The Nazi Heirloom That Embarrasses Uruguay – Foreign

He was not afraid battleships, because it was faster, and did not fear cruisers because it was more powerful: this, in short, the exceptionality of the “Pocket battleship” German Admiral Graf Spee, launched in 1934 after being built with cutting-edge measures to remain under the tonnage imposed by the Versailles treaties. A jewel of naval engineering: “light”, fast, but crowded with large-caliber guns (280 and 150 mm), even equipped with radar, an invention that the Germans wanted to share too late, in ’42, with their ally Italian. She was commanded by the highly decorated ship captain Hans Langsdorff and had the task of attacking the allied merchant ships like a pirate ship.
At the stern, the Spee was adorned with a large one bronze eagle, obviously resting on the classic swastika wreath. In February 2006, this “figurehead” was recovered from the wreck in the estuary in front of Montevideo in Uruguay both as a trophy and as a testimony of a historic event: the Battle of Río de la Plata, the first clash between the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine in the Second World War.
The battleship in fact, the German had set sail on August 21, 1939 from the port of Wilhelmshaven, and, as a privateer in the Atlantic, plundered and sank – without casualties – nine merchant ships. On 13 December she was spotted by three Royal Navy cruisers who, after a brief firefight, forced her to take refuge in the neutral port of Montevideo on 14 December. After 72 hours, the Uruguayan government forced the Spee to leave and Commander Landgraf decided to self-sink on the evening of December 17 in the estuary of the Río de la Plata. The officer would have committed suicide, shooting himself, after two days in a hotel in Buenos Aires, not before having wrapped himself in the flag of the German imperial navy.
After years of legal disputes, in December the Uruguayan Court of Appeal ordered the eagle to be auctioned, also to repay the divers who had recovered this and other parts of the wreck, including the famous rangefinder. The trial had been suspended due to fears that the 400-kilogram heirloom could be bought by Third Reich sympathizers, even if it’s not exactly cheap: in 2020 it was listed for $ 26 million. Despite the value, however, it risks coming to a bad end: an Argentine boating enthusiast, Daniel Sielecky, declared that he wanted to buy it, but… to make it explode, pulverizing even the smallest pieces so that nothing remains.
There is though it should be noted that the relic belongs to military history; in that figurehead of a warship, it is not an object of political propaganda. It would be like rescuing a famous Soviet Aeroflot plane and then destroying its rudder because it bears a winged hammer and sickle, symbol of an ideology guilty of 60 million deaths: for better or for worse, these objects are part of history.
Moreover, such an initiative would easily have the opposite effect, that is to contribute to surrounding with an irresistible “fascination of the forbidden” such memorabilia which, on the collector’s market, have already had skyrocketing prices for decades.
Rathersince the eagle is exactly the symbol of a military defeat of the Third Reich navy, if anything the Royal Navy should make an offer to buy it and exhibit it in one of its museums even if the battleship was not directly sunk by the British.
One thing is certain: iconoclasm is never favorably remembered by posterity.