Richard Schmidt was born in Germany in 1886 and died in Argentina in 1973. He was the number two in the finance department of the Nazi party in Argentina and owner of an old house on the beach of El Remanso, in Mar del Sud. The unique and fortuitous discovery recounted by the journalist Facundo Di Genova in his book “In the distant Southeast”
Summer 1960. A Volkswagen Beetle enters the Remanso along the dirt roads. The vehicle stops in front of a lonely one-story, two-room house, the only building in sight among so much desolation, located about a hundred meters from the sea and far from the town of Mar del Sud.
A family gets out of the vehicle, who, as they have done for several summers, come to rest, to meet others. old chambers and continue making improvements to that enigmatic house with walls so thick and a concrete basement so robust that It looks like a World War II air raid shelter.
After a few hours, one of the women walks towards the sea, crosses a dune and, when she reaches the shore, undresses completely and dives into the icy waters of the Atlantic coast of Buenos Aires. The locals who frequent the area call her “the German girl”. Like every year, they wait to spy on her and observe her white skin and slender figure from afar.
Six decades later, the discovery of a tombstone with two names carved in German, discovered under the foundations of that same house, prompted a group of researchers to reconstruct the history of the enigmatic house and to ask themselves: Who were Clara Probst (1877-1952) and Richard Schmidt (1886-1973), the two German names immortalised in granite. The tombstone (60 centimetres high, 89 centimetres wide and 12 centimetres thick) was discovered lying down, with the names facing the sky, about 30 centimetres below the ground, next to the edge of the old house which had begun to be renovated by a new owner.
During the construction work, a bricklayer of Jewish origin had begun to dig a hole to install a grate and found something very hard that was impossible to penetrate with his conventional drill. The owner, who had bought the small property a decade ago from three elderly German brothers, who in turn had bought the land from another German in the 50s, does not know, to this day, what connection Richard Schmidt, one of the names carved on the tombstone, had with the little house built more than 70 years ago among the dunes, 15 kilometres south of Miramar.
What he was able to verify, according to the work of the researchers, is that the name that appears on the tombstone corresponds to the same Richard Schmidt who was number two in the finance area of Nazi Party in Argentina (NSDAP), a member of the ruling elite who represented the national fascist movement led by Adolf Hitler in Germany in Buenos Aires. Schmidt, it was later learned, would rise through the ranks of the party under the wing of a powerful and multifaceted Nazi: Heinrich Volberg, a tenacious fundraiser. National sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in its River Plate version.
The owner asks me, during a personal conversation that takes place in Mar del Sud, a few blocks from the old hotel Boulevard Atlántico, not to reveal his name or the exact location of the little house in exchange for telling the full story. Which I do and provide proof of in this same story. He says that this spring discovery of 2020 begins, however, with a previous one, which occurred in the same place, in the winter of 2019, and that the first to hear the news was the researcher Laureano Clavero.
The owner had contacted him to share with him that in the old and abandoned El Remanso building that he had bought many years ago, he had discovered a hidden basement in the living room floor, which was accessed through a hatch, and that among light green glass bottles and abandoned drawers Books written in German were hidden.
Investigating the deepest secrets of Marsura, Clavero has been following the trail of the spy Gustav Eickenberg, owner of the El Porvenir ranch, and protagonist of the plan to land SS (Schutzstaffel) officers on these lonely beaches, after the German refugees had escaped aboard U-boats following the capitulation of the Third Reich.
But the news, with the discovery of the tombstone in an abandoned house in the countryside, would put a new chapter in the Nazi saga in Mar del Sud. That is why he contacted the writer Julio Mutti and together they began an investigation that lasted months and which they entrusted to this chronicler, while the first connections of the names carved on the tombstone appeared in the secret lists of the Argentine Nazi Party, microfilmed by the United States during the occupation of Berlin, after the surrender of the regime in May 1945.
What was a tombstone doing buried, hidden in a house lost in the countryside, very close to the sea and far from the town of Mar del Sud? Who were the two names on that tombstone? Richard Schmidt appears on three Nazi lists. First, in the archives of the Argentine Nazi Party (NSDAP), where he appears as a member since July 1, 1932; the date denotes that he was one of the first 200 members of an organization that would come to gather just over 2000 select members four years later, said Mutti, who has published several books on Nazis and is the author of the blog U-Boat Argentina, a reference site.
