France 24
Issued on: Modified:
The 350-kilogram (770-pound) “symbol of violence and war” will be turned into a “symbol of peace and union,” President Luis Lacalle Pou told journalists in the capital Montevideo.
The two-meter (6.5-foot)-tall bird with a Nazi swastika gripped in its talons adorned the stern of the Admiral Graf Spee, a battleship involved in one of the first naval skirmishes of World War II.
The Graf Spee’s captain, Hans Langsdorff, scuttled the battleship — one of the Third Reich’s largest — on December 17, 1939 following the Battle of the River Plate.