Guy Walters

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73 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard yesterday

Guy Walters’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Forbidden History · Secrets of the Vatican: Inside the Archives | The Visual Edition · 24 Sep 2026 podcast

There's this long-standing story that says the Vatican helped Nazis escape after the war.

Why?

Because a lot of Catholic priests were historically quite sympathetic to Nazism because they saw Nazism as being the only force in the world that could stand up to communism, which they thought represented an existential threat to the Catholic Church.

So it was kind of like, you know, my enemy's enemy is my friend.

I went to the archives of the Santa Maria dell'Anima, which is the Austrian church associated with the Vatican, and there you see the records of a man called Bishop Alois Houdal, Luigi Houdal.

He was an Austrian nationalist, loved the Nazis, and you have got there letters written to him by the lights of Franz Stangel.

Now you may not know Franz Stengel, but he's one of the biggest mass murderers.

of the 20th century because he was the commandant of Treblinka extermination camp and under his time murdered an estimated 850,000 people.

And he is writing to a bishop associated with the Vatican saying, please can you help me get out?

If you're being vouched for by a bishop today, that still carries a lot of weight, doesn't it?

And so a lot of these Nazis, they would make their way through what was the Third Reich, down over the Alps, into Italy, and they would go to Rome, they would knock on the door of Bishop Houdal, and he would give them a Red Cross passport.

Then they would take a boat to that most favoured Nazi retirement destination, Argentina.

The interesting thing about the whole story of the Vatican Bank, uh corruption, it's all mixed up with the Byzantine world of the mafia and Italian politics.

You can't imagine a more conspiratorial society in the world than Italy.

The Italians are absolutely obsessed with conspiracy theory, and they always assume, you know, the worst behind any story, and they always assume that everybody

is corrupt.

You know, they're probably right.

I'm sure that there's some really exciting stuff in the Secret Archive.

And and which historian wouldn't want to have the key to it?

You know, God I would.

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