Boxes of Nazi material are found after decades in basement of Argentina court

Workers clearing out the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court made a startling discovery recently. They found boxes filled with swastika-stamped notebooks, propaganda material and other Nazi-era documents.

The boxes had been stored there for more than eight decades, the court said, and were uncovered by accident because workers were going through archives for the creation of a Supreme Court Museum.

Upon opening the boxes, they found “material intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina, during the height of World War II,” according to a statement from the court in Spanish.

Last week, officials, researchers and members of the Argentine Jewish community held a ceremony to open more of the boxes. The court’s president, Horacio Rosatti, ordered a full survey of the material given its historical significance and “potentially crucial information it could contain to clarify events related to the Holocaust,” the court said in its statement Monday.

Jonathan Karszenbaum, the executive director of the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, participated in the formal opening Friday. “I was shocked because of the volume of this,” he said, adding that he had not seen the contents of all of the boxes.

The court has determined some details about the origin of the boxes. It said the material had arrived in Argentina from the German Embassy in Tokyo on June 20, 1941, on the Japanese ship Nan-a-Maru, when Argentina was officially neutral in World War II, and Japan was allied with Hitler’s Germany.

Argentine officials opened some of the boxes in August 1941, finding propaganda material and other items from the Nazi regime. They also included thousands of red notebooks stamped with swastikas and names and addresses that appeared to belong to members of the Nazi party living outside Germany.

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