The Eagle | Translation
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Translated by MC Editorial
[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.
You might have already heard some exciting news; we have just announced a new partnership with iHeart Media, which will now distribute our podcasts—Radio Ambulante, El hilo, and Central—through their My Cultura network.
This next stage represents a huge opportunity for us to reach new audiences. It will help us address our ongoing financial deficit and provide greater stability, allowing us to look to the future with renewed optimism. Although challenges remain in sustaining Radio Ambulante Studios, we will tackle them as we always have: with creativity, resilience, and the support of our community.
You might notice more advertisements, but there won’t be any change in the kind of journalism we produce. Our commitment to independent journalism remains, as does our mission to tell the stories of Latin America and Latinx communities around the world.
We’ll still be available on all podcast apps, on NPR, and of course, on the iHeart app.
And to the NPR team, who have given us essential support for Radio Ambulante’s growth, thank you for supporting us these past seven years.
Thanks also to our entire listener community for your support and companionship. We wouldn’t be here without you.
We’re moving forward! Season 14 begins now. And with that, here’s the episode.
[Daniel]: It’s December 1939, at the beginning of World War II. The Axis powers —an alliance led by Germany, Italy and Japan—confront the Allies, the United Kingdom among them.
[Archive Soundbite]
[BBC]: One of the three powerful German pocket battleships, the Admiral Graf Spee, has been surrounded and forced to put into port in the Bay of Montevideo this afternoon.
[Daniel]: What we are listening to is a broadcast of the BBC, the British public radio. The news is about the Battle of the River Plate, the first naval battle of World War II, and the only episode of this war that reached South America.
[Archive Soundbite]
[BBC]: The Graf Spee was pursued and shelled mercilessly by three comparatively small British cruisers.
[Daniel]: Hundreds of pages have been written about that battle. But I’ll try to be brief. First, we have to keep in mind that the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, had imposed certain conditions on Germany, including limiting its military capabilities. Germany could no longer have large warships. But the Germans tried to circumvent those conditions. They built three cruisers with secret technical advances, the so-called “pocket battleships.” By the beginning of World War II, Germany had these three ships sailing the oceans. One of them was the Graf Spee.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: What the Germans do is, they build a ship with a displacement of a heavy cruiser and the guns of a battleship.
[Daniel]: That was Daniel Acosta y Lara, a Uruguayan amateur historian who, although not yet born at the time, knows this part of history by heart.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: The Germans believed that the only way to defeat Britain was to isolate it.
[Daniel]: Which meant sinking the merchant ships that brought raw materials and food. During her career since the beginning of World War II—in September 1939—the Graf Spee sank nine ships, until she was corralled three months later by the British in the Bay of Montevideo, in Uruguay.
The battle lasted three and a half hours and the Graf Spee suffered extensive damage. Around midnight, the captain of the German ship decided to enter Montevideo, a neutral port, to ask for help.
The next day, the Uruguayans woke up with a German ship moored on their coast. Suddenly the war, which had been so far away, was right there, for everyone to see.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: And the Uruguayan government tells them, “Well, according to international law, you can’t stay for more than 72 hours.”
[Daniel]: Time was running out for the captain. He had to fix the ship within that time frame and return to open sea. But that was not an option for him.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: He has to somehow get the German High Command to accept that the only possible way out for the ship is to scuttle it. Otherwise, the secrets held in the ship’s structure—in its construction—are in danger, right? They are liable to fall into the hands of the British.
[Daniel]: He managed to convince his superiors that it was the best option. But first he had to get the crew of 44 officers and 1,050 sailors to safety. In addition to the BBC, everything that was happening in Uruguay was also being followed closely, with images, in the newsreels produced by British Movietone.
[Archive Soundbite]
[BM]: Meanwhile, great excitement at the port. The Graf Spee’s casualties were 36 killed and about 60 wounded. There is to be a sure funeral for the dead seamen. A burial at sea was impossible.
[Daniel]: They reported that there were 60 injured crew members who were going down to be treated in Montevideo, and that the 36 dead would be buried there. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew was secretly transferred to another German merchant ship that would take them to Buenos Aires.
On December 17, 1939, when the deadline set by Uruguay expired, the captain of the Graf Spee loaded the ship with explosives and blew it up together with all its secrets.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: The explosion even broke many windows around the port of Montevideo, you know?
[Daniel]: Three days later, wrapped in the flag of the German navy, the captain committed suicide.
The remains of the Graf Spee have been submerged ever since at the bottom of the River Plate, feeding the popular imagination of all Uruguayans.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: As a child, when I went with my parents for a walk or whatever, we would see a pair of masts that belonged to a sunken ship, and the myth said those were the masts of the Graf Spee.
[Daniel]: As early as then, Daniel became obsessed with the subject. And he wasn’t the only one. Alfredo Etchegaray, a renowned public relations specialist in Uruguay, also found it fascinating.
[Alfredo Etchegaray]: When I researched the history of the Graf Spee, I discovered that all salvage attempts had been unsuccessful.
