Götterdämmerung and Aftermath

A boat slices through the chilly cobalt waters of Lake Nahuel Huapi in Patagonia. In the distance, the leafy island of Huemul emerges from the mist. The pilot pulls the launch as close to the shore as he dares, but he can't dock: the wooden pier at the landing is crumbling. Beneath it, there's the semi-submerged wreckage of a boat. The only way to disembark is to jump ashore.

Huemul is just ten minutes by boat from San Carlos de Bariloche, the famous lake town in a region of Patagonia known for its raw-boned cowboy culture, skiing and fine fishing. But Huemul, in the middle of this idyllic lake, remains ghostly and mysterious: several large, ruined brick-and-concrete structures stand as witnesses to a secret scientific project conducted in the long and shadowy aftermath of the second world war. Sixty years ago, Argentinian leader Juan Perón hired a number of German émigré scientists to jump-start Argentina's push into industrialisation.

Perón was particularly excited by a nuclear-research project the aim of which was to generate cheap electricity for the factories and steel mills created by his five-year plan, which the dictator imagined would make the country economically independent.

El Alemán [the German] running the project was the physicist Ronald Richter, who was actually born in Austria-controlled Czechoslovakia. From 1948 to 1951, Richter managed to burn through hundreds of millions of pesos of Perón's money building the mega lab, with its own power plant, on Huemul island.

Between 1945 and 1948, slightly more than 100 former Nazi rocket scientists were relocated to the West, principally to the US.

Dozens of others were sponsored by and moved to Moscow.

The two groups were the major contributors to the most significant technological efforts of the Cold War: the intercontinental ballistic missile and the space race. A smaller group of Austrian and German scientists found refuge in South America -- infamously, Adolf Eichmann, who lived in Argentina until his capture by Israeli Intelligence operatives in 1960, and Josef Mengele, who fled Argentina for Paraguay following Eichmann's capture. Mengele had lived comfortably in Buenos Aires for over a decade.

Richter was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia. In 1948, he was invited to Argentina by Kurt Tank, the lead aeronautical engineer for the aircraft manufacturer Focke-Wulf between 1931 and 1945, who had been appointed to the aerotechnical institute in Córdoba under the codename Dr Pedro Matthies. Soon after the Austrian's arrival, Tank arranged an audience between Richter and Perón.

Although woefully under-qualified to conduct such a project, Richter sold the dictator the idea of controlled nuclear fusion from thermonuclear reactions as the most easily attainable power for Argentina's industrialisation. The ingredients (if not the equipment) would be cheap too, involving commonly found materials such as hydrogen, lithium, deuterium and heavy water.

Excited by the possibility of nuclear fusion, Perón gave Richter the go-ahead to build a reactor, and a blank cheque to spend what he needed. Construction started in late 1949 and no expense was spared. When, in mid-construction, it was determined that some radial 5cm pipes leading to the 1,400-cubic-metre reactor's core had been installed incorrectly, Richter made the builders tear down the entire cement structure and build it again from scratch.

Huemul was selected as the site partly because of its abundant water supply. But there was another major reason both Richter and Perón were keen to keep the project secret: Perón had fallen out with many senior figures in the Argentinian scientific community, such as the world-renowned astrophysicist Ramón Enrique Gaviola.

Both Perón and Richter were keen that the Huemul Project, as it became known, should be conducted without external interference.

Perón placed all his faith in Richter, who set about the project with absolute authority. He filled warehouses with expensive equipment, such as a four-metre-high copper coil that weighed 50 tonnes.

In the first two years the project produced no energy and managed to sour what little relationship Perón had with the scientific establishment. But in March 1951 the president announced that fusion had been accomplished. The news was splashed on front pages across the world, but the scientific world was incredulous.

Two months later, CJ Bakker, a highly regarded Dutch nuclear physicist, visited Huemul but was provided with no scientific proof.

Rumours from within the Argentinian military described Richter's scheme as a "colossal bluff ". Hans Thirring, the director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Vienna, wrote in a journal that "it is a 50 per cent probability that Perón is giving credit to the ravings of a fantasist; a 40 per cent probability that the president has been the victim of a huge scam; and a nine per cent chance that Richter is telling the truth."

Perón became concerned that the money he'd spent [about £190 million] had been wasted. To establish the truth, he set up a board that was unable to find a shred of evidence for any scientific merit in Richter's work -- the temperature reached in the experiments was far too low to produce a thermonuclear reaction.

Richter didn't even attain nuclear fission; according to one account, all he managed was a hydrogen burn in an electric arc, which he bombarded with lithium particles, thus causing an explosion so massive it cracked the concrete structure.

Huemul was abandoned and some of the buildings were blown up. In 1955 a provisional military government took over from Perón. The new administration began to investigate corruption under the dictator's regime. Richter was arrested and questioned, but was eventually released. He died in Buenos Aires in 1991.

Argentina's atomic reputation was restored in the following decades by two research institutions founded, and still growing, near the site of Richter's debacle. One is the Centro Atómico Bariloche, which houses a nuclear reactor built in the 80s; the second is the Instituto Balseiro, a research institute for physics and nuclear engineering. Sixty years after Richter's colossal technological fail, Argentina now exports atomic technology to countries such as Australia and the Netherlands.

