Berliner Tageszeitung - Nazi files found in champagne crates in Argentine court basement

Seven crates containing postcards, photographs, Nazi propaganda, notebooks and party membership documents were found by staff in the process of moving non-digitized archive material, the court said Monday of the "discovery of global significance."

A staffer who peeped into one of the crates found material "intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler's ideology in Argentina," said a court statement.

The rest of the boxes were opened last Friday in the presence of the chief rabbi of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) and officials of the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum.

Argentina has the largest Jewish community in Latin America, but was also the preferred destination for several top Nazis who fled Germany after the wartime genocide of six million European Jews.

"Given the historical relevance of the find and the potential crucial information it could contain to clarify events related to the Holocaust, the president of the Supreme Court, Horacio Rosatti, ordered an exhaustive survey of all the material found," the court said.

"The main objective is to... determine if the material contains crucial information about the Holocaust and if any clues found can shed light on aspects still unknown, such as the route of Nazi money at a global level," it added.

The crates, sent from the German diplomatic mission in Japan to the embassy in Buenos Aires, arrived in Argentina in June 1941 on a Japanese cargo ship.

German diplomats in Argentina claimed they contained personal effects, but the shipment was held up by customs and became the subject of a probe by a special commission on "anti-Argentine activities."

A judge later ordered the seizure of the materials, and the matter ended up before the Supreme Court, which took possession of the crates.

After World War II, Argentina became a haven for Nazis -- thousands of whom are believed to have fled there, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights group.

They included top war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann -- considered a key architect of Hitler's plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. He was captured in Buenos Aires in 1960 and sent to Israel where he was tried and executed.

Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, too, hid away in Argentina before fleeing to Paraguay and later Brazil, where he died.

Argentina's Jewish population was the target of a bombing in 1994 of the AMIA center that killed 85 people and injured 300, just two years after the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires claimed 29 lives.

F. Dumont--BTZ