Alperin V. Vatican Bank - Historical Context

Historical Context

The Ustaše hiding in Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome (the Croatian Seminary near the Vatican) brought a large amount of looted gold with them; this was later moved to other Vatican extraterritorial property and/or the Vatican Bank. Although this gold would be worth hundreds of thousands of 2008 US dollars, it constituted only a small percentage of the gold looted during World War II, mostly by the Nazis. According to Phayer, "top Vatican personnel would have known the whereabouts of the gold".

The lawsuit was made possible by a 1997 executive order of Bill Clinton that directed all branches of the US government to open their World War II records to scrutiny. The order came in the aftermath of evidence that Swiss banks were destroying evidence of deposit records by Jews and "pressured other countries to follow the U.S. example". Fourteen European nations, Canada, and Argentina followed suit, but Vatican City did not, despite U.S. pressure. Much of the evidence that has come to light since the executive order was not available to the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold before it disbanded, although Yugoslavia was among the recipients of restitution.