[Daniel]: So he set an ambitious goal for himself: What if he was the one to finally salvage it, at least in part? So in the mid-90s he began a series of bureaucratic procedures to get authorization from the Uruguayan State to explore and work in the area of the shipwreck. Several years later, he got his first permit.
With the authorization in hand, Alfredo put together an underwater exploration team that included two divers, a marine archaeologist, and two crew members. Daniel found out about the mission and got them to let him participate. There were several stages of searching, during which they found different objects. Finally, in 2006, they found a piece that everyone thought was lost. A unique piece that they were not even looking for.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: Also from a symbolic point of view, because seeing that piece come out from under the water was really amazing.
[Alfredo]: You feel like you’re contributing to history. You are making history. That piece was underwater since 1939, and you managed to salvage it.
[Daniel]: What they did not know then is that that piece would put Uruguay in the middle of a diplomatic conflict and that it would become a State issue to this day.
We’ll be back after a break.
[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Our producer Aneris Casassus picks up the story.
[Aneris Casassus]: We’ll come back to the Graf Spee and that piece. But first we need some context. The first thing we need to know is that in 1975, during the Uruguayan dictatorship, a decree-law known as “Sunken Ships” was issued. Among other things, it allowed any interested party to obtain a special authorization to explore a shipwreck in Uruguayan waters and extract objects for eventual commercialization. Half of the money obtained could be kept by the explorer and the other half went to the State.
With this law, the military government said that it wanted to eliminate scrap metal from sunken ships and thereby improve the access channel to the port of Montevideo. But the original goal was soon lost. Because of course, nobody really wanted to go looking for scrap metal. What they wanted was mainly relics from galleons sunk between the 16th and 18th centuries. Those ships that carried the riches of their viceroyalties to the Spanish Crown. The “bounty hunters” found a good port to cast anchor in Uruguay.
They looked up documentation, studied the nautical charts, the characteristics of each ship and, most of all, the type of cargo they carried: Gold, they mainly wanted to find gold. They navigated between information and speculation, between verified history and pirate legends. And there have been several explorations since that law was enacted, but none as successful as the one in 1992:
[Archive Soundbite]
[Journalist]: And the most striking and spectacular weekend news: over 100 gold coins and a two-kilo ingot were found on Saturday…
[Aneris]: Argentinean Rubén Collado had found the treasure in the remains of Nuestra Señora de la Luz, a merchant vessel of the Spanish Crown that sank in 1752 off the coast of Montevideo. And a year later, it was auctioned in New York.
[Archive Soundbite]
[Journalist]: Sotheby’s auction house was in charge of the sale. The treasure was offered in 779 lots, with private and specialized collectors and dealers from all over the world participating in the bidding.
[Aneris]: The auction left a balance of 3 million dollars. Half the money went to Collado and his team, and the other half to the Uruguayan State, which used the money to build a school and buy boats for the Prefecture.
OK, so in that context, Alfredo Etchegaray, one of those we heard at the beginning, thought about the possibility of exploring the Graf Spee. He had been studying hundreds of shipwrecks in the River Plate for years. He spent hours going through archives in Uruguay and Spain, looking for information. Until he came to the German ship that had been scuttled in 1939 off the coast of Montevideo. He didn’t exactly plan to find gold in a warship, but perhaps he would find pieces of invaluable historical value.
In 1997, Alfredo gathered the necessary documentation and submitted to the Uruguayan Prefecture a request for an exploration permit for the famous “pocket battleship.” Thus began his bureaucratic paperwork chase: when he submitted one, they asked for another, when he submitted that one, they asked for another one… But he wasn’t going to give up.
In early 2004, seven years after submitting his first document, he finally received the call he had been waiting for for so long:
[Alfredo]: The Prefecture of the National Navy, an agency of the Ministry of Defense, calls you and tells you that you can start the work, so you have to assemble all the equipment, right?
[Aneris]: Oxygen tanks and diving suits, boats for navigation, a sort of vacuum cleaner to suck mud from the river bed, and most importantly…
[Alfredo]: A side-scan sonar, which produces a scan using a technology similar to the technology used to see a baby in a pregnant woman’s belly.
[Aneris]: A device that emits bouncing sound waves that can assemble an accurate image of the wreck. But he also needed a group of specialists with very specific knowledge. He immediately contacted Héctor Bado, a Uruguayan professional diver who had already been doing this type of work. In fact, a few years earlier, while Alfredo began to deal with the exploration paperwork, Héctor had managed to refloat a small cannon from the Graf Spee for a Discovery Channel documentary.
[Archive Soundbite]
[Discovery Channel]: The crane that will recover the cannon can lift 100 tons and requires a team of 50 men.
[Aneris]: Héctor died in 2017, but as Alfredo told me, they got along very well from the start.
[Alfredo]: Héctor was a good technician, but much more of a dreamer, messier. And since I am neat and organized, we made a good team.
