In a chance discovery, Argentina’s top court has found dozens of boxes of Nazi material confiscated by authorities during World War II.
“Upon opening one of the boxes, we identified material intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina during the Second World War,” the Supreme Court Museum said in a statement on May 12.
The discovery came to light while archives were being relocated in preparation for a new Supreme Court Museum.
Among the documents found were postcards, photographs, propaganda material for the German regime, and thousands of notebooks belonging to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party Organization Abroad and the German Trade Union.
The current President of the Supreme Court, Horacio Rosatti, has ordered an exhaustive review of all the material found after its initial preservation.
The court was able to piece together some of its history, it said.
The 83 boxes were sent by the German embassy in Tokyo to Argentina in June 1941 aboard the Japanese steamship Nan-a-Maru.
The embassy had then declared their contents as personal belongings and asked that they be cleared without inspection.
Instead, Argentina’s Customs and Ports Division halted the shipment and warned the foreign minister at the time that the volume and nature of the materials might jeopardize the country’s neutrality during WWII.
In response, the Special Investigative Commission on Anti-Argentine Activities, created by the Chamber of Deputies and active from 1941 to 1943, stepped in.
Its president demanded a full report on the Tokyo shipment.
On Aug. 8, 1941, customs officials and Foreign Ministry representatives randomly opened five boxes and found postcards, photographs, and propaganda material from the Nazi regime.
When German diplomats asked for the crates to be returned so they could resend them to Tokyo, the commission went to court to stop them, arguing that the examined materials contained anti-democratic propaganda harmful to Argentina’s Allied nations.
They also pointed out that the embassy had already smuggled in a radio-telegraph transmitter under diplomatic cover.
A federal judge then ordered the entire shipment to be seized on Sept. 13, 1941, and three days later sent the case to the Supreme Court.
Eight decades later, during the museum-preparation move, those same crates were rediscovered gathering dust in the basement.
Nazi Operations in Argentina
Earlier this year, the Argentinian government, under the Javier Milei administration, made available to all citizens a series of declassified documents that include information on Nazi operations in Argentina.“Most of them would end up living their lives there, sometimes without even changing their names. Others, like Adolf Eichmann or Klaus Barbie, were eventually caught by the Mossad or Nazi hunters,” it said.
In 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal center, named after the Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, released a list of some 12,000 names of Nazis in Argentina, many of whom had Swiss bank accounts.
At least 14 of those accounts remained open into the 21st century, some even as recently as 2020.
As a result of the committee’s investigation, Credit Suisse said it pledged to further investigate its potential role in supporting Ratline activities.
