In reply to your questions.

Schäffer's original book was published late last year in Argentina in Spanish. This is the unexpurgated version which he wrote in German for the German readership of this country (Argentina) in 1950. I have a copy of this book.

Being an author and translator with contacts, I have access to the documentation you mention. Note that the Argentine Navy interrogations of the other crew members of U-977 and U-530 remain classified. I also have certain facts confirmed "from the horse's mouth" so to speak, and this is why I know I am on the right track. However, as you suggest, the situation in Argentina for research is very difficult. Argentina's Nazi past in not something the Government wishes to have broadcast: the involvement was too huge, too appalling. President Menem in 1993 promised to "come clean" and throw open the archives, but in the end the United States got to him and apart from a few sops he revealed nothing.

I live in this country, speak the language to a degree and have direct Argentine family. This assists me in making contacts, but in general I have to rely on Argentine writers and journalists to make available documents to me. Having authored a U-boot book several years ago, I learned at first hand the problems encountered in getting to the root of certain mysteries. Sometimes you have to wait for several years until an answer arrives, and after it does and you are just on the point of putting the material in a new book a gentleman presents himself at your door and says "It would be more than your life is worth to publish that information" and so it can go no further.

It may be for a political purpose that information remains classified, (e.g. secret dealings and arrangements between Argentina and Germany when they were supposed to be at war with each other) or to keep some dangerous weapons process secret, or to protect people or firms against actions in law. Usually when warned off you will receive some form of confirmation that your suspicions are correct to defuse your interest, and though this tends to take the steam out of your boiler it does encourage you to persevere and delve in other areas. It also teaches you to examine information more carefully, to spend more time thinking Why? In the absence of the full facts in these murky areas it is something of an exercise in detection.

To return to Schäffer. In 1950 when Schäffer sought to reach a wider readership, he was required to delete certain passages from his book which mentioned the cargo he was carrying and identified certain stages of his voyage by dates, and then the expurgated version, the first by a WWII U-boat commander, was published in Europe.

There are three matters which Schäffer had to conceal, and which he was encouraged to conceal by the Argentine and US Navies:

(1) The speed with which he made the passage. If he arrived as he says he did off Rio de Janeiro on 10 July 1945, he must have been refuelled on at least one occasion before then. The interrogation report and his book coincide on his taking aboard only 85 tonnes fuel before sailing, and he had five tonnes in the bunkers when he docked at Mar del Plata.

(2) The fact that when the Brazilian cruiser "Bahia" was sunk in mysterious circumstances at 0910 on 4 July 1945, U-977 was within a few miles of her. As I mentioned earlier, U-977 was almost certainly responsible, but it was a bizarre accident which the United States covered over to protect its liability insurers and others against criminal process. Once the simple details are explained, all based on the official evidence, the facts are obvious.

(3) The fact that he failed to account, either in the interrogation or in the book, for the period between 10 July when he was off Rio de Janeiro, and 17 August 1945 when he surrendered at Mar del Plata. The suspicion is that during this period he was in or near Argentine waters, a situation not wanted by the Argentines.

Schäffer would have remained silent, he says, "if there were not a great secret to be discovered", and that is the reason for his book. He cannot speak openly and thus we have a mystery to resolve. Therefore the general reader is given the famous world record 66-day voyage submerged which never existed. Schäffer did not claim this voyage at Mar del Plata when he landed, he did not claim it in his Argentine interrogation, nor did he tell it to the Argentine Press, and he did not claim it when interviewed by the US Navy a month later. The 66-day voyage submerged occurred when he was planning his book, for what the fiction of a 66-day voyage submerged enables him to present to the reader is a very slow voyage of suffering in which he could just about have made Mar del Plata from Norway on 80 tonnes of fuel without refuelling. This was a voyage of penury in which he was simply hoping to get better treatment for his men from the Argentines than in the North. He met no ship on the way, nor did he refuel: it was the last Kriegsmarine voyage and ended the U-boat voyages of the Second World War.

The modern reader equipped with some knowledge can now see from Schäffer's original book that there was cargo, and a great tonnage of it, and it was provisions, and no mention where it was disembarked. It was not disembarked in Norway before he sailed, for the book mentions it while on the southbound heading. Once he "surfaces" from his 66-day voyage submerged, he provides the fuel figures and speeds to reach Argentina, and tells the reader he will be on one motor at 60 revs most of the time because "he cannot refuel". He thinks he can just about get there by mid August 1945. But in another part of the book he provides the clue that he was on the Equator on 4 July 1945 and off Rio on 10 July 1945, and so the astute reader realizes that there were two voyages: the fictional one for the hoi-polloi and the true one for a clandestine purpose for the detectives who know that things were not as they appeared. He could not state outright that that was the case because he was under coercion.

None of this could have been understood without the work of Salinas and De Napoli. Their research is the key. I can assure you that more revelations about U-boat landings in Argentina will be forthcoming in the next two years.

If there are any more points I will be pleased to answer them.