A team of scientists from the Center for Urban Archeology (CAU) at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina traipsed to the jungle along the border of Paraguay to examine mysterious stone ruins in one of the most isolated portions of the country.
“This is a building that exists where it should not exist, built in a manner that it should not be built in, with an unexplainable purpose given what we know about the region,” said lead investigator and CAU director Daniel Schávelzon to the local media group Clarín after two weeks of digging.
The site is actually three buildings with three-foot thick stone walls and metal hinges deep in Teyú Cuaré park in the northern Misiones province.
Signage in the park states that the buildings were once the hideout of former Nazi bigwig, Martin Bormann, but Schávelzon calls that a “legend.”
The Misiones Ministry of Tourism admitted to Clarín that they weren’t sure when the signs were placed there or who is responsible for them.
But Schávelzon pointed out that none of items that have been excavated at the site—some porcelain marked “Made in Germany,” coins, broken bottles — is dated after World War II. He has a different theory.
“I think what we found is a place of refuge for the Nazi hierarchy," he said, while stressing that it was not a definitive conclusion.
Schávelzon told Clarín that the Nazis had “a secret project to build shelters where the top Nazis could hide after the defeat [of the Reich] — inaccessible places in the desert, on a mountain, on a cliff or in the middle of a jungle like this.”
The thick walls and the panoramic views that the buildings commanded, he believes, added to site’s attractiveness. “It is a defensible site, a protected site, an inaccessible place, a place to live in peace, a place of refuge,” he said. “This site also has the virtue that it allowed people to cross into Paraguay in less than 10 minutes.”
Argentina harbored a large number of Nazi criminals, and the CAU scientists believe that the officials who arrived in Argentina after the war quickly realized that they could live in the country without having to hide and wound up never needing the shelter.
Sergio Widder, the director of the Latin America office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Clarín that it seems possible that the Nazis may have thought about settling in isolated places like Teyú Cuaré, but that the theory requires further investigation.
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