Argentina has sought in the basement of the Supreme Court and something very Argentine has been found: Nazi material

Argentina has maintained a somewhat complex relationship with the legacy of Nazism. During World War II, the country adopted a Neutrality position that allowed him to maintain “mixed” diplomatic ties, although he also took measures to stop the Nazi propaganda in his territory. However, after the conflict, the nation He became a refuge of numerous leaders and collaborators of the Nazi regime that fled from Europe, many With false documentation and under the protection of clandestine networks. Today, more than half a century later, someone has found another thread with Nazism … in the catacombs of the Supreme Court.

An accidental finding. In the basement of the Supreme Court of Argentina, while organizations were carried out for the creation of an institutional museum, the operators randomly with something strange, several forgotten boxes for more than eighty years. The content, however, turned out to be an unexpected historical weight: notebooks stamped with Spastics, Nazi propaganda and other documents of the third Reich destined to disseminate the ideology of Adolf Hitler in Argentina in full boom of World War II.

The finding, confirmed by the Supreme Court itself In a statementhighlighted the potential relevance of the materials to clarify episodes linked to the holocaust. In a recent ceremony, researchers, officials and representatives of the Argentine Jewish community formally opened part of the content, which includes thousands of red notebooks with Nazi symbols and registers of names and addresses that could correspond to members of the National Socialist Party outside Germany.

The shipment that did not achieve its mission. Apparently, preliminary investigation allowed to track the origin of the boxes until the German embassy in Tokyospace from which it was sent to Buenos Aires on the Japanese ship Nan-A-Maru on June 20, 1941, when Argentina maintained a neutrality posture formal in the global conflict. The cargo was declared as personal effects by German diplomats in order to overcome customs controls.

However, the Argentine authorities They detected their content And, concerned about the political implications of admitting Nazi propaganda, they sent the matter to the then Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú. In August of that same year, Argentine officials opened some of the boxes and confirmed their propaganda character. Despite the German request that they were returned, a federal judge ordered his seizure and the transfer of the file to the Supreme Court, a space where the materials were archived and forgotten for decades.

Argentine context in Nazism. We already said it at the beginning. Although the subsequent history made Argentina one of the more noticeable shelters Nazis and war criminals after the fall of the third Reich, the discovery of these boxes sheds new light on the efforts (previous and during the country’s conflict) to curb the ideological and organizational infiltration of national socialism.

Already in 1939, the Argentine Attorney General had declared illegal and unconstitutional The activities of the local Nazi party, pointing them as an affront to national sovereignty. Likewise, it was forbidden that members of the German Nazi party access Argentine citizenship, showing an early will to cut any formal roots channel of the roots of the Hitlerism In the country.

A time capsule. He counted In the New York Times Jonathan Karszenbaum, director of the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires, that the volume of the documents found is overwhelming. Although the entire content has not yet been examined, the thorough analysis of the notebooks is expected to provide concrete clues about The network of supporters and Nazi operators in Latin America during the war.

The most disturbing question, however, is how and why This material remained hidden for more than eighty years in the heart of the Argentine Judiciary, a key institution of the Republic. The rediscovery, with all its symbolism, raises a unique opportunity to clarify dark chapters of the country’s history and reaffirm an institutional commitment to truth, memory and justice.

Image | Supreme Court of Argentina

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