Secret Nazi artefact stash could be Mengele’s
ARGENTINA: Police are investigating whether an unprecedented find of Nazi artefacts, including personal effects once used by Adolf Hitler, were brought into Argentina by Josef Mengele, the infamous Holocaust physician and war crimes fugitive.
In a room at the end of a secret passage concealed behind a false bookcase, police in Buenos Aires stumbled upon the secret collection of 75 original Nazi objects.
Among them were a bust of Hitler, medals, a sculpture of a swastika-emblazoned eagle, a sinister device to measure the size of heads, and a magnifying glass used by Hitler.
Argentina’s security minister, Patricia Bullrich, said some pieces came with photographs showing Hitler using them, by way of grim authentication.
Investigators are now looking at how the secret stash ended up in the home of an antique dealer, who was being investigated for trading illicit artefacts from China and Egypt.
‘‘There are no precedents for a find like this. Pieces are stolen or are imitations. But this is original and we have to get to the bottom of it,’’ said Nestor Roncaglia, head of Argentina’s federal police.
The main theory held among investigators is that the objects were taken to Argentina by a highranking Nazi fugitive after World War II, when the South American country became a key refuge.
Mengele, who was known as the ‘‘Angel of Death’’ for his role in selecting victims at Auschwitz and performing horrific experiments on Jews and other prisoners, many of them children, arrived in Argentina in 1949.
During his time in Buenos Aires he lived in the district of Olivos, where two commercial properties belonging to the art dealer caught in possession of the Nazi hoard were also searched. While police in Argentina did not name any high-ranking Nazis to whom the objects might have belonged, Bullrich noted there were medical devices among the macabre collection.
‘‘There are objects to measure heads, which was part of the logic of the Aryan race idea,’’ Bullrich said.
Other high-profile Nazis who fled to Argentina were Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann and former SS commander Erich Priebke, who spent 50 years living peacefully in the Andean mountain resort town of Bariloche.
Both Eichmann and Mengele lived in the Buenos Aires area for around a decade. Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents near his home in the San Fernando district in 1960 before being put on trial in Israel.
Mengele moved to Paraguay in 1958 after being questioned by the police in Buenos Aires about accusations that he was practising as a doctor and performing abortions without a licence.
He eventually drowned while swimming at a beach in Brazil in 1979.