[Aneris]: They were a perfect match to approach the mission. Héctor would contribute his expertise in diving through the murky waters of the River Plate; Alfredo would contribute his years of research on the Graf Spee and his patience in solving bureaucratic obstacles of every kind that came their way. And something crucial: he would finance the entire operation.
[Alfredo]: Selling my plots of land, my small savings. I never bought Bitcoin, I never bought gold, just plots of land here, plots of land there.
[Aneris]: As stipulated in the exploration contract, half the profits from what they salvaged would be for them and the other half for the Prefecture.
Héctor brought to the team another diver he trusted and the marine archaeologist who had led the Discovery Channel mission. Having an archaeologist was a State requirement for any exploration in which objects of historical value were involved. It was a way to ensure that proper procedures were followed for their conservation. Once the team was formed, they began to outline the steps to follow.
One of the things they wanted to salvage was the Graf Spee‘s rangefinder, an optical device capable of spotting enemy ships, a kind of enormous binocular with a range of about 45 kilometers. For years, Daniel—the amateur historian we heard at the beginning—had studied that piece obsessively. He is a glass technician and had specialized in Germany in the construction of scientific devices using that material. And he had unique documentation about the rangefinder—plans, operating manuals . . .
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: And, well, the possibility of directly accessing the piece that I had been studying for so long, and linked to the production of a book, etc. So… I called Héctor Bado, to see whether I could access the rangefinder once he took it out, you see?
[Aneris]: But he got something much better. In exchange for his knowledge of the rangefinder, he managed to become a part of the salvage group. Of course, he would not get a share of the profits, if any.
The team got to work. They would get on a boat early in the morning, load all the necessary materials, and sail for about two hours until they reached the location of the Graf Spee, about 10 kilometers off the coast of Montevideo. They could do this, in general, about twice a week. They depended mostly on weather conditions.
Once there, Héctor and the other diver took turns swimming down to explore the wreck, tied to a rope so that the current would not drag them away.
They had to go down about eight meters to the depth where the hull of the Graf Spee was.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: You may say eight meters is not much for a diver, right?
[Aneris]: A professional diver can go below a depth of 40 meters… But at the bottom of the River Plate, the standards are different.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: It’s a type of mud, a silt, and you can sink up to your waist in the first meter, you see?
[Aneris]: Furthermore, the area is full of nets and cables, nylon bags and all kinds of trash that is dragged there from the harbor, even loose parts of the ship itself. Between the mud and all the accumulated material, you can’t see absolutely anything down there.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: You work as if it were at night, without any light. And if you want to see a light, you have to put the flashlight close to the glass of your mask to be able to see. Anything else is done by touch.
[Aneris]: And that’s not all. In this shipwreck, says Alfredo, there is something even much more dangerous.
[Alfredo]: The Graf Spee had torpedo loads—three of them—in the bow and stern, and the ship exploded in the rear at the stern, but the other torpedoes are active.
[Aneris]: Undetonated explosive charges that have been under the water since 1939.
But the members of the salvage team knew of the risks since before they began the mission, and they were not going to stop. They had a clear objective. Their mission was to locate the rangefinder in that 186-meter-long hull and then find a way to bring it to the surface.
But not everyone agreed with the Graf Spee salvage mission. When the work began, several former German sailors once on the crew of that ship were still alive. After the scuttling, the injured crew members had stayed in Uruguay and the rest had gone to Argentina. They were held as “interns” while the conflict lasted, a term adopted by neutral countries when they held the combatants of a nation at war. It was a system of supervised freedom, meaning they had a certain ability to move freely but could not leave the country.
When the war ended in 1945, most of them returned to find Germany in ruins. But Uruguay allowed eleven crew members who had married, or who had children in the country, to stay. During the war years, with the help of German families who were already living in Uruguay, they had managed to become part of the local community. In general, they were not seen as Nazis but as 20-year-olds who had been sent to war. In fact, none of them were high-ranking officers.
Daniel knew several who lived in Uruguay and Germany. Because of his interest in the ship, they would even allow him to join the Association of Ex-Crew Members, Relatives and Friends of the Graf Spee. In their conversations. they told him what they thought about this expedition:
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: They believed they were violating the captain’s wish for the ship to remain untouched. They said that the ship was dead and should not be disturbed. Which is understandable, considering it had been their home.
[Aneris]: And Daniel was in the middle.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: Because I was… I was a friend, let’s say, of the people who didn’t want things to be removed, and I worked with the people who wanted the things removed.
[Aneris]: Despite the opposition, the salvage team continued forward. After several days of work, they finally located the ship’s rangefinder and devised a plan to remove it from the river bed. Once the divers managed to secure it tightly with ropes, they had to hook it to a crane in order to lift it to the surface. The work had to be done very carefully because the rangefinder is enormous, an armored piece 10 meters long and weighing 27 tons.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: We had to stop several times because there were a lot of waves and everything was moving. And when you handle pieces of that weight, it is very dangerous for a sudden movement to drag the crane with it.
