Despite being a bit of a detour from the main focus of this blog, my 2010 post on the eagle of the Graf Spee pocket battleship is one of the most-read posts I've written.
We're over four years on and not much progress has been made. Now the BBC asks "What should Uruguay do with its Nazi eagle?".
The country's supreme court has ruled that the Uruguayan state is the owner of the artifact, but that the salvage company should also receive half of the profits in the event of a sale. Businessman Alfredo Etchegaray, one of the men who led the operation to
recover the eagle, told the BBC that the eagle could be worth up to US$ 15 million."Having the eagle in a box doesn't benefit anybody," he said.
There has been reporting that the eagle is not appropriately stored, but Uruguay denies this.
I'm tempted to agree with Etchegaray that the country could make good use of
the cash and possibly display a replica of the eagle instead of the real
thing. It's an amazing historical piece and while I certainly understand the concerns of the German government, I think it should be on display somewhere. I was just listening to a piece on the radio this morning about the difficulties of knowing what to do with the house where Hitler was born, in Austria. These are always thorny issues because the last thing you want is a shrine for neo-Nazis, but letting the sites/objects rot hardly seems to be the solution either.
What should Uruguay do with its Nazi eagle? (BBC)
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