Under rather serendipitous circumstances, a dozen wooden crates have been found early this month in the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court building, containing information pertaining to Germany’s Nazi party and its ties with the South American nation.
As reported originally by the Argentinian newspaper El Clarín, the odd unlabeled boxes were first noticed during a remodeling job to prepare for a future museum for the Supreme Court, and when one of them was opened it was found to contain historical documents from the early 1940s—hundreds of passports, affiliation cards to the Nazi party in Argentina and other Nazi-related organizations, alongside photos of Hitler and other Fascist propaganda.
Realizing the potential historical significance of their find, the Court staff alerted the authorities, who also involved the Holocaust Museum in Argentina, asking them to collaborate scanning, cataloguing and preserving the papers. Only a few of the crates have already been carefully opened, and the digitization of their contents will take many weeks.
As for how the crates got there in the first place, it is currently believed they originally arrived on June 20th, 1941, on board a Japanese boat, the Nan-a-Maru. The German embassy in Argentina had tried to smuggle the crates inside the country by declaring them as ‘personal effects’ under protection via diplomatic immunity, but the Argentine customs authorities at the time decided to confiscate them, out of concern they might contain material that could compromise their nation’s neutrality position in the war fought in Europe (Argentina would only declare war to the Axis until 1944).
Furious with the confiscation, the Germans demanded the crates to be returned back to Japan, and so they were kept stored while a special commission to analyze ‘anti-Argentinian’ activities was established, and the legal dispute over their ownership was settled; but the procedure was abruptly interrupted by 1943 when Argentina suffered one of their many military coup d’etats. Thus, the boxes were eventually forgotten and lost—until now.
While it is still too early to say, the files may help researchers uncover new clues on how Nazis managed to establish secret financial relationships with allies in Argentina—there were around 12,000 sympathizers affiliated to the party in that country at the time (descendants of Germans of Austrians who had emigrated before the war) and in 1938 there was a political rally in support of Hitler at the Luna Park stadium in Buenos Aires that gathered nearly 20,000 attendees, the biggest pro-Nazi assembly outside of Germany—and how they later used these connections after the Third Reich was defeated, to help SS officials and scientists escape into South America, like notorious war criminals Adolf Eichmann (who was captured by Mossad and executed in Israel in 1962) and Josef Mengele (who died in Brazil in 1979).
These Nazi relationships with industrialists during and after the war are often overlooked and should be studied more closely, because they could help us understand how the Nazi ideologies managed to secretly influence international trade agreements and policies in the XXth century.
(And, as researchers like Jacques Vallée have suggested, there may also be a link between post-war Nazi undercurrents, and the shaping of the public perception of the UFO phenomenon. Tom DeLonge’s handlers inside the Pentagon, for example, were hard bent on exploiting the former UFO spokesperson’s celebrity status in order to propagate the mythology of hidden Nazi bases in Antarctica. Aren’t you all curious to know why?)