[Aneris]: But they didn’t have to deal with just the tide. They believe that at some point there was also sabotage. That someone had cut the bolts that held the rangefinder to make the operation fail. Finally, after four failed attempts, on February 25, 2004 they managed to get the rangefinder:
[Archive Soundbite]
[Voice]: Forward, when I tell you. Good!
[Aneris]: The image of the enormous rangefinder emerging from the water traveled around the world and, of course, also reached German television.
[Archive Soundbite]
[German newscast]: Der tonnenschwere Entfernungsmesser des 1939 vor Montevideo.
[Aneris]: The authorities of the Prefecture of Uruguay decided to display the rangefinder at the entrance to the Port of Montevideo, and during those first days, many people went to see it. The newspaper El País of Montevideo, one of the most widely read in Uruguay, commissioned Daniel to write a series of reports on the subject. He had more than enough material to do it—pictures, plans, graphics of the piece. They thought it would be a subject that would interest their readers, but they never imagined how much.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: It became a best seller for the newspaper, and the newspaper sold 50,000 more issues on days that carried the installment.
[Aneris]: It was no small feat for a newspaper that at that time had a maximum circulation of about 100,000 copies on Sundays, and for a country of only 3 and a half million inhabitants. Suddenly, the rangefinder had rekindled Uruguayans’ fascination with the Graf Spee.
Ever since he first embarked on the mission, Daniel assumed that marketing a piece of those characteristics would be complex. These were not gold coins that could be easily sold at any auction.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: The rangefinder is a very difficult piece to sell. To appraise. How much is it worth? Hmm. Let’s say the only people who may have interest in a piece like this, because of its size, is a museum.
[Aneris]: But that wasn’t his problem. He had joined the salvage group, without any financial interest. He just wanted to know more about the ship, and now he could see with his own eyes that object to which he had dedicated years of research. But it was a problem for Alfredo, who already had invested a lot of money.
[Alfredo]: On a single day, the National Port Association charged us more than $10,000 dollars to rent a pontoon, for example. The Insurance Bank charged us $3,000 a single day for reinsurance; they wanted double insurance for that floating platform.
And you have to pay for the boat’s fuel and the sailor sent over by the Prefecture to check that things are being done correctly. Do you understand? It is very bureaucratic and very expensive.
[Aneris]: But there would be time to deal with the future of the rangefinder and recover the investment. Alfredo had an exploration permit on the shipwreck until 2009, and he was not going to waste it. Over the next few months, when time permitted, the team continued sailing to the Graf Spee in search of other items to salvage. Until one day, one of the side-scan sonar images gave him the exact location of one of the ship’s largest cannons. They decided to go for it and began the tasks to try to refloat it. Once again, Héctor Bado and the other diver alternately went into the water to explore the place where the cannon was. And one of those times when Héctor dove the 8 meters to reach the hull, something unexpected happened. Daniel has a clear recollection of it:
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: He was touching along the edge of the ship when he suddenly touched a shape like a beak…
[Aneris]: A pointy thing. As soon as Héctor suspected what it was, he returned to the surface. He had to tell the rest of the team.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: So he came out and said, “I found the eagle. What do we do?”
[Aneris]: The eagle of the Graf Spee, the insignia carried by all Nazi ships. A bronze piece two meters high, almost three meters wide and weighing about 400 kilos. An eagle looking straight ahead, with its wings outspread and its talons clutching a swastika. An emblematic piece that the salvage team was not even looking for.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: Nobody thought about the eagle. We had ruled it out, thinking that it had been taken.
[Aneris]: It was believed that, as soon as the ship had sunk, the Germans had found a way to recover the eagle to prevent it from becoming a war trophy in enemy hands.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: Not so. The eagle was bolted to the stern. And of course, with a choice between bringing up a cannon and bringing up that emblematic piece, the decision was made to bring up the piece.
[Aneris]: It would take time. The eagle was secured with 149 large bronze screws that divers would have to patiently unscrew.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: But we also had to keep secret both the discovery and the buoy we placed with a bottle of mineral water that was barely visible in order to be able to return to the salvage site, you see?
[Aneris]: So the divers dove for four days to loosen those tar-covered screws that had been underwater for almost 70 years. It was risky; they were working almost blindly, by trial and error, with a very heavy piece that could come loose at any moment and fall on top of them.
When they finally managed to loosen all the screws, they tied the eagle to a crane mounted on a pontoon, that kind of floating platform. And so, the eagle began to rise in Montevideo Bay.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: There were a lot of waves, so the pontoon rocked a lot and the piece was going up and down and turning.
[Aneris]: It was February 10, 2006, the day when, as we heard at the beginning, Daniel and Alfredo felt that they were entering history.
The salvage team knew the impact this discovery could cause. Before starting to sail towards the port of Montevideo, they made a decision.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: We proposed covering up the swastika. Because the piece had a very strong symbolism, and because of those who suffered under the symbol of the swastika, you know?
[Aneris]: So now, with the eagle out of the water and the swastika covered with a yellow tarp, it was time to announce the news.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: And as we were returning to Montevideo on the pontoon—it is a very slow boat, Etchegaray tells me—I sent 6,000 emails announcing the extraction of the eagle.
