Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

URUGUAY: Nazi Warship Emerges from the Mud

Raúl Pierri

MONTEVIDEO, Feb 9 2004 (IPS) - After resting for 65 years on the muddy bottom of the Rio de la Plata estuary, the wreck of the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee began to be recovered Monday.

The Graf Spee was scuttled by its captain just after the start of World War II (1939-1945), when it was damaged in a naval battle with Allied vessels off the Uruguayan coast.

The warship, a symbol of German naval might, became a legend of modern-day naval warfare after the battle in the Rio de la Plata (River Plate), which divides Argentina from Uruguay.

But along with the wreck will be dredged up memories that some of the few survivors living in Argentina and Uruguay – German sailors who were left behind when the rest of the crew was transferred to another ship – would prefer to let rest.

”Inside of me there is a voice that says: ‘Leave it alone, don’t touch it. Leave it in peace. It has fought its battle. It’s like pulling a dead person from his rest,” Federico Bachmann, a former Graf Spee crew member who has been living in the western Argentine city of San Juan for the past 65 years, told IPS.

Besides the opposition of some of the survivors, the project is likely to run into many difficulties, due to the wreck’s enormous weight and the live munitions that it might still contain.

The 12,500-ton Graf Spee, one of the first warships in the world to run on a diesel-powered engine, had sown terror along shipping trade routes, sinking nine Allied merchant vessels in the Indian and South Atlantic oceans during the first three months of WWII.

But on Dec. 13, 1939, the British Royal Navy cruisers Exeter and Ajax, and the Achilles of New Zealand, located it in the south Atlantic and set out on a furious chase.

In what came to be known as the Battle of the River Plate, the Graf Spee was crippled by the British vessels when they caught up to it off the coast of the posh Uruguayan resort town of Punta del Este.

In the battle, the Exeter was hit, which forced it to pull out and head south. But the other two Allied vessels continued the chase.

German captain Hans Langsdorff sought shelter in the harbour of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. But local authorities in Uruguay, which was still neutral, gave him 72 hours to abandon port.

With the British ships waiting not far off, and having been denied extra time to repair his ship, Langsdorff gave the order to take the Graf Spee seven kms off-shore, where the crew was transferred to another vessel, and destroy it.

Shortly after it was evacuated, the ship burst into flames. Thousands of spectators lined the shore in Montevideo as it burned for three days before it broke in two and sank to the river bottom.

Some of the crew members were taken to the Uruguayan capital, where they were denied the right to return to Germany. Others travelled to Argentina, including the captain, who committed suicide a few days later in Buenos Aires, where he shot himself in the head, embracing the German flag.

The organisers of the private effort to raise up the Graf Spee from where it lies off Montevideo in just eight metres of water say the recovery will be carried out in at least four stages.

The director of the recovery operation, Uruguayan diver Héctor Bado, told IPS that ”Forty percent of the ship is not visible, because it is buried in sand and mud, so we have to carry out detailed studies of the zone and determine the damages it has suffered.”

On Monday, a crane began to pull up the 27-ton communications tower, to which cables have been attached.

Bado said Monday’s operation alone would cost around 100,000 dollars, and that the three-year recovery effort will require ”many millions of dollars.”

The project is financed by private parties ”who prefer not to give their name.”

The Uruguayan government sees the wreck as having great cultural value and potential for the tourist industry, one of the main sources of foreign exchange in this South American country of 3.1 million.

Alfredo Etchegaray, the Uruguayan businessman who owns the rights to the Graf Spee, told IPS that the ship will be restored in Uruguay with technical assistance from German experts, and put on display in a museum in Montevideo or at a specially designated spot on the coast.

The Graf Spee, which carried the latest radar technology, was one of the few ”pocket battleships”, so named because they were roughly three times lighter than conventional warships.

”Recovering all of the pieces of the ship will help draw people interested in history to Uruguay,” said Etchegaray. ”Wrecks have great value, which gradually deteriorates, however. That means the sooner the parts are recovered, the better.”

The idea to bring up the Graf Spee first emerged in 1997, when the recovery of one of the wreck’s medium guns was filmed in a Discovery channel episode of ”Lost Ships”.

”We saw then that it was possible to pull up much more than one gun, and we began applying for the necessary permits. As soon as authorisation was granted in 2003, we totally threw ourselves into the project,” said Bado.

But not everyone is equally enthusiastic.

”The first feeling I have is that the ship should be left to lie in peace,” said the 84-year-old Bachmann, who served as an electrician on the Graf Spee. ”Our captain killed himself and sank the boat to save us. They shouldn’t come and bother it now. One of my fellow survivors, who lives in San Juan, thinks the same way I do.”

The only surviving crew member of the Graf Spee who still lives in Uruguay, Friederich Adolphe, 85, agreed that the ship should be left alone. Adolphe was one of the wounded German sailors left behind in Montevideo.

”I understand this is a very special issue for them, because that is the place where many of their companions lost their lives, and they see it as kind of an underwater monument,” said Bado.

”But the fact is that everyone who died there was buried in Montevideo, and the ship, once it is rebuilt on land, will be a monument to what happened. I don’t see much sense in having a monument underwater that is just disintegrating,” he argued.

Etchegaray said he respects the feelings of the surviving German crew members, but stressed the international significance of the project.

The businessman noted that U.S. filmmaker James Cameron, the director of the 1997 box office hit Titanic, has been invited to film the operation.

The U.S. company that took part in the search for the remains of the Columbia space shuttle, which broke up as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere in February 2003, is also taking part in the recovery.

In addition, experts from Britain and Germany have come to work on the project on an honorary basis.

But a source close to the project admitted to IPS that the recovery will be ”very difficult”, ”dangerous”, and even ”a bit Utopian”, due to the huge weight of the wreck and the reported existence of live munitions.

”Going down there is a lottery, because there are live explosives with independent mechanisms. The munitions are not a problem because the gunpowder won’t work. But the dangerous thing is that there are torpedoes with around 300 kgs of TNT, still sealed, that could go off,” he warned.

Bado said the project ”is the realisation of a dream I have had since I was 15 years old.” But he clarified that it is still just a ”half-dream.”

”We still don’t know how much this will cost. It will entail bigger and bigger efforts,” because some of the pieces will be enormously heavy to bring up, he said.

Argentine journalist Diego Lascano, who has written several books on the Graf Spee, told IPS that the recovery ”will put an end to the legend, the myth, and a new stage, in which people will be able to see and even touch the ship, is beginning.”

Lascano, who interviewed 30 survivors of the Graf Spee in Germany, Argentina and Uruguay over the space of 10 years for his books, said many are opposed to the recovery of the wreck because ”the experience of the Graf Spee marked them.

”They were very young when they enlisted. The Battle of the River Plate was their baptism of fire, and after that they weren’t involved in the war anymore. They still feel a son’s love for the captain because he saved their lives, and for them, the ship is a symbol. They prefer for it to be left as it is,” said Lascano.