The bronze eagle which once adorned the Nazi battleship Admiral Graf Spee, scuttled off Montevideo during the Second World War, has been saved from smelting, but its future remains uncertain.
Treasure hunters raised the eagle in 2006 from the wreck. The Graf Spee was scuttled at the mouth of the River Plate in 1939, soon after the first major naval battle of the Second World War. The vessel’s captain feared the ship could reveal valuable German secrets if seized by the British.
The BBC reports that a court ruled last year that the bronze eagle belonged to the Uruguayan state, in whose waters it was found.
The country’s president, Luis Lacalle Pou, announced a plan last week to turn it into a sculpture of a dove.
A Uruguayan sculptor, Pablo Atchugarry, had been commissioned to recast the eagle.
However, just two days later, President Lacalle Pou announced that the idea had been shelved.
He said: ‘In the few hours that have passed [since the announcement], an overwhelming majority of people has come forward who don’t share the decision. When you aim for peace, the first thing you need to do is create unity and this [idea] clearly didn’t.’
[Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=574068]
The fate of the eagle – whose ownership was the subject of a long legal battle – has been a matter of controversy since it was first raised from the river bed.
When it was briefly exhibited some years ago, Germany objected, and asked the Uruguayan state not to showcase ‘Nazi paraphernalia’.
When a court in Uruguay ruled that the eagle should be auctioned off to pay off the private investors who had financed its recovery from the River Plate, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation dedicated to Holocaust research and remembrance, warned that it could fall into the hands of Nazi sympathisers.
[Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46556541]