Several boxes containing Nazi propaganda material were discovered in the Argentine Supreme Court, 84 years after they were originally confiscated. According to the judicial body, the documentation had been shipped to Argentina in 1941 from the German embassy in Tokyo but was seized by local authorities upon discovering its contents. It remained long forgotten in the Supreme Court basement until the recent findings. .

The documents were discovered “by chance” by judiciary workers when moving material from the archive as part of works ahead of the creation of the Supreme Court’s museum, according to a press release. 

“When opening one of those boxes, [they] identified material destined to consolidate and spread Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina, when World War II was in full swing,” the release said.

Inside the wooden crates, the workers found photographs, postcards, propaganda material and thousands of notebooks that belonged to the Nazi party’s organization outside of Germany and the German Trade Union Confederation.

Photos released to the press show boxes containing notebooks with swastikas printed on the cover and what seems to be data cards with personal information and Argentine addresses.

According to the Supreme Court’s reconstruction based on historic documents, on June 20, 1941 the German embassy in Tokyo shipped 83 boxes to Argentina on board the Japanese steamship “Nan-a-Maru.” The German embassy in Argentina had stated they were personal effects belonging to diplomats and requested the boxes enter the country without being examined.

However, the Argentine customs office ordered the then Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú to intervene, suspecting “possible inconveniences” due to the number and “potential nature of the material, which could have affected the Argentine neutrality” during World War II, the statement said.

Around two weeks after the packages arrived in Argentina, representatives from the customs office, the Foreign Office and members of the Special Investigations Commissions on Anti-Argentine Activities opened five boxes at random and discovered the alarming contents.

While the German diplomats requested the boxes be handed to them so they could send them back to Tokyo, the Special Commission demanded the judiciary to stop this move on the grounds that they had “antidemocratic propaganda” and highlighted that “the German embassy had already lied to enter a radiotelegraphic transmitter as diplomatic mail,” the release said.

A federal judge ordered the material to be confiscated in September, 1941, and transferred the case to the Supreme Court. The material seems to have been forgotten in an underground floor at the Supreme Court building since then.

After their discovery, Supreme Court authorities ordered the preservation of the documents. Justice Horario Rosatti ordered the boxes to be transferred to an office on the fourth floor of the building with “intensified security measures.” On Friday, the boxes were opened in the presence of Rosatti and authorities from the AMIA Jewish community center, the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, and the Supreme Court, along with restorer María de la Paz Podestá.

“The goal is to carry out a detailed analysis to determine if the material has crucial information about the Holocaust,” the release said, “and whether the clues found in them can throw light on issues that remain unknown, such as the Nazi money route at a global level.”

In late April, the Argentine government released previously unseen documentation of Nazi criminals in Argentina to the general public. Presidential decrees ranging from 1957 to 2005 — including from dictatorship-era de facto governments — that were also classified are now available for all to read.

You may also be interested in: She survived Auschwitz. Then Argentina’s dictatorship took her child