Large collection of Nazi artefacts found in a secret room in Buenos Aires
Around 75 objects were found in a collector’s home in Beccar, which authorities suspect are originals belonging to Nazi officials during World War II.
A large collection of Nazi artefacts, including a bust of Third Reich leader Adolf Hitler, have been found by the police in a hidden room in a house near Buenos Aires, reported The Guardian. In a raid conducted on June 8, around 75 objects were found in a collector’s home in Beccar, a suburb north of the Argentinian Capital, which, authorities suspect, are originals belonging to high-ranking Nazi officials during World War II.
“Our first investigations indicate that these are original pieces,” Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said on Monday. She said that many pieces were accompanied by old photographs. “This is a way to commercialise them, showing that they were used by the horror, by the Fuhrer. There are photos of him with the objects.”
The objects found included magnifying glasses inside elegant boxes with swastikas, a statue of the Nazi Eagle above a swastika and even a medical device used to measure the size of heads. Bullrich said toys that would have been used to indoctrinate children were also found.
The police is now trying to determine how these artefacts entered Argentina and came to be in the room hidden behind a library in the house, she said.
After the end of World War 2, Argentina became a refuge for fleeing Nazi war criminals. The main hypothesis among investigators is that the artefacts were brought to Argentina by the high-ranking Nazi officials.
While the police did not name any high-ranking Nazi officials to whom these objects might have belonged, Bullrich pointed out that there were medical devices found. “There are objects to measure heads that was the logic of the Aryan race,” she said.
While leading members of the Third Reich were put on trial for war crimes, Josef Mengele, who was the leading physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, fled to Argentina after the war and lived in Buenos Aires for close to a decade. After the Israeli Mossad agents managed to capture Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires, Mengele, who was known as the “Angel of Death” during World War II, moved to Paraguay. He later died in Brazil in 1979.