Anima to sign a letter to the military commander of Rome, General Reiner Stahel, requesting that the arrests be halted, otherwise the pope would take a position in public as being against the razzias.^[42] Ambassador Weizsäcker argued that he opted for this ruse because Hitler might have reacted against the Vatican and the pope if it had been the German embassy to convey the warning, instead of the Nazi friendly bishop.^[43]

According to several sources, Hudal may at the same time have been a Vatican-based informer of German intelligence under the Nazi regime. Vatican historian Fr. Robert Graham SJ held that view more categorically in his book Nothing Sacred.^{[44] [45]} Several other authors mention his contacts in Rome with SS intelligence chief Walter Rauff, the developer of the mobile extermination with gas vans^[46]. In September 1943, Rauff was sent to Milan, where he took charge of all Gestapo and SD operations throughout northwest Italy^[47]. Hudal is said to have met Rauff then and to have begun some cooperation with him that was useful afterwards in the setting up of an escape network for Nazis, including for Rauff himself. After the war Rauff escaped from a prisoner camp in Rimini and "hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal"^[48], eventually finding safe haven in Syria and later in Chile.

After the war Hudal was in fact one of the main Catholic organizers of the Ratline nets, along with Monsignor Karlo Petranovic, an Ustasha war criminal who fled to Austria and then to Italy after 1945^[49], Father Edoardo Dömöter, the Franciscan of Hungarian origin who forged the identity of Eichmann's passport, issued by the Red Cross in the name of Riccardo Klement ^[50], and Father Krunoslav Draganović, a Croatian professor of Theology ^[51]. Draganović, a smuggler of fascist (ustasha) war criminals who had also been involved in pro-Fascist espionage, was recycled by the U.S. during the Cold War - his name appears in the Pentagon payrolls in the late 1950s and early 1960s - and was eventually granted immunity in Tito's Yugoslavia, where he died in 1983 at 79. Monsignor Karl Bayer, the Rome Director of Caritas International after the war, also cooperated with this ring. Interviewed in the 70s by Gitta Sereny, Monsignor Bayer recalled how he and Hudal had helped Nazis to Southern America with the Vatican's support: "The Pope [Pius XII] did provide money for this; in driblets sometimes, but it did come" ^[52] Hudal's Ratline was also supposedly financed by his friend Walter Rauff, with some funds allegedly coming from Giuseppe Siri, the recently appointed Auxiliary Bishop (1944) and Archbishop (1946) of Genoa ^[53]. Siri however was "a hero of the Resistance movement in Italy" during the German occupation of northern Italy.^[54] Siri's involvement remains unproven.

According to Uki Goñi, "some of the financing for Hudal's escape network came from the United States", precising that the Italian delegate of the American National Catholic Welfare Conference provided Hudal "with substantial funds for his 'humanitarian' aid".^[55]

Furthermore, since the works of Graham and Blet were published, historian Michael Phayer, a professor at Marquette University (a Catholic, Jesuit University), has alleged the close collaboration between the Vatican (Pope Pius XII and Giovanni Battista Montini, then "Substitute" of the Secretariat of State, and later Paul VI), on the one side and Draganović and Hudal on the other, and has sustained that Pius XII himself was directly engaged in ratline activity. Against these allegations of the direct involvement of Pope Pius XII and his staff there are some opposing testimonies and the denial by Vatican officials of any involvement of Pius XII himself. But according to Michael Phayer, the American Bishop Aloisius Muench, Pius XII's own envoy to occupied western Germany after the war, "wrote to the Vatican warning the pope to desist from his efforts to have convicted war criminals excused". The letter, written in Italian, "is available in the archives of the Catholic University of America", according to Michael Phayer ^[56].

In his posthumously published memoirs, Hudal instead recalls with bitterness the lack of support he found the Holy See to give to Nazi Germany's battle against "godless Bolshevism" at the Eastern Front. Hudal several times in this work claims to have received criticism of the Nazi system rather than support for it from the Vatican diplomats under Pius XII. He assumed that the Holy See's policy during and after the war was entirely controlled by the western Allies^{[citation needed]}. Until his death Hudal was convinced he had done the right thing, and said that he considered saving German and other fascist officers and politicians from the hands of Allied prosecution, a "just thing" and "what should have been expected of a true Christian", adding: "We do not believe in the eye for an eye of the Jew".^[57] He said that the justice of the Allies and the Soviets had resulted in show trials and lynchings, including the major trials at Nuremberg.^[58] In his memoirs he also developed a curious theory about the economic causes of World War II, which allowed him to plainly justify for himself his acts in favour of Nazi and Fascist war criminals: «The Allies' War against Germany was not a crusade, but the rivalry of economic complexes for whose victory they had been fighting. This so-called business ... used catchwords like democracy, race, religious liberty and Christianity as a bait for the masses. All these experiences were the reason why I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my whole charitable work mainly to former National Socialists and Fascists, especially to so-called 'war criminals'».^[59]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Selected works of Alois Hudal

