Buenos Aires (Reuters) -Dizens of Nazi equipment boxes confiscated by the Argentinian authorities during the Second World War was recently rediscovered in the basement of the Supreme Court, the court announced on Sunday.
The 83 boxes were sent by the German Embassy to Tokyo to Argentina in June 1941 aboard the Japanese steam “Nan-A-Maru”, according to the history that the court was able to reconstruct, he said in a statement.
At the time, the great expedition drew the attention of the authorities, who feared that its content could affect Argentina's neutrality in the war.
Despite the allegations at the time of German diplomatic representatives that the boxes had personal objects, the Argentine customs authorities searched five boxes at random.
They found postcards, photographs and propaganda equipment from the Nazi regime, as well as thousands of notebooks belonging to the Nazi party. A federal judge confiscated the documents and referred the case to the Supreme Court.
It was not immediately clear why the articles had been sent to Argentina or what, if necessary, measures that the Supreme Court took at the time.
Eighty-four years later, court employees fell on the boxes while they were preparing for a Museum of the Supreme Court.
“By opening one of the boxes, we have identified material intended to consolidate and propagate the ideology of Adolf Hitler in Argentina during the Second World War,” the court said.
The court has now transferred the boxes to a room equipped with additional security measures and invited the Holocaust museum to Buenos Aires to participate in their preservation and inventory.
Experts will also examine them for any index on the still unknown aspects of the Holocaust, such as the international financing networks used by the Nazis.
Argentina remained neutral during the Second World War until 1944, when it broke up relations with the powers of the axis. The country of South America declared war on Germany and Japan the following year.
From 1933 to 1954, according to the Holocaust museum, 40,000 Jews entered Argentina when they fled Nazi persecution in Europe. Argentina is home to the largest population of Jews in Latin America.
(Report by Walter Bianchi and Miguel Lo Bianco; writing by Daina Beth Solomon; edition by Lincoln Feast.)
