Alois Hudal
From Metapedia
Alois Hudal was German Bishop, and Anti-Communist who helped German Officers escape through Italy. His also published a book:The Foundations of National Socialism in 1937.
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", 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. This allowed him and other PCA priests to piece together their network and organise the escape of accused war criminals such as Franz Stangl, commanding officer of Treblinka. Stangl himself told Gitta Sereny 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. Other highly prominent accused German 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 labourcamps, and above all Adolf Eichmann, the man who had been put in charge of implementing the cleansing of European Jewry. 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.
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. 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. After the war Wächter lived in a Roman monastery "as a monk", 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.
