5h ago

The Vatican and the British Museum hold artifacts that the Fascists stole from people

(This takes 5–9.75 minutes to read.)

Ethiopia hopes to reclaim artefacts taken during the […] fascist occupation that began in 1936, as well as items removed by the British military decades earlier.
The east African nation will bring a legal case against the Italian government. Officials in Addis Ababa want to recover 300 Ethiopian Orthodox Christian manuscripts held in the Vatican Library, among other items.
The library is overseen by the Holy See, the governing body of the Catholic Church led by Pope Francis.
The push to reclaim artefacts is part of an international campaign, revealed by The Telegraph. In the UK, it will target the King’s Royal Collection, the British Museum, and the British Army.
Efforts will be led by the Ethiopian Heritage Authority, a branch of the tourism ministry. Abebaw Ayalew Gella, its director, told The Telegraph in Addis Ababa that experts were drawing up inventories of the plundered artefacts held in Italy and the Vatican.
He said: “We are working on what is where, and how we can negotiate. We are working on the mechanism of how to get them back.”
[Fascist] forces invaded Ethiopia in 1935 under Benito Mussolini and subdued the Ethiopian Empire led by Haile Selassie, later considered a messianic figure in Rastafarianism.
During the occupation, which ended in 1941, Ethiopian palaces, churches, and historical sites were plundered. Statues, murals, thrones, and crowns were transported to Italy.
Some of these may have been in Mussolini’s possession when he was captured and shot in 1945, and many were deposited in the former Colonial Museum in Rome.
These include vast paintings taken from the parliament of Ethiopia.
While Ethiopia was under [Fascist] occupation, Enrico Cerulli, a local governor and scholar, amassed around 300 religious texts sacred to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Legal case ‘within 18 months’
Despite being named a war criminal, he donated his collection to the Vatican in 1954, where it remains.
It is understood that, once an inventory of its collections is complete, Ethiopia will approach the Holy See with a request to return any looted artefacts.
Italy will face a legal case based on the 1947 Treaty of Paris, which insisted that the formerly fascist nation hand back cultural and religious treasures looted from Ethiopia “within 18 months”.
Some items, such as an obelisk taken from the ancient site of Aksum, were returned decades later. But given the scale of the looting, this did not amount to a full return of cultural property, lawyers will argue.
Ian Campbell — author of Holy War, a book about the Catholic Church’s entanglement in the invasion of Ethiopia — said that [Fascist] officers in Ethiopia “officially legitimized looting by the military”.
He added: “[Cerulli] and other high officials transported hundreds of crates of artefacts out of the country. And the treasuries of numerous churches were looted.
“There was also a lot of looting in Addis Ababa. You have to bear in mind that many of the Blackshirts and regulars were from poor peasant families, poorer than the Ethiopian elite of Addis Ababa.”
He added that “the Italian episcopate was overwhelmingly in favour of the occupation”.
The occupation came almost 70 years after a British incursion to rescue European hostages, during which Tewodros II, the Ethiopian Emperor, was defeated and his fortress of Magdala looted.
Plundered artefacts, including objects sacred to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, were scattered across collections including the British Museum, Royal Collection, and regimental museums with close links to British Army Units.
Ethiopia will seek to reclaim artefacts taken by Britain, starting in 2026.
The Italian case will take several years as inventories of stolen treasures are still being drawn up.
The Holy See and the Italian Foreign Ministry have been contacted for comment.

Presently, there seem to be no updates on the situation.

The Vatican probably did not profit solely from Fascism’s Ethiopian victims, though. We have numerous clues that it likely also benefitted from the Axis’s plundering of Jews, Roma and Sinti, yet the Vatican remains suspiciously as well as frustratingly uncooperative on this matter.

Click here if you have time to read the details.

