A police helicopter in Brazil has made a bizarre discovery – a huge swastika tiled into the bottom of a swimming pool. Officers spotted the Nazi emblem this week on a property in the city of Pomerode while investigating a kidnapping case.
The homeowner, who has not been identified, will not face charges as the swastika is on private land and the symbol is not considered to be a promotion of Nazism.
'No running, diving or goose-stepping by the pool'
According to CNN, police said the ancient emblem, which was adopted by Hitler’s party in the 1920s, has sat at the bottom of the pool for 13 years.
Pomerode is in the southern state of Santa Catarina, which has a long history of European migration, particularly Germans and Austrians. The city is regarded as the country's most Germanic, with many residents multilingual in German and Portuguese.
After the Second World War, Franz Stangl, the Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps, was tracked down by Nazi hunters to the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, where he was arrested in 1967.