Schmidt also appears as a member of the German Gymnastics Society of Vicente López, an intermediary association strongly penetrated by the Nazi party located in the town of Florida, next to Olivos, another neighborhood characterized by a large post-war German population.
A comparison of the two lists with his name, date and place of birth shows that Schmidt was born in 1886 in Breslau, a German region in dispute with Poland, where interwar anti-Semitism was rife. Breslau was Hitler's last stronghold in the eastern region of Silesia, home to extermination camps for Jewish residents and also to bloody fighting during the Soviet siege at the end of World War II.
Schmidt, the same man whose remains are believed to be buried under the slab of a house in El Remanso, and who joined the Nazi Party with the number 1228541 as a “construction worker” when he was 46 years old, also appears on a third list. It is a handwritten document, prepared by the Commission Investigating Anti-Argentine Activities in 1941, where he appears as important member of the Nazi Party in the area of finance, behind the powerful Heinrich Volberg, Mutti adds.
Heinrich Volberg was born in Cologne-Mülheim (Germany) in 1905 and, during the interwar period, had settled in Belgrano, in the City of Buenos Aires. He lived at 2870 Palpa Street, a few blocks from the address that Richard Schmidt had established. Volberg is listed as a member of the Nazi Party with the number 1757918, registered as a “merchant” from January 1933. “He was a multifaceted Nazi. He dedicated himself to raising funds for the party among German companies, which he pressured to dismiss Jewish employees. He was involved in many other activities and He was one of the few Nazis expelled from the country in 1941. He was a heavy Nazi.", the researcher says exclusively.
Schmidt grew up in the shadow of Volberg, a member of the inner circle of the fascist group, and after his expulsion, he gained more power among the leading cadres of the National Socialist German Workers' Party of Argentina, a select elite of Germans living in Buenos Aires who were prohibited from getting involved in local internal politics.
“Before the coup in '43 and the rise of Peronism, the Nazis in Argentina were heavily persecuted and the list of their members was never found until it was found in Berlin, at the headquarters of the Foreign Section of the party, and it remained in the hands of the Americans. It was microfilmed and a report was made for the United States Congress in which all the members of the Nazi Party on the American continent were identified,” Mutti notes with millimetric precision.
In short, as Clavero and Mutti were able to determine after several months of study, Argentine Nazi Party elite member Richard Schmidt is the same Richard Schmidt who figures on the heavy tombstone which was found hidden under the subfloor of a small house in El Remanso, Mar del Sud. And which now, at this very moment, I have before me. When Laureano Clavero confirmed with Julio Mutti that Richard Schmidt was a Nazi of relevance in Argentina, he asked the owner if he could share with him, under strict confidentiality, the documents of the sale of the house with the three German brothers. The investigation had to be deepened.
After a long wait, the result also surprised us. One of the owners of the land where the property was built towards the end of 1950 was also a Nazi with papers: Juan Jorge Leopoldo Augusto Erico Erdmann. Erdmann was a member of the German Union of Trade Unions (UAG) or DAF in German, from 1 February 1938, the moment of greatest rise of Nazism in Argentina.
“The DAF in Argentina was the only Nazi union, but its name was changed in 1938 to UAG, after the decree of President Roberto Ortiz ordering the dissolution of foreign organizations. It was a 12 percent Nazi organization, whose head reported to the German ambassador in Argentina, Edmund Von Thermann. It had almost 250 members out of XNUMX German residents in the country (the third largest immigrant community, after Italy and Spain) and was much larger than the local Nazi party,” explains Mutti. But among the documents that the owner gave to Laureano Clavero there was much more.
Since the last owners of the land - who presumably built the house where the tombstone was - did not have a deed but a sales contract made at the Roberto JW Vinelli real estate agency, they had to prove, before selling, that they were the true owners of the lot, providing a series of evidence that was documented in a folder. In that folder, like in a photo novel too perfect to be fictional, there is a series of forty photographs taken between 1960 and 1970 that show the presence of at least three different families, all of German origin, visiting the little house in El Remanso on different occasions.
