Uruguayan authorities are reversing plans to soften down a bronze eagle discovered on a sunken Nazi ship and recast it as a dove of peace, the president mentioned Sunday.
The imposing bronze eagle, weighing 350 kilos (771 kilos) and clutching a swastika between its claws, was recovered from a World Warfare II-era German destroyer off Uruguay’s coast 17 years in the past.
On Friday, President Luis Lacalle Pou had instructed reporters that this “image of violence and warfare” can be changed into a “image of peace and union.”
However the plan drew concern from each cultural and political spheres.
By Sunday, the president had reversed himself, saying: “There’s an amazing majority that doesn’t share this determination” to soften and recast the eagle.
“And if one needs to generate peace, the very first thing one has to do is to generate union,” he added. “Clearly this has not generated it”
The bronze eagle had adorned the strict of the Admiral Graf Spee, a battleship concerned in one of many first naval skirmishes of World Warfare II.
The Graf Spee’s captain, Hans Langsdorff, scuttled the battleship — one of many Third Reich’s largest — on December 17, 1939, following the Battle of the River Plate, off the Uruguayan coast.
The sculpture was present in 2006 after a 10-year hunt, however what to do with it has lengthy been a supply of controversy.
The German authorities complained when, after its discovery, it was briefly displayed in Montevideo, with Berlin discouraging the exhibition of Nazi paraphernalia.
In 2010, the German overseas minister mentioned his need was “to forestall the stays of the symbols of the Nazi regime from changing into commercialized,” and discouraged promoting it to personal collectors, fearing the eagle might fall into the fingers of Nazi sympathizers.
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Initially printed as Uruguay abandons plan to soften, recast Nazi bronze