The country also managed to claw back something from its investment in Huemul: Richter's lab machinery went on to form the core of the technological structure of both the Centro Atómico Bariloche and the Instituto Balseiro. In 1951, while on his buying spree for the project, Richter ordered a particle accelerator from Philips in the Netherlands. For decades, it was the only one in use in South America.

Now Invap, a public company born as an offshoot of the Instituto Balseiro, is manufacturing satellites for Nasa and is responsible for the first reactor built in Bariloche. Unwittingly, Richter sowed the seeds of high tech on the pampas.

When the Second World War ended, a great number of submarines from the Third Reich fleet were drifting around the world. History books tell that following contradictory orders some were scuttled while others surrendered to the Allied forces.

The Patagonian shores were the setting for such events.

After the German surrender, the submarine U-530, under the command of Otto Wermuth, surrendered on 10 July 1945. On 25  July , a report from the Argentine Navy ordered air and sea patrols in the area due to the presence of a submarine near Claromecó. In the subsequent months, several secret documents from the Navy indicate the sight of submarines or periscopes near San Clemente del Tuyú and Necochea. On 17 August 1945, the submarine U-977 surrendered in Mar del Plata under the command of Heinz Schäffer.

And around these events, the myths originated. Myths that bring Hitler, several Nazi submarines and their crews, and “Nazi gold”, to these Southern lands. Under the influence of some weird retarded effect, as if they were harsh echoes of horror or of resounding explosions brought to South America by the wind, the Patagonian shores were filled with rumors of submarines disembarking in the fog, of patches of vessels glimpsed during low-tide, and of foreigners speaking with a thick German accent.

These rumors seemed to concentrate on a specific spot. A desolate place with lonely beaches that appears to be in the middle of nowhere. In the province of Río Negro, more specifically in San Matías Gulf, 140 km.[87 mi] from Viedma and 100 km [62 mi] from Las Grutas, such place is called Caleta de los Loros.

In the time-lapse between the first surrender, that of the U-530, and the second, that of the U-977, many people claimed to have seen unknown submarines in the area. Some of those claims are extracts from documents of the Argentine Navy. Two of those documents, dated the same day, state:

“From the Naval Squadron. July 18th, 1945. 19.15. C.4063. GR20. Relaying signal from Mendoza stating EGA periscope San Antonio Este. Intend reinforce search there”.

“From Escumar to Escumar ships. Received 23.00 hrs, July 18th. Hydrophone Image of submarine U-977 pursuit informs submarine bomb charged until nightfall. Nothing to report. Position: near El Fuerte.”

As regards unofficial versions, one of the first ones seems to be pilot Mario Chironi’s: “In 1957, while I was flying over the area of Caleta de los Loros, I spotted something there, sunken, barely emerging from the water. I thought it was a ship. Later, they began to talk about a German submarine. […] I remember the tide was low and I saw a partially sunken ship, whose prow was a little above the waterline, at the mouth of the canal”.

The Expert in Salvage and Diving Operations Carlos Massey, a specialist in refloating who has worked for the Argentine Naval Prefecture, seems to validate what Chironi claims to have seen:

“One day, by the end of August, I was called to a meeting at the naval base […] and when I got there I learned that I had to evaluate, along with other experts, the possibility to salvage two German submarines sunk at the end of the war.

"The Navy had accurate details about their location, because a Neptune plane had flown over them some seven years before. They were about 15m deep and some eight hundred meters off the coast, almost parallel to each other and slightly more apart by the sterns. In the photographs we were shown we could distinguish the silhouettes of the vessels and even the sails, which appeared darker in color”.

Some years later, a resident of the area named Vidal Pereyra reported:

"In March, 1980, some friends of mine came over and said: ‘There’s a Northern wind, let’s go see the submarine'.

"When we arrived at the beach we Divers from the Fundación Albenga in a searchcould see the prow very clearly; it was aground some 200 meters off the coast. Afterwards I never saw it again, but a lot of people from around here know the story, and I even think there’re photographs".

And yes, there are photographs. Or at least one, according to the amateur photographer Eduardo Frías:

“It was an extraordinary low tide day and I rented a light aircraft to see if I could find them. The person who had told me about the submarines and where they were was Carlos Taborda, President of the Provincial Board of Education. We were flying over the area and suddenly we spotted them. I took pictures of them, we carried on towards San Antonio, turned around, and when we came back the tide was already high, the light had changed and we didn’t see them anymore.”

Whether it is one or two the submarines lying at the bottom of the sea –or, according to the most skeptical ones, none- the truth is that they continue to stir up doubts and pursuits.

Boats of Fundación Albenga on searchSo much so that in November, 1996, one of the most spectacular expeditions was carried out in Caleta de los Loros. A team led by Luis Artigas Brochado, from the San Antonio Oeste Institute of Marine Biology, conducted the inquiry with the collaboration of pilot Mario Chironi.

The results of this inquiry were unsuccessful. Brochado later claimed in several interviews with the media that there is nothing out there.

However, rumors continue to circulate and have even inspired the making of a documentary. Production Company Cuatro Cabezas embarked on board the ship 'Ice Lady Patagónico' in 2003 to film the search for the renowned submarines.

Whether to believe it or not, beyond any evidence and rumors –or the complete lack thereof- always depends on oneself…

*Note: The statements referred to here have been extracted from an article published in "La Nación" newspaper.