30/06/2026 16:30 - 17:30

HALL: Pola - A106

Contact: Zavatti F.

Chair: Armando G.

This panel examines post-WWII Catholic assistance to former Nazi collaborators excluded from Allied relief, war criminals seeking to evade or mitigate prosecution, and displaced fascists fleeing Europe for fear of repatriation. It brings together two complementary perspectives — one focused on the Vatican's institutional engagement with postwar justice, the other on the lived religious and political negotiations between displaced fascists and their Catholic assistants — in order to address the following question: To what extent did the Church's religious and political objectives overlap with its humanitarian activities and its critique of postwar justice? Drawing on recently released archival sources, the panel shows that these assistance efforts were deeply entangled with Christian reconciliation and forgiveness, re-Christianization, anti-communism and fears of Soviet communism's expansion, the Church's competition with other Christian churches, confessional tensions, ambiguous relationships between the Vatican Secretariat of State and former Axis elites, and the prioritization of institutional reputation over retribution. These findings call into question the very nature of the Vatican's critique of the war crimes trials as forms of "victor's justice" and of the discreet operations to assist fascists on the run, offering new perspectives on Christian charity at the crossroads of material assistance, politics, and religion. By shedding light on the so-called "Vatican ratlines" and on the Vatican's critique of the postwar trials, the papers in this panel explain the Vatican's investment of charitable, diplomatic, religious, and political resources as means toward a moral reconstruction of Europe that marginalized postwar justice and accountability. By doing so, this panel demonstrates the complex entanglements between Catholic responses to the Holocaust, Catholic humanitarianism, and the shaping of postwar justice.