Uruguay has a large bronze Nazi eagle. It turns it into a dove.
A bronze Nazi eagle weighing about 700 pounds that once graced a German warship and became the subject of a court case in Uruguay in recent years will be melted down and turned into a dove, the South American nation’s president said Friday. would turn a symbol of “violence and war” into one of “peace and unity”.
In the midst of “times of division, times of violence, times of war in the world,” the president, Luis Lacalle Pou, said at a press conference in Montevideo that “the signal from our country to our people, to the outside world, is we are a society of peace, we are a society of unity and we put it into practice.”
The eagle — over six feet tall and with a wingspan of nearly nine feet, encircling a swastika with a wreath in its talons — was attached to the stern of the Admiral Graf Spee, a roughly 12,000-ton heavily armored cruiser built by Germany in the 1930. When the ship was damaged in one of the first major naval battles of World War II, the commander scuttled the ship in the Plata River shortly after a stop in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.
In 2006, the eagle was recovered off the Uruguayan coast after years of searching by a private company. But when those behind the recovery expedition tried to sell the eagle, the state decided to block any sale, fearing that the object could fall into the hands of anyone seeking to glorify Nazism.
Nearly eight decades after the violent end of the Nazi regime, most of the iconography has been destroyed or housed in museums. Other pieces of Admiral Graf Spee’s wreck — including a device used to measure distances and the warship’s anchor, both naval utilitarian objects with no Nazi iconography — are now on display in public spaces in Montevideo.
But the existence of such a large intact Nazi eagle posed a problem for Uruguay, which had kept the artifact in its naval storage. In 2019, a court ordered the government of Uruguay to sell the artifact and donate part of the money to the private salvage operation, a sale that the German government and Jewish groups warned against so that the object does not end up in the wrong hands.
A higher court overturned that decision and ultimately gave the state custody of the eagle.
Mr Lacalle Pou said on Friday that plans had been made to transform the eagle even before that court ruling.
Now Pablo Atchugarry, a renowned artist in Uruguay, has been selected to carry out the work. He is making a dove out of Italian marble that will serve as a model for the new metal bird, he said at the press conference. The whole process will take months, he said.
“This idea of transforming a symbol of hatred, war or atrocity into a symbol of peace – well, I feel very honored to be given the responsibility to undertake this task,” said Mr Atchugarry.
Mr Lacalle Pou described the decision to melt down the Nazi bird and make it into something new as a “step forward”.
“I’m sure no one wants a symbol on display that represents war and violence,” he said, adding that there was no point in leaving it in Navy storage for decades to come.
While he said the pigeon’s final location had not yet been determined, he suggested it could be Punta del Este, a coastal town where the Plata River meets the Atlantic Ocean.