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EASTON & LEVY
PRESS RELEASE
January 21, 2000
NEWS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
VATICAN BANK SUED OVER NAZI GOLD
On January 20, California attorneys Jon Levy and Tom Easton filed their First
Amended complaint in San Francisco. The original class action suit, filed last
November, named the Vatican Bank, Franciscan Order and other unidentified Swiss,
Austrian, Argentine, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and American banking
institutions as defendants and sought an accounting of the Nazi Ustashi gold and
restitution for the victims and their families.
The original class plaintiffs, four Ukrainian and Jewish concentration camp
survivors and two organizations representing (Union of Nazi Victims &
Prisoners, Organization of Antifascist Resistance Fighters) over 300,000
Holocaust survivors and slave laborers are now joined by three new class
plaintiffs.
First is class plaintiff Vladimir Brodich of Arizona, who was 9 years old in
1941 when the Ustashi took away and shot his Serbian father and brother and gang
raped his sister.
Second is class plaintiff William Dorich of California, who lost 17 relatives
when the Ustashi burnt alive 45 Serbian victims in the Orthodox Serbian Church
in Vojinic.
Third is class plaintiff Igor Najfeld of Vermont, who was born June 28, 1944,
the day his two Jewish physician parents escaped from slave labor in Bosnia to
join Tito's partisans, and whose mother had 56 relatives killed by the Ustashi,
some in the infamous Jasenovac extermination camp.
In addition, The Jasenovac Research Institute of Birmingham, Michigan has also
joined the effort to persuade the Vatican to open its archives and reveal the
truth of the "hidden holocaust" of World War Two.
More than 700,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and former Soviet Union citizens were
murdered and enslaved by the Nazi puppet regime of Croatia during World War II.
The Croatian Nazis, known as the Ustashi, burned villages and churches, operated
slave labor and concentration camps, and committed monstrosities that shocked
even hardened German observers. In a scenario shockingly similar to today's
Yugoslavia, atrocities were committed to cleanse "Greater Croatia" of
non-Roman Catholics. Hundreds of millions of dollars of gold, property, and
money was looted by the Ustashi from their victims.
The Ustash Treasury, with the connivance of the Vatican and other banks, was
secretly transferred out of Yugoslavia in 1944-45 and then used to assist
Croatian and Nazi war criminals to evade justice. Ante Pavelic, known as the
"Butcher of the Balkans" and leader of Nazi Croatia was given refuge
by the Vatican and later escaped to Argentina. The whereabouts of the Croatian
"blood" gold was a dark mystery until the publication in 1991 of
"Unholy Trinity" by Nazi hunters Mark Aarons & John Loftus.
As a result by 1998 even the US State Department was requesting that the Vatican
account for the looted gold and artifacts. Despite these requests from
government and Holocaust victims, the Vatican Bank and Holy See still refuse to
open their wartime archives. Restitution could reach hundreds of millions of
dollars which would be distributed to the tens of thousands victims of the
Ustashi Regime and their descendants.
The First Amended Class Action Complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in San
Francisco, C99-4941MMC.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Law Office of Thomas Dewey Easton
Jonathan H. Levy
PO Box 6080, Cincinnati OH 45206
(513) 528-0586 ~ resistk@yahoo.com
Tom Easton
1335 Pebble Beach Drive, Crescent City CA 95531
(707) 464-4513 ~ Fax: (707) 465-5389 ~ tomeaston@earthlink.net
ADDITIONAL MORBID INFORMATION AT~
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/dor.htm
http://www.serbianna.com/dorich/stories/00_01_21.html