[Aneris]: By the time they got to the port, Alfredo and Daniel say that everything was in chaos…
[Alfredo]: There was a swarm of journalists, a swarm of journalists. It seemed like an Apocalypse Now thing.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: I experienced something that, I don’t know, that Maradona or any of these celebrities must have experienced. We were in a Navy truck with the eagle on the bed of the truck, and the journalists climbed onto the moving truck. But it was impossible to stop them.
[Aneris]: All the reporters wanted to have the image of the eagle and talk to the protagonists of the rescue. This is diver Héctor Bado giving a statement to the international agency Associated Press as soon as they arrived at the port:
[Archive soundbite]
[Héctor Bado]: The eagle was in the stern. It is the German national emblem of the time. And to this day, as far as we know, it is the only one that survives in the world, because they were removed from the other German ships.
[Aneris]: And it wasn’t just journalists who were interested in the eagle. A cruise ship had moored at the port of Montevideo and tourists didn’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing the Nazi insignia.
Meanwhile, Alfredo had contacted the Jewish Committee of Uruguay to see whether they had any objection to the eagle being displayed. He told me they had no objections. They asked him only to put a piece of clear acrylic in front of the swastika.
Alfredo got a hotel near the Montevideo diving port to lend him the space to display the eagle to the public, free of charge. Daniel estimates that about five thousand people went there every weekend.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: The Graf Spee has a rare magnetic force in Uruguayan society, and there are many myths, a lot of tales.
[Aneris]: Daniel remembers many absurd things that happened in those days of the exhibition.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: People came with a wooden stick and told me, “This is part of the Graf Spee mast,” or they came with a bronze bolt telling me, “This has been in my family since the 40s and is part of the Graf.” And I said to her, “Look, ma’am, I cannot know nor can I guarantee or sign a document that says it is a piece of the Graf Spee.”
[Aneris]: Another day, someone who claimed to be a dowser came to see the piece. Dowsers are people who use a pendulum to find underground water or objects. He claimed he had discovered a magnetic field on the eagle’s chest and that it was linked to a magnetic source in Central Europe. But there was actually a much more rational explanation:
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: And the eagle has a magnetic field because it has iron. I mean, it’s a bronze casting; it’s not… it’s not solid bronze, and it’s contaminated with iron, and the iron becomes magnetically charged.
[Aneris]: It was a matter of physics and Central Europe obviously had nothing to do with it. One day, a writer appeared saying that one of the sailors of the Graf Spee, who was housed in a barracks in the Uruguayan city of Sarandí del Yi, more than 200 kilometers from Montevideo, had brought with him the nails of Christ.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: A group of people was formed immediately and traveled to Sarandí del Yi to do excavations around the barracks looking for the nails of Christ and they would come up with horseshoe nails. I say, “But do you think that a nail that is two centimeters long can hold Christ?” Well, and so on.
[Aneris]: But there were things that happened during those days that were not absurd or funny at all, but rather worrying.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: People went and spat on it. Other people went and performed the Nazi salute.
[Aneris]: On another occasion, Daniel remembers that someone told him…
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: “How unfair.” “What do you mean how unfair?” “Yes, how unfair. Three against one. No, that’s not fair.”
[Aneris]: He was referring to the three English ships that had attacked the Graf Spee. Daniel responded:
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: “What do you mean it’s not fair? I mean, it’s war.” Furthermore, the ship is very much sunk. Besides the fact that one has… let’s say I am interested in it as a piece of engineering, etc. The ship served spurious interests. It was a representative of a terrible regime. No. So what? People often lose their bearings. This admiration that I am talking about, which is quite unusual, makes people lose track of what it really was.
[Daniel]: The eagle was provoking unexpected reactions and could not remain there. The problem was where to take it and what to do with it.
We’ll be back after a break.
[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Aneris continues the story:
[Aneris]: As we heard before the break, while the eagle was on display in a hotel in Montevideo, there were some rather absurd but also disturbing situations. And according to Daniel Acosta y Lara, the amateur historian we have been listening to since the beginning, that started to set off alarm bells.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: Many people, including the Government, did not want it to be a piece where people would make a pilgrimage to see it and where there would be Nazi salutes or even signs of aggression.
[Aneris]: Having it on display required certain security measures. Alfredo had paid a guard for security during those days, but it was clear that the hotel was a temporary exhibition site. The eagle could not remain there indefinitely.
So after a month, they decided to remove it from the hotel. With the huge impact that the topic had generated, the news did not go unnoticed at all, and as the days went by, the Uruguayan media began to wonder:
[Archive Soundbite]
[Journalist 1]: Where is the eagle of the Graf Spee? The answer in this report.
[Journalist 2]: The powerful eagle that once represented the Nazi regime is now in a warehouse of the National Navy. For greater security, it rests in a box that was sealed before a notary public.
