Buenos Aires, March 23 (IANS/EFE): Argentine archaeologists are investigating whether a shelter found in a jungle in the northeast province of Misiones near the Paraguayan border was a secret Nazi hideout, a newspaper reported.

Experts from the Centre for Urban Archaeology (CAU) of the University of Buenos Aires, together with an archaeologist from Museum Andres Guacurari in Misiones, stumbled upon some structures they suspect belonged to a Nazi hideout while working on a site in the Teyu Cuare park.

"This site also has the bonus of allowing the inhabitants to be in Paraguay in less than 10 minutes. It's a protected, defendable site where they could live quietly," CAU Director Daniel Schavelzon told Argentine newspaper Clarin that reported the news on Sunday.

Schavelzon believes the hypothesis, that is yet to be corroborated, is supported by the discovery of German currency and porcelain dating back to 1938 and 1944 in the shelter.

The lair comprises up to three-metre thick walls and three buildings: one for housing purposes, another thought to be a warehouse and a third, that till now had remained partially hidden, built as a sentry post.

Schavelzon admitted that the site's date of construction and the German objects found there were not sufficient to prove its Nazi origins.

However, he mused: "We can find no other explanation as to why anyone would build these structures, at such great effort and expense, in a site which at that time was totally inaccessible, away from the local community, with material which is not typical of the regional architecture."

The CAU researchers believe these shelters were ultimately not used by the Nazis who fled to Argentina as they realised they could live freely in the cities without needing to hide.

According to the Wiesenthal Centre, 300 war criminals and thousands of collaborators of the Third Reich arrived in Argentina at the end of the Second World War.

This figure far exceeds that of the 180 Nazi criminals accounted for by the Commission for the Clarification of Nazi Activities in Argentina.

Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust who entered the country in 1950 with a false passport issued by the Red Cross, was one of the first German Nazis to be arrested in Argentina.

Gerhard Bohne, head of the Nazi euthanasia programme; Walter Kutschmann, a former Nazi Gestapo head, and former SS commander Josef Schwammberger were other Nazi criminals captured in the south American country.