Wreck of German U-Boat Found off Argentina: Could Have Helped Nazis Escape AFter WW2?

Furious row breaks out as suspected German U-boat which could have helped Nazis flee to Argentina after the Second World War is found off the coast of South America

• The 262ft-long wreck was found off the coast of Quequen, in central Argentina
• Opposition leaders accuse president Alberto Fernandez of 'stalling' probe into it

A furious political row has broken out in Argentina over the wreck of a suspected German U-boat which may have been used by Nazi leaders to flee at the end of the Second World War.

The 262ft-long wreck was discovered off the coast of Quequen, a port in central Argentina, last October. 

The cliffs there are ideal for signalling small boats of the sort that might have brought people ashore.

Local legend says that policeman Luis Mariotti went to investigate reports of submarines landing there in 1945.

He followed truck tracks from the beach to a Nazi owned ranch, where men with machine guns prevented him from entering.

When he asked for further instructions from his superiors, Mariotti was told to forget the whole matter.

Abel Basti, 66, leader of the Missing Link research group, which discovered the submarine, has suggested that it may have been scuttled with explosives after helping prominent Nazis escape to Argentina.

The Mail on Sunday was this week shown a confidential 24-page document sent by opposition leaders to Argentine president Alberto Fernandez accusing him of 'stalling' the official probe. 

Opponents claim his Justicialist Party – which supports the politics of former president Juan Peron – is attempting to cover up the potential embarrassment. 

The 262ft-long wreck was discovered off the coast of Quequen, a port in central Argentina, last October

'When this comes out, and if it is a Nazi sub as everyone, including the president, suspects, then it will be a story of huge global consequence,' a source said.

Peron was president from 1946 to 1955 and from 1973 until 1974. He and wife Eva (known as Evita) were known Nazi sympathisers who welcomed hundreds of Nazis and collaborators into Argentina to escape the Nuremberg war trials.

Any formal identification of the wreck as a Nazi U-boat could be extremely embarrassing to the ruling government.

The government spent £250,000 on remotely operated vehicles capturing images at the wreck site last year.

Mr Basti hired two independent experts to examine the wreck, and they both concluded that it appears to be a submarine. Experts identified what seems to be an 'attack periscope' and SS-style lettering. 

Mr Basti claimed: 'The presumption is that it arrived stealthily in the winter of 1945'.

Steven Woodbridge, history professor at Kingston University, called the discovery 'intriguing and historically significant. There is good evidence that key Nazi criminals did make their way to South America.' 

Thousands of Nazis are believed to have fled to South America after the collapse of the Third Reich, including Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s Angel of Death, and Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.

The routes they took became known as 'ratlines', which generally led to either Spain or Italy, where fascist sympathizers were able to smuggle them to South America.

Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia are known to have housed former members of Hitler's regime.

However, Argentina is the best-known destination for former Nazis, as President Juan Perón was a known sympathizer of Hitler and actively sought to rescue members of his regime from Europe. 

Ten of thousands of Nazis escaped after the war, including the notorious Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.

Once in South America the Nazis were provided with blank identity documents that allowed them to assume new lives, often in barbed-wire ringed settlements away from prying eyes.

Eichmann and Mengele both lived openly in Bariloche, though the former was discovered by the Israeli secret service in 1960 - subsequently kidnapped, put on trial, and executed.

Mengele managed to flee, however, and lived out the rest of his life in Brazil where he died of a stroke in 1979, aged 67.

Although Argentina is better known as a refuge for exiled Nazis after World War II, many also lived there in the 1930s while a pro-Nazi military regime was in power. 

Researchers discovered a list of 12,000 Nazis who lived in Argentina in the 1930s, including many who hid stolen money in Swiss bank accounts. 

The long-forgotten list was found in a store room at a former Nazi headquarters in Buenos Aires, and given to the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre.  

Many of the Nazis on the list held funds that were sent to a bank called Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, now known as Credit Suisse.