[Aneris]: The National Navy had taken charge of guarding the eagle and, until its future was defined, no one else would be able to see it. And, even though Alfredo had permission to auction it, questions soon began to pop up.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: There is a fight between those who consider it a heritage piece and call the rescuers pirates. That is to say, what they want is to benefit themselves and they do not follow any type of archaeological procedure, even though the extraction team has to include a marine archaeologist.
[Aneris]: On that side was William Rey, current general director of the Cultural Heritage Commission of Uruguay, and vice president of the Commission when the eagle was pulled up. This is William:
[William Rey]: I understand that this item was an asset of cultural interest and that therefore it was not a good idea to carry out salvage work for economic purposes, let’s call it, for the purpose of making the best commercial return.
[Aneris]: But actually, William’s opinion did not matter too much because in the 80s, one of his predecessors on the Heritage Commission had considered that the Graf Spee was not a historical monument of Uruguay. In other words, the Commission could not be involved in any way in the salvaging or preservation of objects found on the German ship.
The Uruguayan Navy—through the Prefecture—was the only State agency that had any say in the matter. And, for now, they would not allow anyone to take the eagle from its location. The thing is that the administration of then President Tabaré Vázquez had begun to have some reservations about the piece going to auction.
[William Rey]: Taking it to a public auction also means that possible neo-Nazi groups can become interested in the piece, buy it, and continue fueling a hatred that is not at all desirable.
[Aneris]: But for Alfredo, that possibility was part of a fantasy.
[Alfredo]: And they imagine that there are hordes of neo-Nazis walking around the streets with millions of dollars in trucks wanting to buy the eagle, which is not true.
[Aneris]: The contract stipulated auctioning because, according to Alfredo, that was the most accurate way of knowing what the value of the piece was on the market. He says the price could start at eight million dollars and go up to forty million. William, on the other hand, feels the salvagers tend to inflate the value of their pieces because that is part of their business.
Apparently, figuring out what to do with the eagle would take considerably longer. But the case had put the issue of salvagers or “bounty hunters” at the center of the public agenda. So, to avoid further problems, in September 2006, nine months after its extraction, President Tabaré Vázquez signed a decree that indefinitely suspended applications for underwater searches. In that document, shipwrecks were recognized as—and I quote— “submerged archaeological sites” that “are part of the national heritage” and that “must be preserved for the Uruguayan people of today and for future generations.”
Meanwhile, the eagle issue was already making noise on an international scale. By 2007, William had gone from vice president to president of the Heritage Commission and received a call from the German Ambassador in the country. His government was aligned with William’s position and also wanted to prevent the auction by any means. That is why they had sent a note to the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry assuring them that, as a warship, the Graf Spee was still the property of the German State. But that Germany would donate the remains of the ship anyhow—including the eagle—to a museum in Uruguay.
The claim to ownership could not hold up because, after the scuttling of the Graf Spee, England—through a Uruguayan front man—had purchased the remains of the ship from Germany. The English wanted to explore the wreck and find out the military secrets of the enemy ship. Between 1941 and 1943, they made several expeditions in which they took some pieces. After a few years, the front man died without any descendants and the remains of the Graf Spee were considered abandoned and formally became the property of the Uruguayan State.
But beyond the discussion about who owned it, William was also interested in seeing the piece going to a museum. He then took advantage of that communication with the Ambassador to delve deeper into that idea.
[William Rey]: I remember telling the German Ambassador at the time that turning those pieces over to a museum also required financial support, that I could make arrangements for that, but that I wanted to know whether Germany could collaborate. The Ambassador told me, “I have to ask Berlin for instructions.” He requested the instructions, and Germany said, “No, we can’t collaborate in any way.”
[Aneris]: So Germany claimed ownership of the vessel but at the same time, it refused to take charge of it.
[William Rey]: That seems logical, in part because it is a warship, a ship that raised the Nazi flag and, well, possibly neither the German government of the time nor anyone else wanted to be linked to it.
[Aneris]: Finally, in mid-2007, the Parliament of the city of Montevideo reached an agreement on what to do with the eagle. It was approved for display in an exhibition about the battle of the River Plate. However, according to Alfredo, another intervention by the German Ambassador cut that project short.
[Alfredo]: Which is a huge interference in the independence of a country, an international embarrassment.
[Aneris]: The eagle remained in the Navy warehouse for months that soon became years… many years. And during that time, no one cared too much about the conditions in which it was kept. After spending decades underwater, these types of pieces need to be preserved in special environments, under very specific conditions. None of that was done with the eagle, William assures us. Nor with the rangefinder, which remained at the entrance to the Port of Montevideo since it was removed from the bottom of the River Plate. It was completely vandalized; only the casing remained, and attempts to market it came to nothing. We tried to speak with any representative of the Navy or the Uruguayan Ministry of Defense, but at the time of closing this episode, we had not received a response.
Five years passed with the eagle put away, and not even Alfredo was able to see it again. By then, another president was in power, José Mujica, who had inherited a problem that he did not know how to solve either. But we know already that Alfredo is a very persevering man. He wasn’t going to give up that easily. He wanted his money back. So in 2011 he began a legal process against the Uruguayan State. In the lawsuit, Alfredo demanded fulfillment of the contract—that is, that the eagle and the rangefinder be auctioned off and the profits shared.
