Why go to the Appalachian Trail when we have them all over the US. Spend your tourist dollars domestically.
Archaeologists say they've discovered what they believe to be a Nazi hideout in the middle of an Argentinian jungle.
Six researchers from the University of Buneos Aires and La Plata Museum found the ruins of what is believed to be a hideout in Teyu Cuare Park in northern Argentina near the border with Paraguay, team leader Daniel Schavelzon told ABC News today.
"We found German coins minted between 1938 and 1944, fragments of a porcelain plate that said it was made in Germany and Nazi symbols and German inscriptions carved into the walls," he said. "It's hard to prove the site was definitely made by the Nazis, but we're working to unearth more evidence to support this hypothesis."
But the truth is a little more mundane. For a start, the dilapidated buildings were not recently “discovered” – they have actually been open to the public for decades, along with other ruins which date back to the 17th and 18th century settlements established by Jesuit missionaries – and which give the region its name. Not far from the “Nazi” site are the remains of San Ignacio Miní, a Baroque monastery which is one of the area’s most-visited tourist attractions.
At least 10 years ago, the local tourist board erected a sign on the path to the Teyú Cuaré site, saying that the ruins were originally part of a Jesuit site.
Below that, the sign makes the astounding claim: “In the 1950s they were refurbished and inhabitated by Hitler’s most faithful servant, Martin Bormann.”
The idea that Hitler’s deputy somehow escaped to Argentina is an integral part of the Nazis-in-South-America myth, and a key element of Ira Levin’s novel The Boys from Brazil and the 1978 movie of the same name...
Argentina did, of course, give refuge to some of the worst Nazi criminals, including Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
Thousands of former SS officers and former Nazi party members were welcomed with open arms by Argentina’s then-president Juan Perón, who sent secret missions to Europe to rescue them from Allied justice between 1945 and 1950.
But they settled in comfortable suburban homes outside Buenos Aires, like the cozy chalet Eichmann lived in with his family at 4261 Chacabuco Street in the middle-class northern suburb of Olivos, where many other Nazi officers also settled.
Not in the steamy, damp, pre-Amazon jungles of northern Argentina.