MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Nazi materials found in Argentine Main Courthouse Building

The boxes were found in the basement, where non-digitized documentation is stored

Hundreds of Nazi documents, membership cards, and propaganda materials were discoovered in the Argentine Supreme Court's (CSJN) archives last week, in was reported in Buenos Aires during the weekend.

The items belonged to a 1941 German diplomatic shipment aboard the Japanese-flagged steamship Nan-a-Maru from Tokyo that was intercepted by Argentine Customs carrying out a raid in search of materials that could compromise the South American country's neutrality during World War II.

Among the pieces retrieved were National Socialist German Workers' Party and German Guilds Union materials, which are now being inventoried to determine their potential link to the Holocaust or local Nazi activities.

Assisting the CSJN are Buenos Aires' Shoah Museum and the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA).

A total of seven boxes were found by chance at the main Courthouse Building as the CSJN was doing some research to create a Museum of the Judiciary.

Chief Justice Horacio Rosatti participated last Friday in the opening of the boxes alongside members of the Jewish community. In principle, the findings were believed to be intended “to consolidate and propagate the ideology” of Nazism.

When the diplomatic shipment arrived in Buenos Aires, then Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú was alerted about “possible inconveniences given the quantity and potential nature of the material, which could affect Argentina's neutrality in the face of the war,” the CSJN explained.

President Roberto Marcelino Ortiz (1938-1942) had issued a decree in September 1939 declaring Argentina's neutrality.

The Lower House's Special Commission for the Investigation of Anti-Argentine Activities functioned between 1941 and 1943, chaired by Congressman Raúl Damonte Taborda.