Quoting Arieh Doobov’s The Vatican and the Shoah: Unanswered Questions of Material Complicity, pages 319–322:

In 1997, the research team for an American television documentary came across a document discussing a transport of loot with parallels to the fore-mentioned shipment. The memorandum was authored by Emerson Bigelow, an expert in illicit funds who followed intelligence reports gathered by officers in the field concerning stolen valuables. Again, the connection between Ustasha gold and the British army's intelligence is present.
Yet instead of referring to unidentified ‘priests’, Bigelow states that gold was divided into two destinations: the British gold pool, and the Vatican, as follows:
The Ustascha [sic] organization (a Croatian fascist organization, headed by Ante Pavelic) removed funds from Jugoslavia [sic] to total 350 million Swiss francs. The funds were largely in the form of gold coins.
Of the funds brought from the former Independent Croat state where Jews and Serbs were plundered to support the Ustascha organization in exile, an estimated 150 million Swiss francs were impounded by British authorities at the Austro-Swiss frontier; the balance of approximately 200 million Swiss francs was originally held in the Vatican for safe-keeping.
According to rumor, a considerable portion of this latter amount has been sent to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican’s ‘pipeline’, but it is quite possible this is merely a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository.⁵
In today's values, 350 million Swiss francs is worth approximately U.S. $295 million, meaning that assets to the value of U.S. $180 million may have been absorbed into the Vatican's financial holdings. The 1997 release of this document prompted American President Bill Clinton to promise an internal inquiry into the fate of the property. An exhaustive study is still awaited.
Elan Steinberg, of the World Jewish Congress, responded that the revelation of the Bigelow letter ‘is an extremely significant development[’] that fits into the pattern of the [Axis] gold question. It is a pattern that involved not only Switzerland and other neutral countries, but, according to U.S. intelligence documents, went to the heart of the Holy See.⁶
The June 1998 U.S. State Department report on stolen wartime assets and trade with [the Third Reich] reported, inconclusively, on the fate of the Ustasha war chest:
The Ustasha régime in Croatia accumulated a treasury that apparently included valuables stolen from the dispossessed and deported Jewish and Sinti-Roman victims of the ethnic cleansing campaign. A variety of wartime and postwar U.S. Intelligence reports confirm Ustasha régime treasury of some size, but no authoritative quantification proved possible.
Nor was it ever clear how much came from Croatian Jewish victims — although one U.S. intelligence report speculated that it might be as much as $80 million in gold, mostly coins. Official and postwar information does confirm that the Croatian régime transferred gold to Switzerland toward the end of the War…⁷
As noted above, the postwar fate of the Ustasha booty was linked to the common anti-Communist interests of the Allies and the surviving Ustasha affiliates. The June 1998 State Department report agrees with many of the conclusions of Ratlines by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, a 1991 study branded as polemical by the Catholic establishment.
The report affirms that Ante Pavelić was in control of an uncertain quantity of stolen assets which he used to protect himself in postwar Europe and finance his escape. By early 1946 Pavelić had arrived in Rome from where his subsequent flight to Latin America was arranged. This escape was probably directed by Father Krunoslaw Draganović from the College of San Girolamo, a centre for Croatian clerics — and for Ustasha operations.
Draganović is perhaps the key to understanding these secretive machinations: he had long been an Ustasha supporter, had many contacts with international aid organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and was well connected to intelligence circles. Draganović was also a seasoned member of the Vatican milieu. He was the pivot around which secreted fugitives, stolen money, complicity with intelligence agencies, and escape routes revolved.
In an interview with the authors of Ratlines, the foremost defender of the Vatican’s wartime actions, Father Robert Graham, commented as follows: ‘I’ve no doubt that Draganović was extremely active in siphoning off his Croatian Ustashi friends… Just because he’s a priest doesn’t mean he represents the Vatican. It was his own operation. He’s not the Vatican.’⁸
This distancing does not tally with the Vatican’s official recognition of the San Girolamo operation as the Croatian Committee of the Pontifical Welfare Commission,⁹ nor with the fact that the deputy director of San Girolamo was the Vatican’s official representative to the institution.¹⁰ This status helped Dragonovic and his peers benefit from the Vatican’s diplomatic immunity. Ratlines details many cases of direct Vatican intervention on behalf of Croatian refugees, a number of whom were also war criminals.¹¹
The U.S. report confirms the framework in which postwar Ustasha activities took place, but stops short of confirming details. Further information is certainly present in the U.S. National Archives, British archives, Swiss banking records, Croatian archives, and unquestionably in the Vatican City itself.
The foreign policy arms of the Holy See are numerous, comprising both formal Secretariat of State operations and scores of particular channels between the Church and abroad. San Girolamo's personnel were far from being strangers to the Vatican, and the question of whether its highest offices tacitly acquiesced to the institution’s operations or were more deeply involved is still unresolved.
In December 1997, the London Conference on Nazi Gold gathered representatives of over forty countries primarily to exchange information as to the fate of stolen Jewish and other victims’ property. Although the Holy See initially declined the British Foreign Office’s invitation to participate in the conference, this decision was amended some weeks before the meeting and two official observers were sent from the Vatican City.
The Jewish and Romany delegations both raised the issue of stolen assets eventually being placed in the hands of the Vatican. A number of delegations joined these voices to demand that the Vatican open their archives to independent researchers. Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who chaired the conference, summarized the scene:
There were a number of calls for the Holy See to open its wartime and postwar archives, which, it was suggested, might contain relevant information. The Holy See delegation, which had made it clear from the outset that they were attending only as observers, did not respond.¹²

