A secret Nazi hideout may have been found in a distant jungle region of Argentina recently, according to the archaeologist who found the remains of three buildings near Paraguay.
The Argentine newspaper Clarin reported that researchers found not only the buildings in the Teyu Cuare park, but also five German coins minted between 1938 to 1941, as well as pieces of porcelain plates with an inscription indicating that they were made in Germany.
"Apparently, halfway through the second World War, the Nazis had a secret project to build shelters for top leaders in the event of defeat — inaccessible sites in the middle of deserts, in the mountains, on a cliff or in the middle of the jungle like this," Daniel Schavelzon, the
archaeologists' team leader, told The Guardian.
An Israeli commando team captured Adolf Eichmann, an organizer of the Holocaust, in Buenos Aires in 1960. Other Nazi leaders such as Joseph Mengele, Walter Kutschmann, Josef Schwammberger, Eduard Roschmann, and Wilfred Von Oven also reportedly sought refuge in Argentina.
"We can find no other explanation as to why anyone would build these structures, at such great effort and expense, in a site which at that time was totally inaccessible, away from the local community, with material which is not typical of the regional architecture,"
Schavelzon said, according to The Washington Post.
The 2002 book ''The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's Argentina'' reported that Argentina became a haven for Nazis trying to escape punishment. Uki Goñi, the book's Argentine journalist author, had to do much of his research in European archives after the government balked at a lot of his work.
Goni charged in the book that documents were found supporting the idea that Argentina at one time harbored nearly 300 war criminals from World War II.
"The documents indicate that the covert network was run directly from the presidential palace here by Rodolfo Freude, a German-Argentine who was one of Perón's
closest advisers," The New York Times wrote of Goni's book. "At the same time, Mr. Freude was both running Perón's propaganda apparatus and serving as director of the newly founded state intelligence service."