Uruguay to melt Nazi eagle discovered off Montevideo

Game over for the monumental Graf Spee eagle. Two meters high, the bronze emblem that has embarrassed Uruguay for years will soon be entrusted to an artist to be melted down and then sculpted from scratch. "Symbol of violence and war", the raptor perched - wings outstretched - on the insignia of the Nazi party will be transformed into a "symbol of peace and union", declared Friday the President of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou. Former ornament of the bow of a German battleship scuttled in December 1939, off the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, the eagle will rise from its ashes not as a phoenix, but as a dove of peace.

For the Uruguayan authorities, the artistic reappropriation to come of this object of 350 kilos will close a judicial soap opera opened more than 17 years ago. The eagle was exhumed in 2006 from the depths of the Rio de la Plata. It rested at the bottom of the estuary alongside the wreck of the Graf Spee, prospected at the time during several underwater excavation campaigns. Set up by Uruguayan entrepreneur Alfredo Etchegaray, the operation was partly subsidized by the state. The ownership of the emblem, however, was the subject of a dispute between the two parties - a dispute aggravated by the commercial inclinations of the entrepreneur, who claimed half of the market value of the object.

With an estimated value of more than 10 million euros, the Nazi emblem of Graf Spee was thus exhibited for a time in a hotel in Montevideo and was almost sold several times - a fate that the Uruguayan and German authorities wanted to avoid. at all costs, lest the eagle land in the hands of a neo-Nazi collector. Other potential buyers had also expressed their desire to acquire the object to destroy it, like businessman Daniel Sielecky. "Once I have it in my possession, I will immediately blow it into a thousand pieces," he told the Uruguayan press last year when the emblem almost ended up at auction.

After years of proceedings, however, the Supreme Court of Uruguay confirmed once and for all, at the end of 2022, that the eagle - kept all this time in a military warehouse of the Navy - was indeed the property of the State. Uruguayan artist Pablo Atchugarry will graciously create the new bronze sculpture, based on the Graf Spee ornament. The work should be completed in November. It will then be exhibited in an as yet undetermined location.

A modern jewel of the German Navy, armed in January 1936, the Graf Spee had been chased at the start of the Second World War by half a dozen French and British ships. The soap opera which had kept the Allied command in suspense during the "phoney war" in the autumn of 1939 ended with the engagement of the Rio de la Plata on 13 December. Damaged by three Royal Navy cruisers, the Graf Spee was scuttled by her crew off Montevideo, to prevent the ship from falling into Allied hands.