The photos depict different sequences over the years, from the time the thick foundations of the house were built between the field and the dunes (which would have happened before the 1950s) until they went down to the beach, much later, with young friends and married couples.
A curious detail: in many of these photos you can see a Volkswagen Beetle, the vehicle of the German people, a rather unusual detail in the landscape of the Buenos Aires pampas. Among the families that appear in the handwritten captions of the photos are the surnames Klein, Schulz, Becker and Ratzlaff. This last surname caught Mutti's attention, because of how unusual the name is.
“Karl Ratzlaff, born in 1886, was a member of the Nazi Party from 1937. When he came he was single, so his daughters were born here and it is very likely that one of them is in the photos. Max Ratzlaff (1883), Karl's brother, was one of the founders of the Nazi Party in Paraguay, in 1929. Conclusion: the Ratzlaffs are one of the first Nazis on the American continent, in fact, They were the ones who brought Nazism to South America", Mutti remarked in a conversation with this reporter.
Shortly before publishing the scoop, I traveled to Mar del Sud to interview the owner who found the tombstone, and to examine the documents and books that had mysteriously appeared, along with some very clear green glass bottles filled with water, which were also resting inside the concrete basement that looked like a World War II bunker. These bottles seemed to fulfill the function of vital supply, in the face of an apocalyptic scenario or, simply, facilitate the survival of those who hide from sustained persecution over time.
During my meeting with the owner, I saw the Germans' house in El Remanso, of which there are no traces left of either the old building or the hole where the tombstone was removed. However, its structural design is the same, and the concrete basement has remained intact.
Later, during the long days and nights I spent there in the summer of 2021, I was able to verify that the humble and robust dwelling was clearly built for the burial of the tombstone, and that the access hatch to the small basement was clearly identical to the one in the Nazi radiotelegraph station in General Madariaga, as Mutti and Clavero had noticed.
Before the discovery of the tombstone, the house was abandoned: it had been built for 60 years (this was stated on the papers, when the construction was “whitewashed”). Despite the passage of time, there was not a single moisture leak, despite being so close to the sea and with so little shelter., the owner tells me. At the time of the discovery, Richard Schmidt's membership card for the Nazi Party, as a "construction worker", resonates in this reporter's mind.
The owner also shows the old furniture that he took out of there, a folding metal bed, a rustic cupboard and a wooden box painted light blue with mosquito netting where cheeses and cold cuts were kept in times when electric refrigerators were not common.
He also brings a box with about twenty old books written in German. As far as I could see, none of them deal with Nazi themes. They are novels from the period that were inside the house when the owner bought it, among the dust and spiders. The legal page of three different copies indicates the provenance and the date of printing: Berlin, 1935, at the height of Nazism in Germany. When I ask the owner about the tombstone, he tells me that “it is well kept.” And he takes me to where he has it hidden. When I see it, I cross myself. And silently, while I read the names of the two people who appear on the cenotaph, I apologize to them, knowing that, perhaps, they do not deserve it, but it is the first thing I do and feel when faced with what remains of the enigmatic tomb; desecrated, so to speak, by pure chance.
I ask the owner:
—And they didn't continue digging to see what was below? If there was a tombstone, it's likely that there was a grave as well.
—I didn't want to keep looking; and if that's the case, may they rest in peace.
The owner tells me. I nod. After all, as far as we know, Schmidt was a Nazi leader, not a war criminal. Much less is known about his sister Clara, who died before him, born Schmidt and married to a Probst.
When I ask the owner if he is not afraid of living in a house where there is possibly one or two people buried very close to the foundations, like Clara Probst and Richard Schmidt, he says no: “Not at all.”
So I ask him what he's going to do with the tombstone: is he going to donate it?
—To the Miramar Museum?
—No, to the Mar del Sud Museum.
—But the Mar del Sud Museum does not exist.
-Still.
Excellent article, very well narrated. Stories from our beloved Argentina.
It would be very interesting if the excavation continued, to perpetuate the true history of how far the claws of that Murderous ideology reached.