Twelve wooden boxes cornered for more than 80 years in the subsoil of the Palace of Courts of Buenos Aires open a new door to the Nazi past of Argentina. They contained hundreds of affiliate notebooks to the Nazi party abroad, passports and documents and propaganda material of the Adolf Hitler regime during World War II. The Supreme Court of Justice reported Monday through a statement that the finding occurred “fortuitously” during the preparation works of the future museum of this judicial body.
According to the reconstruction made by the highest Argentine court, the boxes were sent by the German embassy in Tokyo aboard the Japanese ship Nan-A-Maru and entered the port of Buenos Aires on June 20, 1941. The diplomatic representation declared its content as “personal effects” to avoid inspection, but failed. Customs stopped the cargo and warned the Foreign Ministry “about the nature of the material, which could affect Argentine neutrality to the European conflict.”
When reviewing the boxes, Argentine officials found propaganda material of the German regime, photographs, postcards and thousands of notebooks: some belonging to the organization of the German National Workers’ National Socialist Party abroad and others to the German union of guilds, sympathizing with Nazism. The latter, red, had a swastika surrounded by a gear in the lid. Envelopes with documents with the same logo and files with names, surnames and affiliation numbers also appeared.
The Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires is in charge of digitizing the information found and investigating it. “The most relevant is the volume of documentary material found,” says the museum’s executive director Jonathan Karszenbaum. This specialized human rights political scientist witnessed the opening of the first boxes last Friday. “You have to wait for digitalization to end,” he adds cautiously. Although the most accepted hypothesis about the origin of the documentation is that of the German embassy in Tokyo, Karszenbaum does not consider it definitive for now.
In 2020, the researcher Pedro Filipuzzi found a list with the names of 12,000 Nazi supporters in Argentina. It is possible that many of the notebooks found in the boxes correspond to that list. “The names were known, the new information is the notebook itself,” emphasizes the executive director of the Holocaust Museum.
Support among the German community
“They were affiliated with the Nazi party, which we understand that they were German speakers in the country, descendants of Germans or Austrians,” says Karszenbaum. The support of the Führer in that community was reflected in mass acts such as the one held in 1938 at the Luna Park Stadium in Buenos Aires, which was attended by about 20,000 people. That support, however, was not unanimous. “On the same day of the event at Luna Park there was a countermarcha in San Martín Square,” he sets as an example.
Karszenbaum doubts that the notebooks belong to war criminals for the historical moment to which they belong: “In 1941 the perspective in Germany was of triumph, they were not escaping.” The context changed after the defeat of the axis, in 1945. At the end of that decade, several Nazi bosses crossed the Atlantic Ocean escaping justice. Among the criminals who hid in Argentina, Adolf Eichmann is, considered the brain of the Holocaust, and the ruthless medical Josef Mengele.
Among the material found there are stamps that indicate economic contributions and researchers believe that it could shed light on the known as Nazi money route in Argentina. “It is very soon to know if there is evidence, for now it is a conjecture that has been sustaining,” says Karszenbaum.
According to the Supreme Court, German diplomatic representatives tried to recover the boxes seized in Argentina. They requested that they be returned to their embassy in Tokyo, but the Special Commission of Anti Argentinas Activities of the Chamber of Deputies stopped them in Justice. The Commission said it was “anti -democratic and harmful propaganda for the allied nations of Argentina in the already examined material” and warned that the German embassy had already lied previously when trying to enter a radiographic transmitter as a diplomatic mail.
Justice denied at that time the repatriation of the material, but the investigation fell in the dead man after the coup d’etat that occurred in Argentina on June 4, 1943 against the president, the military Ramón Castillo. The regime led by the group of United Officers, among whom was Juan Domingo Perón, closed the Congress and the Investigative Commission ceased to exist. The track on the content of the boxes was lost until this 2025 is reappeared by chance.
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