But let us not single out the Vatican. The British Museum is also guilty of hanging onto artifacts stolen from some of the Fascists’ victims:

It would be illegal for the British Museum to return artworks looted by the [Axis] to a Jewish family, despite its “moral obligation” to do so, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
Vice-Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt ruled that the British Museum Act — which protects the collections for posterity — cannot be overridden by the ethical merit of a claim involving plundered art.
The heirs of the art's original owners, Dr Arthur Feldmann, a Czech lawyer, and his wife Gisela, who died at the hands of the [Axis], said they were “very upset” at the ruling.
They called on the government to introduce legislation that would allow the pieces — four Old Master drawings stolen from the family home in Brno by the Gestapo in 1939 — to be returned to them swiftly.
Lawyers for the British Museum, which had agreed in principle three years ago to the restitution of the drawings to the family, also said they were "disappointed" by the outcome of the test case.
Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, had asked for clarification of the law after warning that if a moral obligation to restore such objects could override the act, it might allow Greece to reclaim the Elgin Marbles.
However, the judge said this case would have no implication for other claims.
Anne Webber, the co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which is representing Dr Feldmann’s heirs, said the ruling had “prolonged the agony of a family who have already suffered”.
She said: “The looting of these drawings was over 60 years ago, the claim was three years ago and the British Museum acted with alacrity. They never expected it would take so long.
“The family are very upset by the outcome but nevertheless they have confidence in the British Museum’s commitment to restitution. The government needs to move swiftly.”
The museum’s trustees had asked the Attorney General if they had permission to return the artworks under the terms of the Snowdon principle — a legal test that permits charities to give back items judged wrong to keep.
Ms. Webber said the ruling was significant for all claimants of looted art from the [Fascist] era, as it set aside any possibility of restitution being achieved without further legislation.
Sir Andrew said in his judgment that neither the Crown nor the Attorney General had any power to dispense with “due observance” of acts of parliament.
A spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said: “We welcome clarification in this important area, which will contribute to our consideration of a Spoliation Advisory Panel recommendation that the Secretary of State consider legislation to return the spoliated items.
“The case confirms that legislation is necessary. We will now look urgently at this issue.”
Dr. Feldmann was tortured and murdered by the [Axis] and died in prison.
Mrs. Feldmann died at Auschwitz, but their children survived.
The drawings, for which the museum paid a total of nine guineas in 1946 at auction, are now estimated to be worth £150,000.

In fairness, the British régime modified its law in 2009 to facilitate reclamations, and in 2013, Arthur Feldmann’s grandson, Uri Peled, finally reclaimed a work that the Gestapo stole from his family.

Even so, ‘Around 30% of some 21,350 continental and British drawings acquired since 1933 have an uncertain or incomplete provenance for the 1933–1945 period.’ This means that the British Museum likely still has some works stolen from the Fascists’ victims—to say nothing of the works pillaged from other victims of colonialism. At least reclaiming them will be a little easier than getting stolen loot out of the Vatican.