BUENOS AIRES - In a hidden room in a house near Argentina's capital, police believe they have found the biggest collection of Nazi artifacts in the country's history, including a bust relief of Adolf Hitler, magnifying glasses inside elegant boxes with swastikas and even a macabre medical device used to measure head size.

Some 75 objects were found in a collector's home in Beccar, a suburb north of Buenos Aires, and authorities say they suspect they are originals that belonged to high-ranking Nazis in Germany during World War II.

"Our first investigations indicate that these are original pieces," Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said on Monday, adding that many pieces were accompanied by old photographs.

"This is a way to commercialize them, showing that they were used by the horror, by the Fuhrer. There are photos of him with the objects."

Among the disturbing items were toys that Bullrich said would have been used to indoctrinate children and a statue of the Nazi Eagle above a swastika.

Police are trying to determine how the artifacts entered Argentina and came to be in the room hidden behind a library in the house, she said. The raid that found them was carried out on June 8.

The main hypothesis among investigators and member of Argentina's Jewish community is that they were brought to Argentina by a high-ranking Nazi or Nazis after World War II, when the South American country became a refuge for fleeing war criminals, including some of the best known.

As leading members of Hitler's Third Reich were put on trial for war crimes, Josef Mengele fled to Argentina and lived in Buenos Aires for a decade. He moved to Paraguay after Israeli Mossad agents captured Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who was also living in Buenos Aires. Mengele later died in Brazil in 1979 while swimming in a beach in the town of Bertioga.

While police in Argentina did not name any high-ranking Nazis to whom the objects might have originally belonged, Bullrich noted there were medical devices.

"There are objects to measure heads, that was the logic of the Aryan race," she said.

Ariel Cohen Sabban, president of the DAIA, a political umbrella for Argentina's Jewish institutes, called the find "unheard of" in the country.

"Finding 75 original pieces is historic and could offer irrefutable proof of the presence of top leaders who escaped from Nazi Germany," Cohen said.

Associated Press