Nazi propaganda materials dating back to 1941 were discovered in the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court.
More than 80 boxes filled with documents from Nazi Germany have been discovered in the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court, decades after the crates were stashed in 1941.
The “discovery of global significance” came as workers were clearing out the area in preparation for transferring the archives to a newly-established museum, the court said in a statement on Monday.
The 83 boxes were sent by the German embassy in Japan’s capital Tokyo to Argentina in June 1941 on board the Japanese steamship “Nan-a-Maru”, the court statement said.
At the time, German diplomats in Argentina claimed they contained personal effects, but the shipment was held up by customs and became the subject of a probe by a special commission on “anti-Argentine activities”. A judge later ordered the seizure of the materials, and the matter ended up before the Supreme Court, which took possession of the crates.
About 84 years later, upon opening one of the boxes, the court identified material “intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina during the Second World War”.
The rest of the boxes were opened last Friday in the presence of the chief rabbi of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) and officials of the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum.
“Given the historical relevance of the find and the potential crucial information it could contain to clarify events related to the Holocaust, the president of the Supreme Court, Horacio Rosatti, ordered an exhaustive survey of all the material found,” the court said.
“The main objective is to … determine if the material contains crucial information about the Holocaust and if any clues found can shed light on aspects still unknown, such as the route of Nazi money at a global level,” it added.
Holocaust Museum in Argentina joins the investigation
The court has transferred the boxes to a room equipped with extra security measures and invited the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires to participate in their preservation and inventory.
Experts will examine them for any clues about still-unknown aspects of the Holocaust, such as international financing networks used by the Nazis.
Argentina remained neutral in World War II until 1944. The South American country declared war on Germany and Japan the following year. From 1933 to 1954, according to the Holocaust Museum, 40,000 Jews entered Argentina as they fled Nazi persecution in Europe.
But after World War II, Argentina, led by President Juan Peron, became a haven for several high-ranking Nazi officials.
They included Adolf Eichmann, who was considered a key architect of Hitler’s plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews. He was captured in Buenos Aires in 1960 and taken to Israel, where he was tried and executed.
Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, too, hid away in Argentina before fleeing to Paraguay and later Brazil, where he died.