Boxes with Nazi material are found in the basement of the Argentina court after decades
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Employees who clean up the basement of the Supreme Court of Argentina recently made a surprising discovery. They found boxes filled with swastika stamped notebooks, propaganda material and other documents from the Nazi era.
The boxes had been stored there for more than eight decades, the court said, and were accidentally discovered because employees went through archives for the creation of a museum of the Supreme Court.
When opening the boxes, they found “material intended to consolidate and propagate the ideology of Adolf Hitler in Argentina during the peak of the Second World War,” said a declaration from the court in Spanish.
Last week, officials, researchers and members of the Argentinian Jewish community held a ceremony to open more of the boxes. The president of the court, Horacio Rosatti, ordered a complete overview of the material, given its historical meaning and “potentially crucial information that it could contain to clarify events with regard to the Holocaust,” the court said in his statement on Monday.
Jonathan Karszenbaum, the executive director of the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, participated in the formal opening on Friday. “I was shocked because of the volume,” he said, adding that he had not seen the contents of all the boxes.
The court has determined some details about the origin of the boxes. It said that the material on June 20, 1941 had arrived at the Japanese ship Nan-a-Maru in Argentina from the German embassy in Tokyo, when Argentina was officially neutral In the Second World War, and Japan was connected to Hitler Germany.
At the time, the German diplomatic mission in Argentina had designated the boxes as personal effects, the court said in the hope that they would easily pass customs. But the boxes were stopped by the Argentinian customs authorities and marked with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the country, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, about concern that allowing the content could endanger the neutrality of Argentina, the court said.
Argentinian officials opened some of the boxes in August 1941 and found propaganda material and other items from the Nazi regime. They also include thousands of red notebooks stamped with swastikas and names and addresses that seemed to belong to members of the Nazi party who lived outside of Germany.
German diplomats asked that the packages were sent back, the court said, but a federal judge in Argentina ordered the seizure of the material and referred the case to the Supreme Court of the country.
That is where the documents seem until this month, largely forgotten, largely forgotten.
The full meaning of the documents was still clear, said Mr. Karszenbaum. Researchers were planning to comb the red notebooks in the coming weeks.
While Argentina recorded thousands of Nazis and Nazi war criminals After the Second World War, the journey of the boxes reflects the efforts of the country to discourage the spread of Nazi ideology and membership before and during the war.
In May 1939, the public prosecutor of Argentina indicated That the activities of the local Nazi party in Argentina were an “insult to the Argentinian sovereignty” and “completely illegal and contrary to the Argentinian Constitution”. Members of the Nazi party in Germany were not allowed in nature to be attempted Argentinian citizens.
Mr. Karszenbaum said that he hoped that the further investigation into the content of the boxes would offer more information about Nazi activities in Argentina during the war, as well as the answer to another urgent question: “Why this hid for so many years?”
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