New book claims that the Red Cross and the Vatican helped thousands of Nazi war criminals escape justice after World War II

As reported by Randy Boswell of Postmedia News on May 27, 2011:

A new book claims thousands of potential Nazi war criminals and collaborators escaped justice in the years after the Second World War with help from the Vatican and Red Cross, using false documents and altered identities to emigrate undetected to a host of haven countries - including Canada.

Gerald Steinacher, author of Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Escaped Justice, probes newly opened files from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other war-era archives to reconstruct the strategies of evasion and routes to freedom used by potential war-crimes suspects, including SS officers, National Socialist Party officials and other possible perpetrators of Holocaust-era atrocities.

As many as 8,000 ex-Nazis whose wartime activities should have been probed by Allied authorities reached Canada or Britain by questionable means, Steinacher found, though even more made their way through Italy to Spain or South America to live out their lives...

... In the case of Vatican authorities, Steinacher asserts that "many leaders of the Catholic Church - sometimes knowingly, at other times unwittingly - also were involved in large-scale Nazi smuggling. A key motive for the clergy was the need to fight against 'godless communism.' "

Steinacher added in the interview that because some ex-Nazis were "good Catholics" they were often treated sympathetically by the church and provided with letters of support or other help when they sought travel visas to emigrate overseas.