Authorities in Argentina said Tuesday they had seized a major trove of authentic Nazi artifacts, including a bust relief of Adolf Hitler, AFP reports.
Numerous sculptures and crafted objects including an eagle of the Third Reich were found in two shops and a home in the north of the capital, the security ministry said in a statement.
It said no arrests were made and gave no indication of who had owned the objects, which will now be taken to the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum.
According to JTA, the cache of 75 original Nazi objects was discovered earlier this month by the Argentine Federal Police.
The objects included equipment used for Nazi medical experiments during the Holocaust. They were analyzed a week ago at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, Federal Police Commissioner Marcelo El Haibe told the Jewish news agency.
In addition to the bust relief of Adolf Hitler, police also found medical devices marked with swastikas used to measure head and body size, Nazi puzzles for children and knives, among other objects.
Among the objects discovered was a magnifying glass attached to a photo of Hitler using the magnifying glass.
“We checked some marks and characteristics, and it is the same object that Hitler holds in his hands in the photo,” El Haibe, a member of Interpol who accompanied the pieces to Lyon, told JTA.
“Interpol colleagues from Germany, Israel and United States were surprised by the globally unprecedented discovery. No one has a record of this magnitude a discovery of original Nazis objects, and we have started a collaborative process to search the route of the objects to Argentina.”
Officials and Jewish groups said it was a major historical find in a country where numerous senior Nazis fled after World War II.
They included Adolf Eichmann, who was captured there and later convicted as one of the architects of the Holocaust.
"This investigation is a major contribution to the institutional mission to fight against anti-Semitism," the Delegation of Israeli Argentine Associations said in a statement quoted by AFP.