Vatican Denies It Aided Fleeing Nazi Criminals : Rebuttal: The church rejects the old allegation as ‘historically false.’ The papal spokesman also cites help for Jewish groups.

Rebutting an old accusation, the Vatican on Friday rejected as “historically false” allegations that it aided Nazi war criminals to flee Europe to South America after World War II.

The assertion came in a written statement by Joaquin Navarro, the spokesman for Pope John Paul II. It was triggered by reports from Argentina that newly declassified archives there show that Nazi officials arrived in Buenos Aires after the war on passports provided by the Vatican, the Red Cross and Spain.

Noting news reports from the Argentine capital, Navarro said, “The idea that the Holy See . . . helped Nazi criminals, persecutors of the Jews, to flee from Europe by helping provide passports is historically false.”

In fact, he said, during and immediately after the war, the Vatican--on the specific orders of Pope Pius XII--cooperated with Jewish organizations seeking transit documents for displaced Jews in Europe. A pontifical commission cooperating with Allied military authorities helped refugees of many nationalities find new homes outside Europe.

“It was probably easy for wanted criminals and others to disappear among the refugees trying to emigrate. . . . It was easy to create a false identity,” the Vatican statement said.

Navarro rejected long-advanced assertions that the Vatican sheltered Nazis because it preferred them to Communists, then seen as the archenemies of the church. That, Navarro said, “is a fiction, which, doing violence to history, tries to deny Pius XII and the Vatican well-earned recognition as benefactors of uncounted thousands of people displaced in Europe as a result of the tragedy of World War II.”

Accusations of Vatican connivance to aid and abet fleeing Nazis in postwar chaos regularly surface. Vatican archives for the period are closed, despite requests from Jewish groups, most recently the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, for access to them.

But since the still unsubstantiated reports from Argentina, a procession of church officials and historians have told Italian newspaper and television interviewers that there is no evidence in church files to show that the Vatican as an institution wittingly aided fleeing war criminals.

What has been known for many years is that individual clerics and religious institutions did shelter fleeing Italian fascists and Nazis.

Alois Hudal, a bishop in Rome at the war’s end, was an unabashed Nazi supporter.

Perhaps the best-known hide-out for Nazis on the run was a convent on Via Sicilia near Rome’s Via Veneto.

In France, conspiring priests--monks to a cardinal--sheltered war criminal Paul Touvier for decades, according to the recent report of church-appointed investigators.

“The church has always given Christian help to people in distress, without discriminating among them,” Cardinal Achille Silvestrini told the newspaper La Repubblica.

During the German occupation of Rome, he said, some priests sheltered anti-fascists. After the war, “the situation was turned upside down. Some fascists, Nazis and their sympathizers were helped by priests or members of religious orders. But not by order of the Holy See,” Silvestrini said.