• Soldatenpredigten (Graz, 1917) - Sermons to the Soldiers.
• Die serbisch-orthodoxe Nationalkirche (Graz, 1922) - The Serbian Orthodox National Church.
• Vom deutschen Schaffen in Rom. Predigten, Ansprachen und Vorträge, (Innsbruck, Vienna and München, 1933) - On the German Work in Rome. Sermons, Speeches and Lectures.
• Die deutsche Kulturarbeit in Italien (Münster, 1934) - The German Cultural Activity in Italy.
• Ecclesiae et nationi. Katholische Gedanken in einer Zeitenwende (Rome, 1934) - The Church and the Nations. Catholic Thoughts in the Turn of an Era.
• Rom, Christentum und deutsches Volk (Rome, 1935) - Rome, the Christendom and the German People.
• Deutsches Volk und christliches Abendland (Innsbruck, 1935) - The German People and the Christian Occident.
• Der Vatikan und die modernen Staaten (Innsbruck, 1935) - The Vatican and the Modern States.
• Das Rassenproblem (Lobnig, 1935) - The Race Problem.
• Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus (Leipzig and Vienna, 1936-37 and facsimile edition Bremen, 1982) - The Foundations of National Socialism.
• Nietzsche und die moderne Welt (Rome, 1937) - Nietzsche and the Modern World.
• Europas religiöse Zukunft (Rome, 1943) - The Religious Future of Europe.
• Römische Tagebücher. Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs (Graz, 1976) - Diaries of Rome. The Confession of Life of an Old Bishop.

[edit] Bibliography

• Robert Graham and David Alvarez, Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage against the Vatican, 1939-1945, London: Frank Cass, 1998.
• Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2000.
• Michael Phayer, "Canonizing Pius XII. Why did the pope help Nazis escape?", Commonweal, May 9, 2003 / Vol. CXXX (9) [14].
• Michael Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2007. Hudal is mentioned throughout the book, and especially in chapter 8, "Bishop Hudal's Ratline", pp. 195-207.
• Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican, New York, Paulist Press, 1997.
• Greg Whitlock, "Alois Hudal: Clero-Fascist Nietzsche critic", Nietzsche-Studien, volume 32, 2003.
• Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness, London, Deutsch, 1974.
• Ernst Klee, Persilscheine und falsche Pässe. Wie die Kirchen den Nazis halfen (Whitewash Certificates and False Passports. How the Churches Helped the Nazis), Frankfurt, Fischer Geschichte, 1991.
• Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945, S.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2003.
• Robert Katz, Dossier Priebke. Anatomia di un processo, Milano, Rizzoli, 1996.
• Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa. How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, London, Granta, 2002 (with many valuable references to Hudal and the "Ratlines", including new details on Hudal's role in Eichmann's escape to Argentina).
• Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, New York, Free Press, 2004 (one of the most reliable and up-to-date sources on Hudal).
• Marcus Langer, Alois Hudal, Bischof zwischen Kreuz und Hakenkreuz. Versuch eine Biographie (Bishop Alois Hudal : Between Cross and Swastika. Attempt at a biography), PhD thesis, Vienna, 1995.
• Dan Kurzman, A Special Mission : Hitler's Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII, Cambridge, Da Capo Press, 2007.
• Matteo Sanfilippo, "Los papeles de Hudal como fuente para la historia de la migración de alemanes y nazis después de la segunda guerra mundial" (Hudal's papers as a source for the history of the migration of Germans and Nazis after World War II), Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, 43, 1999, p. 185-209.
• Philippe Chenaux, "Pacelli, Hudal et la question du nazisme 1933-1938", Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, January/July 2003, p.133-154.
• Mark Aarons and John Loftus Ratlines: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets, London, Heinemann, 1991 (republished in the U.S. as Unholy Trinity, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1991).
• Johan Ickx, "The Roman 'non possumus' and the Attitude of Bishop Alois Hudal towards the National Socialist Ideological Aberrations", in: Gevers L., Bank J (ed.), Religion under Siege. The Roman Catholic Church in Occupied Europe (1939-1950), I (Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia, 56.1), Löwen, 2008, 315 ff.

[edit] External links

• "Krunoslav Draganovic", in The Pavelic Papers [15]
• Erika Weinzierl, Kirche und Nationalsozialismus [16], with photos of Hudal, Archbishop Innitzer and fac-simile of several documents concerning the Anschluss, namely a welcome letter by the Austrian Bishops collectively (The "Solemn Declaration" of March 18, 1938) and a letter to the Gauleiter by Archbishop Innitzer individually, with the famous final handwritten phrase: "und Heil Hitler!".
• "Luigi Hudal, bishop of Aela" [17] (Hudal's position in the Catholic hierarchy).
• "Hudal, Alois C." [18], Biographisch Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL).
• Dominik Burkard, "Alois Hudal – ein Anti-Pacelli? Zur Diskussion um die Haltung des Vatikans gegenüber dem Nationalsozialismus", Zeitschrift für Religions und Geistesgeschichte, Volume 59 (1), January 2007 [19].
• Vatican Radio, Symposium on Bishop Hudal and, 2006. (Link)