Argentina has announced a “discovery of global significance” after unearthing a store of documents from Nazi Germany sitting in decades-old champagne cases in the basement of the country’s Supreme Court.
On Monday, the Supreme Court of Argentina revealed that it has opened seven wooden champagne boxes containing Nazi propaganda, party membership documents, notebooks, pictures, and even postcards.
Wooden boxes labeled as Crillon champagne, where the documents were stored. Credit: Argentina Supreme Court.
An employee of the court, who made the initial discovery during preparations for a new museum, had opened one of the boxes and reported finding materials apparently “intended to consolidate and spread Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina, during World War II.”
The remaining six champagne boxes were opened on Friday at the court alongside members of the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires and the chief rabbi of the Amia Jewish community centre.
Investigators inspecting the inventory of the material found. Credit: Argentina Supreme Court
According to a press release from the Supreme Court, initial findings indicate that the boxes arrived in Argentina on June 20, 1941 alongside a shipment from the German embassy in Tokyo aboard the Japanese steamship “Nan-a-Maru”.
At the time, Nazi diplomats in Argentina claimed that the boxes merely contained personal items. However, concerned about the potential for neutral Argentina being drawn into the war, then-Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú seized the boxes.
Concerns were raised that the propaganda found in the boxes could also be used to damage the democracies of Argentina’s allies.
Judicial authorities and experts from the Holocaust Museum evaluate the state of the notebooks found and their possible historical connections. Credit: Argentina Supreme Court
Two months later, Customs and Foreign Ministry officials inspected five of the boxes, finding thousands of documents from the Nazi Party and red notebooks bearing the symbol of the German Labour Front, which replaced the independent trade unions in Germany during the Nazification of the country in the 1930s.
The documents were never returned to the German embassy and have remained, apparently untouched, in the Supreme Court’s basement until now.
Among the documents are postcards, photographs and propaganda material from the Nazi regime. Credit: Argentina Supreme Court
The president of the Supreme Court, Horacio Rosatti, said on Monday that given the “historical relevance” of the discovery, he has ordered an full investigation of the materials to search for any new information about the Holocaust or other unknown aspects of Nazi Germany, such as the proliferation of Nazi money internationally.
Following the Second World War, Argentina became a hotspot for Nazi sympathizers and officials to escape prosecution for their war crimes. High-ranking members of the regime, including ‘Angel of Death’ physician Josef Mengele, Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, and SS commander Erich Priebke, were among those who sought refuge in the Perónist nation.
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