Off the submarine base at swank Mar del Plata, fishermen trolled through the wintry, misty Argentine dawn. Out of the grey murk loomed the bulk of a big sub marine. Its engines silent, it rolled gently with the waves. The fishermen noted the craft's unfamiliar lines, went right on fishing.
Just before daylight, the submarine got under way, slid silently through the naval base's narrow entrance. The sub swished past a sentry, standing with his back to the sea, and blinked a surrender signal to the control tower. The German sub marine, U-530, Lieut. Otto Wermoutt, 25, skipper, had indeed achieved the element of surprise.
The Argentine Navy treated the U-530's crew of 54 men to a hot meal and a haircut, then interned them in a Navy rest camp. Skipper Wermoutt's story: on V-E day, the U-530 was operating in the North Atlantic. He had decided to surrender at Mar del Plata. He did not explain why it had taken him more than two months to get there, why the sub had jettisoned its deck guns, why the crew members carried no identification, nor what had happened to the ship's log.
Rumor Crop. The unexpected arrival of the U-530 started a flood of rumors. Brazilian Admiral Jorge Dodsworth Mar tins, boiling mad over the loss of the cruiser Baía (see above), said he believed "that the U-530 could have torpedoed the Baía." Another Brazilian, Admiral Dudal Teixeira, believed that the U-530 came from Japan. An Argentine reporter topped them both: he had seen a Buenos Aires provincial police report to the effect that a strange submarine had surfaced off the long, lonely, lower Argentine coast, had landed a high-ranking officer and a civilian. They might have been Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, in man's dress.
Said the Argentine Naval Ministry's official communique: 1) the German U-boat was not responsible for the sinking of the Baía; 2) no Nazi leader or military officer was aboard; 3) the U-530 had landed no one on the Argentine coast before surrendering.
Would the Argentines, who had declared war on the Axis only four months ago, be allowed to keep the U-530 and its Nazi crew? Said Argentina's Acting Foreign Minister César Ameghino: the problem would be resolved "in a spirit of full cooperation with the United Nations."