*Literally, Navy Center. An officer’s club serving both services on Calle Florida.
*The German pocket battleship Graf Spee, under the command of Captain Hans Langsdorff, was engaged in destroying British shipping in the South Atlantic when located and damaged by three British cruisers. She sought refuge in the neutral port of Montevideo, Uruguay. Two British cruisers followed her, and patrolled outside the harbor. A British aircraft carrier and a British battleship were en route to Montevideo when, on 17 December 1940, under British diplomatic pressure, the Uruguayan government insisted on compliance with International Law and that she leave Uruguayan waters after seventy-two hours or be interned. Langsdorff then took her to sea, but rather than risk her capture by the British, blew her up just outside Montevideo. A flotilla of tugs and other small craft hastily organized by the German colony in Buenos Aires carried Captain Langsdorff and his thousand-plus-man crew to Buenos Aires. There, after learning his crew would be interned and that he could do nothing else for them, and to prove that it was fear of British capture of his warship, and not fear of death at the hands of the enemy, that made him scuttle his command, Langsdorff arranged himself so his body would fall on the Graf Spee’s battle ensign and shot himself in the temple.
* It is perhaps germane to note here that “NAZI” was the shortened form of NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and that the root of Hitler’s power when he was first elected Chancellor, quite legally, was from Germany’s socialists.