Reports that archaeologists were examining stone buildings in the Argentinian jungle seemed to give new life to a second world war myth. Here’s the real story

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

As Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in the spring of 1945, Adolf Hitler and his new wife Eva Braun escaped from their underground Führerbunker through a secret tunnel.

Behind them, they left the bodies of two doubles murdered to fool the Allies into believing that the Nazi leader had taken his own life rather than admit defeat.

By the time victorious Red Army troops entered the bunker, Hitler was on board the last Luftwaffe plane to fly out of Europe, heading south on the long journey that would eventually take him to Argentina.

Or at least that’s the story.

Ruins found in remote Argentinian jungle 'may be secret Nazi hideout' Read more

The idea that senior Nazis escaped the collapse of the Third Reich to live out their days in the sweltering jungle of South America has long been a staple of fiction and “counterfactual” alternative histories.

This weekend, however, reports that archaeologists were examining three recently discovered stone buildings in the jungle of Argentina’s northern Misiones province seemed at last to provide evidence that the notion could have a base in fact.

“Apparently, halfway through the second world war, the Nazi air force

devised a secret project of building hideouts so that the highest-ranking Nazis could escape after their defeat – inaccessible sites in the middle of deserts, in the mountains, on a cliff or in the middle of the jungle like this,” Argentinian archeologist Daniel Schavelzon told the Buenos Aires daily Clarín on Sunday.

Schavelzon, who finances his digs with contributions from private funders, told the newspaper that he believed the ruins he was exploring in Teyú Cuaré national park were exactly that: a bolthole for Nazis on the run.

But the truth is a little more mundane. For a start, the dilapidated buildings were not recently “discovered” – they have actually been open to the public for decades, along with other ruins which date back to the 17th and 18th century settlements established by Jesuit missionaries – and which give the region its name. Not far from the “Nazi” site are the remains of San Ignacio Miní, a Baroque monastery which is one of the area’s most-visited tourist attractions.

At least 10 years ago, the local tourist board erected a sign on the path to the Teyú Cuaré site, saying that the ruins were originally part of a Jesuit site.

Below that, the sign makes the astounding claim: “In the 1950s they were refurbished and inhabitated by Hitler’s most faithful servant, Martin Bormann.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adolf Eichmann escaped to Argentina in 1950 before being caught by Israeli Mossad agents a decade later. Photograph: Dan Balilty/AP

The idea that Hitler’s deputy somehow escaped to Argentina is an integral part of the Nazis-in-South-America myth, and a key element of Ira Levin’s novel The Boys from Brazil and the 1978 movie of the same name.

The Bormann story is based on files sold by Argentinian police officers to Hungarian historian Ladislas Farago in the 1970s, but those files are widely held to be fakes. In 1998, DNA tests showed that bones recovered in Berlin were Bormann’s, confirming reports that Hitler’s secretary had been killed while fleeing the bunker on 2 May 1945.

In an interview with the Guardian, Schavelzon admitted that evidence linking the Teyú Cuaré ruins to a supposed Nazi safe haven plan is slim.

“There is no documentation, but we found German coins from the war period in the foundations,” he said.

But does a handful of old German coins provide sufficient proof of a secret Nazi hideaway plan in northern Argentina?

“That was just speculation on my part,” Schavelzon said. “The press picked it up and magnified it.”

And the discovery of second world war-era German coins in Misiones seems less surprising when you consider that Argentina has long been a destination for European immigrants, and that the country’s population includes about 3 million people of German descent.

One of the largest and oldest German communities is in the northern province of Misiones, founded by a large influx of German immigrants who arrived in the early 20th century.

Argentina did, of course, give refuge to some of the worst Nazi criminals, including Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.

Thousands of former SS officers and former Nazi party members were welcomed with open arms by Argentina’s then-president Juan Perón, who sent secret missions to Europe to rescue them from Allied justice between 1945 and 1950.

But they settled in comfortable suburban homes outside Buenos Aires, like the cozy chalet Eichmann lived in with his family at 4261 Chacabuco Street in the middle-class northern suburb of Olivos, where many other Nazi officers also settled.

Not in the steamy, damp, pre-Amazon jungles of northern Argentina.

Uki Goñi is the author of The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón’s Argentina.