[Alfredo]: The contract and the law say that 50% of the profits are for the individuals who risk their time and work. The work of many people, many families is involved here. Years and decades of work done under risk, at an economic and a life risk, and bureaucratic obstacles.
[Aneris]: But the Judiciary did not find it such an easy issue to resolve because, as Daniel believes, there were many things at stake.
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: So there is always the debate at a political level, right? If I rule in favor of the contractors, I’m being complicit, and if I don’t, I’m not keeping my word. That is, they present claims about which they are right. Regardless of whether you agree or not with the extraction of those treasures, they are right because the State signed.
[Aneris]: But the request was rejected in the first instance, in the Court of Appeals, and in the Supreme Court. The rulings also made it clear that the assets rescued from the Graf Spee were property of the Uruguayan State. Between one ruling and the next, another three years went by.
[Alfredo]: And they raise unfounded technical objections, in my opinion. And then they reject it. Because, of course, they fear a public auction. We have no problem with there being no public auction.
[Aneris]: At that point, Alfredo just wanted to get paid.
[Alfredo]: There is always, above all things, the constitutional right—which is above any small decision of a judge—to fair compensation. That is in the Constitution, in addition to the fact that it is in the contract and it is also in the law.
It is very easy to be generous with other people’s work. Here an agreement is required that can be long-term. Aside from that, they can say, “All right, we are going to compensate you and we will pay you in 15 years, over 15 years, in 100 installments, in 200 installments.” Everything is possible, but they can never steal from you, do you understand?
[Aneris]: While we were talking and he was telling me all this, I took the opportunity to ask Alfredo how he gets along with that nickname of “bounty hunter.” And, well, clearly not too well:
[Alfredo]: I am not a bounty hunter. I am passionate about culture first and foremost. Bounty hunters are people who advertise false things, whose business is to find investors by means of lies.
[Aneris]: That is, people who claim to have discovered a treasure that does not exist and take money from investors for supposed salvage operations.
[Alfredo]: But people who work on real cultural projects, following the laws, with contracts, with archaeological projects, preserving information, exhibiting it to the public. Without charging a single cent. Earlier, that was under water. We informed the general public here and around the world; we gave them historical information.
[Aneris]: Despite the judicial setback, it was evident that Alfredo was not going to sit idle. In 2017, during Tabaré Vázquez’s second presidency, he returned to the battle. He began another legal action against the State. And in 2019, after 13 years had passed since the salvage, a ruling was finally handed down.
[Soundbite de archivo]
[Journalist 1]: This story of the Graf Spee goes back a long way, doesn’t it? It may be coming to an end now, with this court ruling.
[Journalist 2]: The court ruling ordered the Ministry of Defense and the National Prefecture to sell the parts of the German ship Graf Spee, which is not only the eagle, that famous eagle, but also the rangefinder.
[Aneris]: This time the Judiciary had sided with Alfredo. A ruling ordered the State to sell the eagle and the rangefinder, and pay the salvage group. The State, through the Ministry of Defense, appealed the ruling, but in late 2021, the Court of Appeals confirmed the lower court decision. By then, Uruguay had another president: Luis Lacalle Pou. This was the fourth administration that had had to deal with the issue. And now that the auction seemed imminent, the controversy broke out again.
Shortly after the ruling was announced, I spoke with Ariel Gelblung, director for Latin America of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international human rights organization that fights anti-Semitism and racism. The news had been received with concern at the Center. Ariel told me that, when faced with an auction, there were three possible scenarios:
[Ariel Gelblung]: The first, that someone wants to have it, quote-unquote, for personal consumption, that is, inside their house, their mansion or their property, and not to be displayed publicly. They can do whatever they want.
[Aneris]: The second option is that someone wants to buy it to take it to a museum.
[Ariel]: And, of course, this is the preferred result. That is to say, whoever has it is going to use it to show what should never happen.
[Aneris]: And then there is the third possibility…
[Ariel]: The only one that implies danger for us is a person who wants to have it to vindicate what happened and glorify a regime that was disastrous for humanity.
[Aneris]: For Ariel, unfortunately, thinking about something like that is not as crazy as Alfredo thinks.
[Ariel]: Do they exist? Yes, they do exist. They exist and there has been a resurgence in recent years, but not only of those who talk about glorifying the Nazi regime, but in general of many people who subscribe to different forms of totalitarianism.
[Aneris]: The State had one last chance to appeal. But at the same time, and outside of the judicial process, the parties continued looking for alternatives to try to reach an agreement. On one occasion, the President himself summoned Alfredo to his house to try to find a solution:
[Alfredo]: And he asked me whether I could accept financial compensation if there was a cultural project, but he didn’t tell me what, and I said, “Yes. Of course. We want to end this matter.”
