CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST VATICAN BANK
ALLEGES COMPLICITY IN HOLOCAUST ERA WAR CRIMES

November 20, 1999
Kiev, Ukraine:

Two Ukrainian organizations, The Ukrainian Union of Nazi Victims and Prisoners and The Organization of Antifascist Resistance Fighters, representing over 300,000 Ukrainian World War II victims of Nazi and Fascist aggression announced the filing of a class action lawsuit alleging complicity in war crimes by the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan Order. The lawsuit was filed on November 15, 1999 in the United States District Court in San Francisco, California. Case No. C 99-4941 MMC.

This class action on behalf of all affected Ukrainian nationals, is based in part on a 1997 U.S. State Department Report which linked the disappearance of the treasury of the Nazi satellite state of Fascist Croatia to the Vatican Bank and Roman Catholic Church Officials. The Fascist Croatian state is credited with murdering over 700,000 Serbians between 1941 and its demise in 1945. The Serbs were brutally liquidated in a state sponsored killing spree aimed at cleansing Croatia of adherents to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the foundation of an ethnically pure, Roman Catholic state. Prime movers in this ethnic cleansing were militant Franciscan monks, many of whom held military and civil commands in wartime Croatia.

The Ukrainian organizations allege that Croatian army, navy, and air force divisions assisted the German Army in occupying Ukraine during the war. The Croatian forces also participated in the well documented, systematic looting of Ukraine by the Nazis. The suit seeks to recover a percentage of the Croatian hoard estimated to have been worth as much as 180 million dollars in 1945.

Another Ukrainian class action was filed last August in New York on behalf of former Ukrainian slave laborers. While the Vatican lawsuit is smaller in scope, it is hoped that it will force the Vatican to finally reveal the active participation of Roman Catholic factions in war crimes. The majority of Ukrainians are in sympathy with the little known Serbian Holocaust. Recent books, including the best selling "Hitler's Pope" and a soon to be released Argentine government report, firmly link Vatican organizations to the Fascist Croatian state and subsequent disappearance of its treasury following the Nazi defeat.