Deep in Argentina’s lush northern jungle, archaeologists have discovered the ruins of what may have originally been a Nazi safe haven.
Researchers from the University of Buenos Aires decided to investigate the site, located near the Paraguay border in the province of Misiones, where local legend has it that Adolf Hitlers’s private secretary, Martin Bormann once lived.
The archaeologists dismissed Bormann’s residency as untrue, saying Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tests on a skeleton found in Berlin prove that he committed suicide there and never even arrived in South America.
Three separate buildings with notably different structures from that which was common in the area at the time, in addition to German coins and a piece of a German porcelain plate from the mid-20th century have led the investigators to believe that while Bormann never lived there, it was in fact built as a potential refuge for high-ranking Nazis fleeing Germany at the end, or near the end, of World War II.
“So far where we are working we found a porcelain plate, European porcelain from Germany, and it’s interesting because the only fragment of domestic life, of the table, that we have found says ‘Made in Germany’, it’s from the 20th century, not even the 19th. We have found a variety of coins which are all dated, almost all of them, from the ’40s, the first part of the ’40s, a bunch of other objects in pieces, even pieces of the chalkboards the children used to take to school. But all of this approximately from the mid-20th century,” explained Schavelzon.
Schavelzon said the remote border location made it an ideal refuge for eluding authorities, but explained that Nazis probably never ended up using the hideout since they could live freely in Argentine towns and cities following the war.
“It’s a defendable site, a protected site, an inaccessible site, where you can live peacefully in hiding. We believe we have found a refuge for the Nazi hierarchy,” he said.
Adolf Eichmann, a leading Holocaust architect, and Josef Mengele, the doctor of the Auschwitz death camp nicknamed the “Angel of Death” were among the large number of fugitive Nazis who were harbored by Argentina after the war.
(Reuters)
