By Leila Miller
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) -The Supreme Court official had a secret to share when he called Eliahu Hamra, the rabbi of Argentina’s main Jewish community center, one night around the turn of the year.
The court had found a dozen boxes of Nazi documents in its basement archive containing photos of Hitler as well as thousands of red Nazi labor organization membership booklets stamped with the swastika of the Third Reich. Silvio Robles, chief of staff to the court’s president, wanted the rabbi’s advice about how to handle the discovery, Hamra recalled.
It was an uncomfortable subject for Argentina, home to Latin America’s largest Jewish community, but also notorious for giving refuge to dozens of Nazi war criminals after World War Two.
Hamra said he told Robles the court could face awkward questions about how the Nazi material came to be in its basement.
“I warned him to take into account that this could leave a stain on them,” Hamra said in an interview with Reuters.
The conversation with the rabbi was an important early step in a coordinated effort between the Supreme Court and Jewish community leaders to bring the trove of documents to light.
The find surfaced at a time when Argentina is demonstrating new readiness to look back at its complicated history with Nazis in the war era.
President Javier Milei, who has shown a personal interest in Judaism and strong support for Israel, in April opened up access to Nazi documents, uploading hundreds of de-classified documents online. “The Argentine government is committed to bringing these issues to light,” said Emiliano Díaz, a spokesperson for Milei’s government.
Argentina remained neutral during the conflict until March 1945 when it declared war on Germany.
After the Allied victory, many Holocaust survivors emigrated to Argentina. So did Nazi war criminals Adolf Eichmann, the chief organizer of the massacre of Jews during the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, an Auschwitz death camp doctor who performed experiments on prisoners, granted entry by the Juan Perón government.
Even decades later, this history made the Supreme Court tread carefully around the discovery. It declined to answer written questions from Reuters on the finding or to allow the news agency to see the booklets.
The court has said it discovered the boxes during preparations for a new Supreme Court museum. But the Nazi documents had been seen sporadically in the court’s archives since the 1970s, according to interviews with three judiciary employees and a private attorney with direct knowledge of the matter.
Reuters could not determine why the trove of documents was not made public until now.
“Nazis in Argentina set in motion many feelings,” said Argentine historian Germán Friedmann.
‘DON’T TOUCH’
The basement archives housed in the large stone building of Argentina’s Supreme Court contain hundreds of thousands of legal case files. It’s easy to imagine that something could get lost.
The Nazi materials were rediscovered in a room storing broken furniture, according to two judiciary officials. Robles, alerted to the find, then reached out to Hamra, the rabbi.
And on May 9, Hamra, Jonathan Karszenbaum, the director of the local Holocaust museum and himself the grandson of survivors, and Horacio Rosatti, the president of the court, gathered in a judge’s chamber to watch workers pry open the wooden crates.
“I couldn’t register even my own sensations because of the strangeness of the moment,” said Karszenbaum.
The court announced the find two days later.
It later said the discovery included 5,000 membership booklets from the German Labor Front and the German Association of Trade Unions, both Nazi labor organizations.
But some people who worked in the archives have long known about the boxes of Nazi material.
One archive employee said he saw the boxes in the same storage room about a decade ago, and caught a glimpse of booklets with German names in a partially opened box.
In the early 1970s, Alberto Garay, now an attorney and constitutional law expert in Buenos Aires, was visiting a friend who worked at the archives. He spotted a pile of red notebooks, imprinted with swastikas and bundled together with string, on the floor, he said.
“I was surprised and said, ‘what do you have here?'” Garay recalled. “He said, ‘don’t touch'”.
A SHIP AND A RAID
According to the Supreme Court, the material arrived in Argentina in 1941 aboard a Japanese vessel, part of a shipment of 83 packages from the German embassy in Tokyo. The cargo was impounded by customs agents because of concerns it could damage Argentina’s war neutrality, the court said.
But for local historian Julio Mutti, whose work focuses on Nazis in Argentina, that sounded implausible. In a May 15 article, Mutti suggested the court had conflated two events that occurred a month apart: the arrival of the Japanese ship and a raid on underground Nazi organizations.
Argentina was home to about 250,000 German-speakers at the outbreak of World War Two. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, more than 10,000 people filled a Buenos Aires stadium to celebrate, causing alarm among locals.
In 1939, Argentina’s president dissolved the local branch of the Nazi party. Two years later, in 1941, Argentina’s congress created a commission to investigate Nazi activities in the country. When the Nan A Maru docked in Buenos Aires, the commission asked the foreign ministry to intervene, according to a Reuters review of reports in La Prensa, a popular Argentine daily at the time.
Inspectors opened five packages, finding propaganda, La Prensa reported. Searches of the remaining 78 packages revealed mostly children’s books, magazines and envelopes with war photographs. There was no mention of membership booklets.
Reuters was unable to determine what happened to the impounded cargo.
Around this time, the commission was also investigating whether the banned Nazi party and the German Labor Front were continuing to operate underground.
On July 23 – a month after the arrival of the Japanese ship – the authorities raided the offices of the German Association of Trade Unions and the Federation of German Beneficence and Cultural Clubs, fronts for the banned Nazi labor organization and party, seizing thousands of red membership booklets, according to La Prensa.
The booklets were stored in the Supreme Court, La Prensa reported.
Mutti, who learned about the raids through archival research in 2016, had searched for the notebooks in the court building, eventually concluding they had been incinerated to make space in the archive.
When news broke of the discovery of the red booklets in the basement, ”I immediately realized where they came from,” he said.
In June, the Supreme Court said it was digitizing and cataloguing the materials, and released photos of workers in masks and hairnets poring over the find.
For now, it’s unclear what the rediscovered booklets will reveal. Four historians told Reuters it’s unlikely the notebooks will yield information not already uncovered by the wartime commission.
Holger Meding, a historian at the University of Cologne, didn’t expect the booklets would radically change historians’ understanding of Nazi activities in Argentina. But, he said, “for historians, every piece of the mosaic is important.”
(Reporting by Leila Miller; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Suzanne Goldenberg)
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