[Aneris]: Alfredo had also thought of many alternatives to the auction to recover his money. He proposed, for example, that the original eagle stay in a museum in Uruguay and that several replicas be made to sell to different museums around the world that were interested in the piece. Or that artistic installations be made through holograms. Always, he told me, for a historical and educational purpose.
[Alfredo]: The swastika is not prohibited in Germany if it is used for educational purposes or for museum purposes. If you use it in a negative way, it is prohibited, you see? The Israel Holocaust Museum has copies of Mein Kampf, Nazi flags, and all kinds of things, but they are displayed in that context, simultaneously showing the horror of the Holocaust, as it is shown also in Auschwitz.
[Aneris]: So there were conversations and conversations about what to do, while the case continued its course. Finally, in November 2022, the Supreme Court had the last word: it revoked the two rulings that ordered the sale and rejected Alfredo’s lawsuit, arguing that his right to claim against the State had expired. It also confirmed that the pieces were property of Uruguay.
After 16 years, Alfredo had lost the fight and it seemed that this story, once and for all, had come to an end. Now it only remained for the State to decide what it was going to do with the eagle.
The answer came in June 2023 from President Lacalle Pou. This is what he said at a press conference:
[Archive Soundbite]
[Lacalle Pou]: It occurred to us that that symbol of violence, of war, could undergo a virtuous transformation into a symbol of peace and a symbol of unity like the dove.
[Aneris]: He was announcing that the eagle was going to be completely melted down and that the bronze would be used to sculpt a dove. Next to him was the most recognized sculptor in Uruguay, Pablo Atchugarry. He would be in charge of the work.
When Alfredo heard the announcement, he couldn’t believe it. The project sounded like complete madness. And he wasn’t the only one:
[Archive Soundbite]
[Journalist 1]: Virtually unanimous criticism over the melting down of the Graf Spee eagle.
[Journalist 2]: That decision generated controversy and even rejection in the Government coalition.
[Journalist 3]: Prominent figures in the cultural scene and members of the Government, such as Undersecretary of Education and Culture Ana Ribeiro, expressed their public disagreements with the project.
[Aneris]: William Rey, the director of Heritage, was among those who came forward criticizing the initiative:
[William Rey]: Destroying it or transforming it into a ritual object are analogous manifestations. In other words, they do not help to establish a space of historical recognition.
[Aneris]: Criticism of the project came from all sides. Initiatives were even launched on the Change.org platform to gather signatures in favor of preserving the eagle.
[Alfredo]: Incredibly, there was a consensus—total support for saving the piece—including many institutions in the community that said you cannot destroy history, because if you destroy history, you eliminate the memory of our testimony, for remembering, for not repeating the mistakes of the past.
[Aneris]: The president was also criticized for having released this statement while the country was in the middle of a serious drinking water supply crisis, and for addressing this issue after not participating in an event in honor of the victims of the dictatorship. Daniel was another of those who questioned the project:
[Daniel Acosta y Lara]: A president worrying about this, when we have other and much more important crises. Why? And, well, I think it has to do precisely with the fact that the president and the rest of the politicians are under the same spell of the Graf Spee. That is, they know it is a product that ultimately moves public opinion.
[Aneris]: If—as Daniel says—the president had intended to talk about the eagle to cover up other things, well, he succeeded. What he perhaps had not anticipated was such a barrage of negative criticism.
Two days after announcing the project, Lacalle Pou spoke to the press at a public event. The journalists, of course, asked him about the topic of the moment.
[Archive Soundbite]
[Journalist]: Your dove for peace initiative, President, has aroused some adverse comments.
[Lacalle Pou]: In these few hours that have passed, I believe that there is an overwhelming majority that does not share this decision. And if you want to create peace, the first thing you have to do is create unity. And clearly this has not created unity. So, unfortunately, I still maintain that it is a good idea, but a president must listen and represent, so I spoke early with Pablo Atchugarry today, and we are unfortunately going to abandon the idea, but it seems to me that it is what the majority of people want…
[Aneris]: And just like that, within 48 hours, the dove idea melted down.
18 years, four governments and thousands of opinions later, things remain exactly the same. The eagle remains in a box in a warehouse, hidden, but not forgotten. And no one knows what to do with it.
[Daniel]: Alfredo Etchegaray considers starting more lawsuits in the courts of Uruguay and even taking the case to international justice in search of compensation for the rescue tasks of the Graf Spee objects. He has not been able to see the eagle since it was salvaged in 2006.
The German Embassy in Uruguay informed us that, despite the court rulings, Germany continues to consider itself the owner of the remains of the Graf Spee, and that today, now that the risk of the auction has passed, they agree that the piece should be exhibited in a museum in Germany or Uruguay.
Aneris Casassus is a producer for Radio Ambulante and lives in Buenos Aires. This episode was edited by Camila Segura. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri and Rémy Lozano with music by Rémy.
Thanks to Jorge Cabaleiro and Juan Antonio Varese, whom we also interviewed for this episode.
The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Pablo Argüelles, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Ana Tuirán, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas and Desirée Yépez.
Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.
Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.
Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.
