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The enormous bronze sculpture of an eagle clutching a swastika in its talons spent nearly 70 years lying at the bottom of the River Plate, off the coast of Uruguay.
After being salvaged in 2006, it briefly went on display in the Uruguayan capital – before the government reconsidered the wisdom of granting such prominence to a Nazi emblem, and the eagle was hidden away on a military base.
As the 20th anniversary of its recovery approaches, Uruguay still does not know what to do with the half-tonne raptor which once adorned a German battleship sunk at the start of the second world war.
One former president suggested melting it down and recasting it as a dove of peace. Others have suggested housing it in a museum, while a local politician is now campaigning for it to be displayed on the seafront of the resort town of Punta del Este.
“It has been hidden away in a crate,” said Teresa Marzano, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Maldonado province last year.
Her plan involves mounting the eagle atop a structure resembling a ship’s stern, surrounded by a moat, with a viewing platform for up to 100 visitors. A video presentation of the proposal features a 3D rendering set to an incongruous instrumental version of What a Wonderful World.
“My project would transform the eagle into a kind of tourist icon,” added Marzano, whose idea has drawn criticism from those who believe there are other ways to deal with such a sensitive issue.
The sculpture – which is more than 1.8 metres tall and has a wingspan of nearly 3 metres – was originally mounted on the stern of the Admiral Graf Spee, a 610ft-long “pocket” battleship that sailed from Germany to patrol the south Atlantic, days before the 1939 invasion of Poland.
In December that year, the ship was severely damaged by British and New Zealand cruisers, and limped into port at Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. Days later, the captain evacuated the 1,000-man crew, detonated explosives and scuttled the Graf Spee.
Mensun Bound, a British marine archaeologist who was born in the Falkland Islands and educated in Montevideo, had heard stories about the Battle of the River Plate since childhood.
In the early 2000s, he and diver Héctor Bado began searching for the ship.
“Diving out in the River Plate is quite dangerous: the currents are absolutely furious between tides, and the visibility is probably the worst I’ve ever known. You’re swimming in liquid mud,” said Bound, who was working for the University of Oxford.
In 2004, they found the Graf Spee and raised a cannon and a rangefinder, which are now on display in Montevideo.
Months later, they discovered the eagle, completely covered in mud. “We reported it straight away to the government, which instructed us to recover it,” said Bound. The team had to dig around the stern and unbolt about 150 heavy, encrusted bolts.
“We knew the swastika was there, but we weren’t quite ready for it mentally,” said Bound, recalling the moment when the Nazi symbol emerged from the depths. “Everyone just stopped because, suddenly, we were looking into the absolute heart of darkness,” he said.
At first, the sculpture was displayed in the lobby of a Montevideo hotel, drawing thousands of visitors. There were reports of people making the Nazi salute, or spitting at the sculpture, and after a few weeks the government stepped in. The eagle was taken into military custody at the Cerro fortress, where it remains to this day.
“The government didn’t want the site to become a place of pilgrimage or to risk it falling into the hands of neo-Nazis,” said researcher Daniel Acosta y Lara, who was also part of the expedition.
But while it is no longer on public display, the eagle has never truly faded from public attention. It became the focus of a long-running legal dispute between the Uruguayan government and Alfredo Etchegaray, a businessman who financed much of the expedition and who is suing the state for £18.7m in compensation.
And in 2023, the then president, Luis Lacalle Pou, announced that the sculpture would be melted down and recast – only to backtrack days later after a public outcry.
“When the proposal to destroy it emerged, I was the first to call it madness,” said Acosta y Lara, who argues that the eagle should be displayed in a museum: a similar sculpture, removed from a building in Berlin, is on show at the Imperial War Museum in London.
But the researcher is also critical of Marzano’s proposal to exhibit it in Punta del Este.
“It doesn’t belong there,” he said, noting that no part of the battle or the sinking took place in the town, which lies more than 80 miles from Montevideo. “And more than that: imagine tourists arriving in Maldonado Bay and being greeted by that symbol.”
The structure envisaged by Marzano would be built on Isla Gorriti, 1.2 miles off the coast, close to where cruise ships anchor.
She presented the project to the government in December 2024 and said she had been told it was advancing internally, although there has been no formal response.
The government did not respond to requests for comment.
Marzano does not believe the structure would become a site of “pilgrimage” for neo-Nazis and instead sees it as an opportunity to promote education while boosting tourism: “Our country is deeply republican and democratic and respects all religions … We must ensure that future generations understand what happened.”
Fabian Schamis, executive director of the Jewish Community of Punta del Este, did not wish to go into specifics about the project because “it has not been formally presented to us”.
But he said the “appropriate places” for its exhibition “would be a museum or any space that clearly provides a historical context that allows people to understand it properly … Otherwise, it should not be displayed at all.”
