Dozens of boxes with National Socialist material, which were confiscated by the Argentine authorities during the Second World War, were recently rediscovered in the basement of the Supreme Court, the court said on Sunday.
The 83 boxes were sent by the German Embassy in Tokyo in June 1941 on board the Japanese steamship NAN-A-Maru, according to the story that the court could stay together, it said in a statement.
At that time, the big show attracted attention of the authorities’ attention, which feared that their content could influence the neutrality of Argentina in the war.
Despite the claims of German diplomatic representatives at the time, that the boxes held personal items, the Argentine customs authorities searched five boxes on the chance.
They found postcards, photographs and propaganda material from the NS regime and thousands of notebooks that belong to the NS party. A federal judge confiscated the materials and referred the matter to the Supreme Court.
It was not immediately clear why the objects were sent to Argentina or what measures the Supreme Court took at that time.
84 years later, the court employees came across the boxes when they prepared for a museum of the Supreme Court.
“After opening one of the boxes, we identified material that was intended to consolidate and spread Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina during the Second World War,” said the court.
The court has now transferred the boxes to a room that is equipped with additional security measures and invited the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires to take part in its preservation and inventory.
Experts will also examine you for references to still unknown aspects of the Holocaust, such as international financing networks used by the Nazis.
Argentina remained neutral in the Second World War until 1944 when relationships with axis powers broke. The South American country declared war on Germany and Japan the following year.
From 1933 to 1954, according to the Holocaust Museum of Argentina, 40,000 Jews entered Argentina when they fled in Europe through Nazi persecution. Argentina houses the largest Jewish population in Latin America.