In a Buenos Aires suburb, decades after the fall of the Nazis thousands of kilometres away, lay a device once used to determine race by measuring people’s heads.
Found in 2017 in the home of Carlos Olivares, a collector and dealer of antiques, the instrument in its velvet-lined box will soon go on display at the city’s Holocaust memorial museum along with other relics seized with it.
The discovery has prompted speculation about who has cashed in by selling such items to obviously eager buyers.
All were said by Mr Olivares, now 57, to be reproductions but have since been confirmed as genuine and valued at $37m.
Suspicion has fallen on the families of the thousands of high-ranking Nazis who fled Hitler’s defeated Third Reich to South America at the end of World War II.
Walter Rauff, an SS colonel who developed mobile gas chambers that killed at least 100,000 people, died from a heart attack in Chile in 1984.
Eduard Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga, died in Paraguay in 1977. Gustav Wagner, an SS officer known as the Beast, committed suicide in Brazil in 1980.
Josef Mengele, known for his gruesome experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, lived for years in South America before he drowned in Brazil in 1979.
Read the article by Lucinda Elliott in The Australian.